Mastermind 2024 first round heat

Yeah, late again. Sorry about that. I don’t know what to tell you. Sometimes you’re just so tired in an evening that you’re best to admit defeat, not force it, and come to it with a fresh mind the next day. Enough of such things.

The first into the chair last night was Bob Teasdale. Bob was answering on the folk musician Richard Thompson. I can’t claim any familiarity with him but I did recognise he names of a lot of people he’d worked with and a lot of tracks he played on. Only a despairing guess on the last question concerning Britney Spears did I scrape a point. Bob did better – we can all be grateful for that. He scored 8 and no passes. It’s a strange score, is 8, in as much as it’s still an achievement which displays your knowledge, but it’s likely to be beaten, and by a couple of points at least.

Lisa Wallace was the first to try to beat it. She was answering on the TV show Ted Lasso. Somehow this show has managed to fly beneath my radar and other than a vague recollection of having heard the name before I knew nothing about it, as proven by my pathetic nul points. Lisa, by contrast, delivered a wonderful round, hardly faltering at all, never passing and accruing an excellent 12 points in the process. Beat that!

Well, Jane Hill certainly had a go. Jane joins a select band of hardy masterminders who appeared in the original Magnus era, and have now appeared in the revived show. She was answering on the life and works of Joan Didion. No, I’m not very familiar with Joan Didion and her work at all. I scraped a couple with guesses. Right up until the last question it looked very much as if Jane could match Lisa’s score. The last answer let her down though, and she finished with a fine 11 points.

Krishna Jada closed the first round with my ‘banker’ subject, the early life of Gandhi. I call it my banker subject, but that’s only because I though I might scrape a couple of points – which I did – whereas I didn’t fancy my chances of getting any on the other three subjects. This was another fine round. Krishna was thoroughly prepared for anything that Clive threw at him, answering quickly, precisely and above all correctly. He too scored 12 and no passes.

General knowledge then. Bob Teasdale had found himself in last place at half time despite having had a pretty good specialist. This didn’t seem to both him. He accrued 10 points and had 3 or 4 questions left, and these were what might have raised a good round to the status of a great round. Sadly he passed on most and ended with the 10. A good performance, but surely one of the others would be able to beat his 18 bearing in mind that they each had several points head start.

Thinking about it, Jane Hill’s GK round was like Bob’s in reverse. He start wasn’t quite as good as she would have liked, but once she got into her stride there was no stopping her. Her momentum built, encouraging Clive to ask more and more quickly. In the end she’d accrued a brilliant 14, to raise the target to 25. Not a 100% guaranteed winning score, but a score that would prove a considerable challenge to everyone.

It was a score that Lisa Wallace couldn’t match. Maybe it was nerves in the chair, or maybe the questions just didn’t fall her way but it was pretty clear from quite early n that she was not going to get there. It happens – as we often say SIJNYR (Sometimes it’s just not your night). Lisa finished with a total of 17.

Which just left Krishna. Much the same as with Lisa’s round, it became clear as the tound went on that he was going to fall short. Oh, he gave it a fair old lash, alright, passing quickly to try to move the round along, but for him too it was a case of SIJNYR. It happens. Take a bit of time to reflect, enjoy that you’ve been part of the experience and, if you want, decide if you want to try again in the future.

Well done to Jane. Last time out in the Magnus era she was a semi finalist. She’d like to go one better this time. Well, Jane, if you can produce GK like that you’ll always be in with a shout. I wish you the best of luck.

 The Details

Bob Teasdale	The Folk musician Richard Thompson	8	0	10	4	18	4
Lisa Wallace	Ted Lasso	12	0	5	0	17	0
Jane Hill	The Life and Works of Joan Didion	11	0	14	0	25	0
Krishna Jada	The early life of Gandhi	12	0	7	4	19	4

 

Bonus Conversion Rates on UC

This post comes with a government health warning. In fact it comes with several:-

 - I am not a mathematician and am all too capable of making basic errors.

