Well, I know what you’re asking yourself. Did Dave live up to his prediction of doing worse on the specialists last week and end up with zero? Well, no, actually. Go figure.
Two of my 6 points came from the first of the specialists
and that was Robert Cohen’s round on the History of Sheep. Look, I live in
South Wales so I can guarantee that I’ve probably heard more jokes involving
sheep than most and I have no intention of adding to them. This was one of
those left field subjects that must have been difficult to prepare for, but it’s
also the kind of round that just might offer a couple of pieces of low hanging
fruit that the non expert can guess. There weren’t 8 of these though, but 8 was
the score that Robert Cohen managed. This was good, but did leave quite a bit
of room for the other three contenders, and if one of them managed a perfect
round then Robert might be in a spot of bother.
Right, let’s get to Liz Bain’s round on the Neapolitan
Novels of Elena Ferrante. I have never read any of these and I managed none of
these. I want to be honest about Liz’s round but on the other hand I really don’t
want to be horrible. Liz scored four, and looking at the questions she missed
my gut feeling was that she had probably not prepared carefully enough. It’s
not always about the amount of time or effort that you put into it. I have
never tried to learn a set of novels for Mastermind, so I don’t know, for
certain, but I wouldn’t trust my memory to retain what I needed to know just
from re-reading the books however many times. It’s a shame. The last thing I
want to see is contenders not having a really positive experience. I pay credit
to Liz for putting a brave face on it, but she still appeared a bit shaken.
I couldn’t call myself an expert on the music of Katy
Perry, a noted chanteuse of recent decades, so I gathered. Nonetheless a couple
of decent guesses provided a couple more points for me to add to the aggregate.
At one point I thought that Katie Stoyle was looking good to take the outright
lead but just a couple of stumbles slowed her progress just a little. Like
Robert she finished with a good 8.
What might have been going through Maxim Sinclair’s mind as
he approached the chair, the last of the contenders to go in the specialist round?
Was he thinking of what had happened to Liz in her round and hoping lightning
would not strike twice in this heat? Or was he looking positively at the lead,
and hoping for a round that would blow the others out of the water? Well, what
happened was neither of these two extremes. I took two of his questions to pull
myself to a respectable enough aggregate of 6. Maxim scored 7. I often make the
point that sometimes there seems to be something in the air in a show, ad this
show was a case in point. It meant that while Maxim would have been out of contention
in many of the other heats at this same stage, he was handily placed on the
shoulders of the leaders in this one.
Poor Liz Bain. When you’ve had a testing time in the
specialist, the thing you need most of all in the GK round is a couple of
questions you know the answers to at the start of the round in order to get you
moving with a bit of momentum. Liz just didn’t get that. Maybe I was reading
things into it which weren’t there, but even though she tried to maintain a
brave smile I think you could see that she was suffering. She rallied to post a
total of 9.
Maxim, on his return to the chair, did not seem to be
suffering at all, on the other hand. It was an admirable display of sang froid
considering that a lot of questions just would not fall for him at all. He kept
picking up what he could, and in the end added six to his total to raise the
target to 13 overall.
Robert returned to the chair and gave us what seemed to me
to be a better round than his specialist had been. In this day and age it takes
a bit to get at least a dozen in GK but that’s exactly what Robert did. It wasn’t
a perfect round and it wasn’t the best GK round we’ve seen so far in this
series but it was good and despite all of the honest endeavour of all of the
contenders we really hadn’t seen a contender having a genuinely good round,
rather than a respectable one in this heat. Robert reached the psychologically
significant 20, and Katie was going to have to match this score with only 1
pass to win.
Well, she gave it a lash and you can’t realistically ask
for more than that. But by halfway through it was clear that what we were looking
at was another decent round. Decent but not good enough. Katie managed the second
highest GK score of the night, with 7 and that was good enough for the runner
up spot.
So, well done Robert. I’m sure that your children who egged
you on to enter are very proud of you. Best of luck in the semi-finals.
The Details
|
Robert Cohen |
The History of Sheep |
8 |
1 |
12 |
1 |
20 |
2 |
|
Liz Bain |
The Neapolitan novels
of Elena Ferrante |
4 |
3 |
5 |
3 |
9 |
6 |
|
Katie Stoyle |
The Music of Katy
Perry |
8 |
0 |
7 |
0 |
15 |
0 |
|
Maxim Sinclair |
Gerald Winstanley and
the Diggers |
7 |
2 |
6 |
2 |
13 |
4 |
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