Mastermind 2023: First Round Heat Fifteen

Welcome back Mastermind, and it’s nice to see the 2023 series actually being in 2023 now.

So, let’s start, shall we? Chidi Ngwaba’s subject – The British Industrial Revolution – struck me as one of those specialists that probably should come with a government health warning. After all, it’s just so wide, isn’t it. When I was thinking about the Wiki Challenge, this really wasn’t in the running. Which actually is rather ironic since it provided me with one of my better specialist scores with five. Chidi, I’m afraid, didn’t have a great round at all. He finished with 3 points.

Now I’m afraid that my knowledge of the films of Christopher Guest begins with This is Spinal Tap, which is also coincidentally where it ends. So it didn’t really come as a great surprise to me that the two points I managed on the round both came from questions about it. Rebecca Lodge Birkebaek started very well. Rebecca also finished very well. However she did become a little bit becalmed in the middle of her round, and this is why she finished with a respectable 7, but not more.

It was Ann Mayner who was answering on our wiki challenge subject, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. I’ll come to the challenge shortly. Let’s talk about Ann, though. It wasn’t quite a perfect round that she produced, but it was a very good one. 11 put her four point ahead with just one more contender to go before half time. As for me – well, I had 6 on the round. If I hadn’t done the wiki work yesterday I would have had one. There’s no reason why anyone should do this, but if you checked on the questions I wrote yesterday, five of them would have brought you points, and I also noticed the Helensburgh one as well though I didn’t write it down.

So, with points in all 3 specialist rounds thus far, was I going to manage a full house? In a word, no. Well I’ve never watched an episode of the TV series Succession, even though I like the actor Brian Cox very much, and he’s from the city of Dundee, from which my Clark family originated. Robin Geddes obviously knew his stuff, but not having watched the show I can’t say how fleeting or obscure were the details that he missed. In the end he managed 8, which to my reckoning meant that essentially Ann was the overwhelming favourite to take the place in the semi-finals.

Chidi was first to return to the chair. He made a good start too, taking what looked like the first half dozen or so on the bounce. This didn’t quite last though, and it was only towards the end of the round that he managed to get some momentum going again. In the end he finished with a decent 8 to set the target at 11.

I’d noticed Rebecca moving her fingers a lot during her specialist, and this continued throughout her GK round. It doesn’t mean that she was definitely nervous, but bearing in mind the circumstances it’s a decent enough bet. Having managed 7 in specialist she repeated this score in GK and raised the bar to 14.

I’ll be honest, in my own Mastermind shows I always felt a little more comfortable being the setter rather than the chaser – or to put it another way, going before the final contender and letting them chase my total. In real terms it doesn’t make a lot of difference – you have to go like the clappers and get as many of them right as possible whether you go first or last. Still, it meant that Robin had to try to at least score enough to make the corrido of doubt that Ann would have to pass through as long as possible. To be fair he gave it a decent lash as well. 10 is a good performance on a GK round, but it did mean that 8 would be enough for Ann. In my heart of hearts I felt it was maybe 2 points short of a winning score.

Not that Ann found it easy. Her way of listening carefully to each question and weighing up the answer before giving it had paid dividends in the specialist round. However it meant that she was well into her GK round before she started to close in on Robin’s target. She equalled the total. Then she took the single point she needed to win. But that was it. In the end it was a lot closer than you’d have thought that it was going to be.

So congratulations, and as always, best of luck to you in the semi-finals.

The Details

Chidi Ngwaba	The British Industrial Revolution	3	3	8	5	11	8
Rebecca Lodge Birkebaek	The Films of Christopher Guest	7	0	7	0	14	0
Ann Mayner	Charles Rennie Mackintosh	11	0	8	2	19	2
Robin Geddes	The TV series Succession	8	0	10	0	18	0