 - Even my miniscule knowledge about statistics tells me that 10 is a very small number from which to draw any kind of meaningful conclusions.

 - Even when statistics provide us with questions, it’s rash to jump to conclusions over the answers.

Right then, let us begin. After the current series of UC had been running for a few weeks, let’s say five, it started to strike me that the bonus conversion rates seem noticeably higher than in previous years. So I waited until after last week’s 10^th match. By bonus conversion rate I mean the percentage of bonus questions each team gives correct answers to. So, for the sake of example, if one team were to only answer one starter correctly in the whole show, then if they answered none of the 3 bonuses that followed correctly their rate would be zero. If they answered one correctly it would be 33.3 (recurring). If they answered two correctly it would be 66.6 (recurring) and if they answered all three correctly it would be 100.

I feel that a bonus conversion rate is a useful measure to look at rather than a team’s overall score. I haven’t done analysis on these so I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the teams’ scores are noticeably higher than 2023’s. I yield to no one in my admiration of Jeremy Paxman but it’s understandable that his speed of questioning in his final series didn’t match the speed at which Amol Rajan has been asking questions in he current series. The more questions that are asked in the match , the higher the teams are likely to score. Whereas the BCR is not as strongly affected by the number of questions asked in the show. This is why it is perfectly possible for runner-up teams to have higher bonus conversion rates than the teams that beat them.

I’ve compiled a table showing the bonus conversion rates for the teams in the first ten matches of the current series, and a second table showing the rates for the teams in the first ten matches of the 2023 series. Here they are.

Bonus Conversion Rates

Current Series

Winning team	BCR (Bonus Conversion Rate)	Runners Up	BCR
Manchester	54	Trinity, Cambridge	67
Aberdeen	55	Birmingham	49
Birkbeck	80	Oxford Brookes	88
Christ Church, Cambridge	43	Southampton	67
Emmanuel, Cambridge	59	Jesus, Oxford	60
UEA	54	Strathclyde	52
Hertford, Cambridge	69	Open University	73
Imperial	71	Balliol, Oxford	66
Sheffield	67	Loughborough	72
Warwick	61	Wolfson, Cambridge	62
Average winners	61	Average runners up	66

 

2023 series

Winning team	BCR	Runners Up	BCR
Durham	57	Bristol	57
Newcastle	64	Open	43
University, Oxford	48	LSE	67
Cardiff	49	Coventry	66
Royal Holloway	63	Cranfield	36
Queens Belfast	29	Glasgow	50
S. Andrews	49	Gonville and Caius	50
UCL	70	Sheffield	52
Christ’s	48	Oriel	42
Jesus	52	St, Catherine’s	50
Average - winners	53	Average – Runners up	50

 

So what does this show us? Good question. As I said we should be careful about drawing conclusions. So let’s start with what we CAN say.

The first ten matches of the current series have seen higher average bonus conversion rates by both winners and runners up than we saw in 2023.

What MIGHT this point to?

- Maybe the bonuses are easier on the whole than they were in 2023.

- Maybe the teams are stronger than they were in 2023.

- Maybe the average BCR (bonus conversion rate) was lower in 2023 than previous years and this season has seen things revert to normal.

- Maybe it’s just a blip that looks far more significant than it is because 10 is such a small number for any statistical analysis.

It will be interesting to do the comparison for the whole series. In fact it would be helpful to do an analysis of, let’s say, the whole seasons over the last ten years. Interesting, but not something I have the time to do at the moment.

Opinion

Yes, I thought I’d better highlight that this is just my opinion and not based on anything it says in the tables above. The thing which made me start to look at the whole question over whether the bonuses have been easier this year was the BCRs, not any gut feeling that the questions were easier. It’s difficult to quantify the relative difficulty of questions as it is. After all, to use a widely quoted adage, they’re all easy if you know the answers. But no, I haven’t been sitting in front of my telly thinking that the show has ‘dumbed down’ at all. There have been the odd bonus sets where I’ve thought that they were rather easy, but that’s happened in previous years as well.

However, I seem to recall that in one of the interviews prior to the broadcast of the first match, Pinki Chambers, BBC Commissioning Editor for Entertainment and Comedy, was quoted as saying  “the questions are harder.” Well, I know it’s the kind of boast you would make, but the evidence of the first ten shows suggests that this is going to be a hard claim for to prove.

Alan Carr's Picture Slam

Right, I have a problem with this show. Can you guess what it is yet? That’s right. It’s about pictures. That’s not the whole problem. Many quizzes have picture rounds, even University Challenge. Only Connect makes copious and clever use of pictures. The problem with Alan Carr’s Picture Slam is that it’s only about pictures. Yes, Dave – did you not work that out from the title? Well, yes, I did, and only watched it I the interests of writing about it. But I mention all this faff just so I can say that this quiz show is based on the pub quiz round that I like the least – the picture round.

No, sorry, not finished yet. I guess that my issue with picture rounds is that I’m not very good at them. Now, if I was of a mind, I could pick on another weaker area of mine – let’s call this purely hypothetical round food and drink – and work on it, learn stuff, and make myself less weak. In fact I once did with food and drink, but let that go for a minute. Now a picture round doesn’t allow you that luxury. Quizzes call for recall, and sometimes give you the opportunity to work out an answer by using what you do know to help you work out what you don’t know. Picture rounds don’t. They are about recognition, and it pains me to say it but this is a skill I have very little of. And it wouldn’t make a difference how much I worked on it, I still would have difficulty telling my Ryan Goslings from my Ryan Reynolds and my young blond actress from any other young blond actress.

So how well does Alan Carr’s Picture Slam do something that I don’t really like? Well, look, it’s basically just about recognising pictures, right? The pictures are linked by category, so we have the flag of Chile, a bottle of Sunny Delight and various other things being connected by types of weather. You see how it works. The show moves quite quickly, which is in its favour. But then it does something a bit odd. The competition is between teams of two. However in one round the individuals within the teams face off against individuals from another team. One of them is shown the pictures and has to name them. Then the opposing player is shown exactly the same pictures. Fair on the players, yes, but not very fair on the poor viewers.

Alan Carr? Look, he’s a funny guy, but on a show like this it’s difficult to let that come out naturally, and he was a bit shouty for my liking. But then this isn’t a show for me anyway, so that doesn’t really matter. It does what it does pretty well, but . . . you know what I’m going to say, I do’t like what it does.  

Film Quiz

Look, I was just in a very grumpy mood when I wrote this yesterday. Here goes: - 

 I am currently sitting in a theatre on a school INSET day, listening to the ‘expert’ in a particular field. His first mistake was to discard the microphone he was offered. He thinks his voice is perfectly clear and carries to the middle and back of the auditorium. He is wrong. We are sitting around large round tables. I currently have 11 people around mine. He keeps stopping, and I’m guessing that he is asking us to discuss things, judging by the fact that everyone else in the group starts talking. At the same time. I hear snatches of three or four conversations each time. I feel somewhat like I am being beaten over the head with a blunt instrument today.

Which brings me to Wednesday night’s quiz. I enjoyed Wednesday night’s quiz – always do, even though I very rarely provide more than one or two answers. It’s a film quiz, you see. Wednesday night’s theme was movie villains. And we played an absolute blinder. I say we. I had a couple and that was that for me. There’s one quiz every month – with no quiz in August. Of the 8 quizzes so far this year we’ve won 6, tied for first place in another, and been second in the other. This year as well as the individual quizzes it’s being run as a league. Now, on Wednesday night we won by something like 18 points, or put it another way, we could have not played the last round and still won by 8. It’s our biggest win this year, possibly our biggest win ever.

There is a certain irony to this. There are several guys who run the quiz. Most of them we get on with fine, but there’s one of them who makes no secret of the fact that he is extremely frustrated that we win the majority of quizzes. Well, on Wednesday night, as we were in the queue for drinks, this particular guy passed us in the queue. Jess and I turned to each other and at exactly the same time said, “That’s ruined his night.”

If you play in quizzes and you win quite regularly then you’ll have experienced some unpleasantness from other teams or question masters I’m quite sure. On Thursday night Dan said he’d been told that the organisers are considering introducing a handicap system. Hmm. Personally, I would hope that if they do they will hang on until after December, and the end of the league. Changing things before the league ends, somehow that’s not quite cricket.

I have mixed feelings about handicaps. On the positive side, the more teams that take part in a quiz the better as far as the host venues are concerned, and without the venue you can’t have a quiz. I would imagine that playing in a quiz where you know you have a chance of winning is more fun than playing in a quiz where you know that you have no realistic chance of winning. Okay. On the negative side – I don’t really want to say this now, because I don’t come across very well for saying it. But what the hell? The nasty, too serious about the whole thing side of me says – handicaps reward you for not being very good at it. Handicaps remove any incentive to get better at it, and if winning matters that much to you, then you ought to be prepared to put in a bit of effort to get better at it. On a more practical note, I think it’s difficult to do handicaps fairly. Trevor Parry in Newport, who is as good a question master as you are ever going to meet, started using handicaps in his Monday quiz which I used to attend. It was a constant source of frustration to me – even as great a setter as Trevor seemed to have no discernible system of handicapping, just plucking the figures out of thin air each week. Some nights I just wanted to get up and walk out after he announced the handicaps, because we’d be starting so far off the pace there would be no chance of winning, even if we comfortably outscored everyone else.

Well, that’s just me, and I know I do take it all too seriously. If I lived closer to Newport then I’d consider going again, but I cannot in all conscience do a 40 minute journey back on a school night now, even with handicaps.

On the other hand, I would not even make a 40 second journey to a bingo quiz. Bingo quizzes are a firm fixture in the drawer I have labelled ‘NOT FOR ME’. I can’t cope with the idea that you might get all the answers in the quiz right (unlikely but not impossible) and still not win. Quizzing is a broad church, and we can’t all like the same things. If you regularly go to a bingo style quiz and you enjoy it, then good luck to you. As I say, it’s not for me.

 

The Way of the Pedant

I have tried to mellow just a little as I get older. But the fact is that when I do finally manage to wholeheartedly subscribe to the undoubtedly correct view – it’s only a game – I’ll probably have so little of my allotted three score and ten left that it won’t be log enough to make a lot of difference. I take it all too seriously, still. Not as much as I did, but that’s not saying that much when you get down to it.

Which is maybe why I let myself get worked up about 2 questions last night. The question setter last night is a regular, and someone I like very much. As a person. As a question master, well, he frustrates me. It’s not so much that he gets things wrong, although he does. It’s more that he gets things wrong which, well, for want of a better way of putting it, he gets things wrong which he really should get right and which he would get right if he wasn’t so slap-dash about it.

Now, last night’s quiz was a gimmicky thing. Each round had a theme (ugh, themed quizzes). Each team had a joker. Before the first question of each round was asked, you had the opportunity to play the joker on the round. Whatever your score, as Arthur Ellis would say ‘Played the joker, double it up to . . . “ The first question in each round was a three pointer. The last was an either/or with two answers to choose from (ugh, either/or questions). So look, he’d obviously taken some time over putting it together. But then on the transport round he comes up with this one – in 1952 where did Albert Gunton jump a double decker bus? Was it – and by this point I’d already written down Tower Bridge – 12 other double decker buses, or , London Bridge?

Now, what gets me is that when I told him of his mistake – sorry, but London Bridge is important to me. It was my specialist subject in the final of a well known TV show- when I told him of his mistake he even admitted that the right answer made more sese. Mind you he wasn’t happy that it pretty much meat he had to tell everyone the right answer then.

He’d maybe have been even more unhappy if I’d told him that he’d cocked up this question – When Josh Kerr won the men’s 800m in this year’s world athletics championship, who presented his gold medal? – Because as I am sure you and everyone else knows, Josh Kerr didn’t wi the 800m. He won the 1500m. Just lazy slapdashery.

Does it matter? That’s a tricky one. It made no material difference to he outcome. It didn’t affect the result. And let’s be hones, even if it had, would it have mattered? It certainly would not have been important. But as I’ve said before, just because something isn’t important it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter. My view is this. Everyone makes mistakes. When you set a quiz you are going to make mistakes with the best will in the world. But you don’t have to make mistakes which are simple and easy to find.

I’d like my pedantry proficiency badge and certificate back please.

University Challenge 2024: Warwick v. Wolfson, Cambridge

The Teams

Warwick

James Coe

Luke Beresford

Matthew Bliss (Capt)

Abby Akarapongpisakbi

Wolfson, Cambridge

Scott Wilson

Grace An

Rob Steel-Browne (Capt)

Patrick Pan

Anyone remember Jeremy Paxman? I only ask because It seems like Amol’s settled so well into his role that it’s like he’s been going for years. To the contest, then. Empire and Rose Chamber were enough to give me Ottoman for the first starter. Patrick Pan miscued with Russian, allowing Luke Beresford in with my answer. This brought Warwick bonuses on the name Artemisia, a well-crafted set that brought a full house. Poor Patrick Pan came in too early again for the next starter, offering Confucianism which was almost the next word in the question. This allowed in Luke Beresford for his double with Legalism. Notable authors in the Austro-Hungarian Empire announced Amol. Kafka! Shouted I. Well, he was the last of the set. He was also the only one either of us answered correctly. Abby Akarapongpisakbi knew that Bartok wrote the piano pieces known as Mikrokosmos. Works in the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 Paris Exposition were far less obscure than you might have expected and we both had a full house. So to the picture starter, and a map with an area highlighted that was obviously the Gobi Desert. Luke Beresford took his third with that. The bonuses, other ‘cold’ deserts, were harder than this very gentle starter, and we both only managed the one. For the next starter none of us were quite up with the FORTRAN programming language. Finally Wolfson managed a starter, with captain Rob Steele-Browne knowing that Karl Rove was the presidential advisor nicknamed Bush’s Brain. Was he a particularly small man, by any chance? Bonuses on extinct Indo-European languages yielded nowt, leaving Wolfson still on a deficit budget. But they were out of the traps now, and Patrick Pan atoned for earlier miscues, knowing that Campari is a main component of a Negroni cocktail. Sounds disgusting. The letter S in biology made my brow furrow. There is NO letter S in the word biology. But Wolfson took two and I took a lap of honour for working out serine. Thanks Mr. Rose (my latin teacher). This mini revival meant that Wolfson had improved their situation although Warwick led by 80 – 15.

Patrick Pan took a second consecutive starter with a very quick buzz to identify the word spot – or do I mean to spot the word identify? No. Real life scientists and The Simpsons was a lovely set of bonuses of which Wolfson took a full set. And Wolfson struck again with the next starter, skipper Steele-Browne knowing Ngugi wa Thiongo’’s debut novel was set in Kenya. Impressive buzz, that. Works ending with ‘of the Dead’ brought two correct answers, and a total of 60, just 20 behind Warwick. Then, for the music starter Patrick Pan only needed about half a note to identify the work of Brahms (Johannes, I’m guessing, rather than Shirley). Other works written for piano with four hands brought the two correct answers that Wolfson needed to tie the scores. And you still don’t believe that Amol is a jedi? That purple patch, though, was brought to an end when the Warwick skipper recognised a series of words beginning with Ale - . Two bonuses on Bertold Brecht brought Wolfson into triple figures. Patrick Pan hit back to name Sumerian as the oldest known text written in cuneiform. Semi-precious stones did nothing to help the Wolfson cause. Now, I have always told people that if you get a question starting ‘what numerical value’ you must say 1 or zero, coz it’s often one or tother. Well, the strains of the baby elephant walk drowned out the rest of it, but I said 1, Luke Beresford said 1 and we were both right. Luke, to be fair, didn’t make a fool of himself by taking a second lap of honour around the living room, but there we are. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie isn’t a writer with whom I’m very familiar but Warwick knew enough to take a bonus. Abby Akarapongpisakbi knew that Ash Barty was the homegrown player who won the Australian Open then retired. 2 bonuses on China in the 70s followed. With the picture starter Abby Akarapongpisakbi took a double, recognising the work of David. 3 British artworks depicting poisonings saw both of us fail on the first two, but correctly identify the work of the man Oscar Wilde nicknamed Awfully Weirdly. I love Aubrey Beardsley’s work. So although the second period had proven to be more competitive than the first, Warwick very much had the whip hand by the 20 minute-mark.

Matthew Bliss knew of Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line for the next starter. Snakes on flags and anthems brought another full house. Wolfson were still within shooting distance of a repechage slot, but they really needed to get buzzing again to give themselves a realistic chance.And captain Rob Steel-Browne did just that, knowing that Sharm – El – Sheikh was the location of the COP27 conference. (Sharm – El – Sheikh, Sharm – El – Sheikh, Sheikh Your Booty). Short scientific terms ending with x – took them to 115, and they looked definitely in with a shout of reaching the repechage. Nobody knew that the great and the kori are a pair of bustards – although perhaps they’re just misunderstood. Various clues gave James Coe the word Saint for the next starter. The team missed out on the term tenebrism although they did pick up a bonus for a noted practitioner in Caravaggio. Grace An brought hope to Wolfson knowing that Victor Horta (who had a lovely daughter) was an exponent of Art Nouveau in architecture. A full house on coffee brought them to 140, tantalisingly close. Now, when the next starter mentioned Solhofen Limestone the word Archaeopteryx popped into my head. What can I say – I’m funny like that. This led me to fossils and did the same to Matthew Bliss too, since he gave the same answer. Film bonuses yielded another full house. Warwick were in no mood to ease Wolfson’s path into the repechage and were slamming the buzzer down on every starter now. Luke Beresford knew that Lake Vattern is in Sweden. The use of the drug chloral hydrate in fiction (there was none of that in Bamber’s day!) brought a couple more bonuses. Jomon pottery comes from Japan, as Luke Beresford helpfully informed us. Two bonuses on ships followed. James Coe knew that daggers were the weapons referenced in stated works, and there was time to add a further five points before the contest was gonged. Warwick won by 265 – 140.

Hard lines Wolfson. They showed in their purple patch that at least a repechage slot was not beyond them, but it didn’t work out. They had a conversion rate of 63%. As for Warwick the impressive thing about them was that although Luke Beresford top scored with 6 starters, the buzzing was spread well throughout the team. Their conversion rate was 61%. I will share some thoughts on what the bonus conversion rates this year seem to be telling us, but not until the first round is finished.

How is Amol Doing?

Goodness me, but Amol uncorked his jedi tricks early in this show. No more than 7 minutes and 18 seconds of the show had elapsed before he said “Plenty of time left Wolfson. See if you can get going with this one.” Well, to be fair, for once there really was plenty of time remaining, and the score did stand at 80 to Warwick and minus 10 to Wolfson. As often happens, it took a minute or two to work. When Wolfson did get started he felt confident enough of their revival to be a bit of a sarky devil, telling them that one of their answers was only a few thousand years out.

Interesting Fact That I Didn’t Already Know of the Week

Enugu was the capital of the short lived breakaway republic of Biafra.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

“In mathematics what numerical value is both the supremum of the hyperbolic tangent function and the infimum of the hyperbolic cosine function?” That. . . ain’t . . . English! Dum de dum dum dumdum dumdum dum dum.

Mastermind 2024 - Round 1 - Heat 5

We’re whipping through the first round now, dearly beloved. Tonight’s Mastermind was that relative rarity, a show containing no passes whatsoever. This suggests a clutch of well-schooled contenders who appreciated the demands of the show. Was this what we actually found though?

First to brave the chair was student Ben Jones. Ben was answering on F. Scott Fitzgerald. I’ll be honest, I didn’t fancy this as a subject. A great many people whose opinions I highly respect love Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby”. This is the only one of his novels that I’ve actually read, and . . . look, it’s like this. As with Kafka, I can appreciate the achievement while just not having that emotional response to it myself. Say it quietly but I’d far rather read a John Grisham. All of which is, I suppose, a long-winded apology for getting a total of zilch on this round. Ben did better, getting 7, but it looked like he’d have some catching up to do in the GK.

Now, there’s no reason why I should get more points on our second specialist, otters, than I should have on Fitzgerald. Yet I did. I don’t know a great deal about otters, but I’ve read and seen Ring of Bright Water, and I knew about Terry Nutkins, who was also the straight man to the late great Johnny Morris on Animal Magic once Dotty the Ring-Tailed Lemur had moved on to explore other career opportunities. So I took two. Hannah Mitchell weighed in with the first double figure round of the night. 10 looked good but left a little room on top.

Michael Thompson was answering on Thomas Paine. Normally I’d think of this as a ‘scraping a couple of points if I’m lucky’ round. Well, even that made it my ‘banker round’ of this particular show. And to be fair I did equal my score of 2 from the previous round – thanks Common Sense and Marquis de Lafayette. Michael scored 7. It’s never a bad score, is seven. You can’t get it without knowing your subject. But it looks modest, and it usually leaves you adrift a half time.

Finally Simon Pinnell with The Navy Lark. Now, I know a little bit about the show, and can actually remember once or twice listening to episodes when I was little – and sadly, wondering what people were laughing at. Bu this really wasn’t enough to bring me any points – only a wild guess of Scapa Flow did that. So I finished the specialists with an aggregate of five, and frankly felt bloomin’ lucky to get that many. Simon managed to equal the best score of the night so far, taking a good ten o ensure that he would be the last to go in the GK round.

First in the GK was Michael. Michael did not answer very quickly. I always find this a little frustrating as a viewer because I want to go at 100mph to amass as good a score in my own chair as I can. However it can be an effective tactic if it means you get a higher ratio of correct answers. And let’s be fair to Mchael, he managed 10. What do we say, dearly beloved? Anything in double figures is a good score. Did he have a winning total? Well, no, I couldn’t see 17 doing it.

Ben’s first minute and a half was absolutely terrific. He was picking them off with the greatest of ease, and with time left on the clock he looked to be heading towards a score of fifteen or so. A few questions began tripping him up at this point, though, and that vital momentum was lost. This couldn’t undo the good work in the earlier part of the round though, and Ben finished with 12 for 20. It’s a funny thing, but the psychological gap between scores of 19 and 20 is a huge gulf, and it was possible that Ben might just do it.

Not before Hannah had made her run for the tape, though. She was never quite as convincing as Ben but then she didn’t really need to be. She was two points to the good at half time, and she was on nineteen as the white line of doom snaked around the score. She couldn’t find the answer that she needed, though, and remained just one short on nineteen.

Only Simon could prevent Ben from taking an unlikely win now. He didn’t start badly either. There was an admirable economy in the way he answered. Sadly, though, there just weren’t enough correct answers among the answers he gave, and it was clear that he wasn’t going to get there before the white line of doom reappeared. Simon finished with 8 for a total of 18.

Well played all. Not the highest scoring show we’ve seen, but well contested. As to Ben, best of luck in the semi final. As you so rightly said, you are now a Mastermind semi-finalist, and win, lose or draw, nobody can take that away.

The Details

Ben Jones	F. Scott Fitzgerald	8	0	12	0	20	0
Hannah Mitchell	Otters	10	0	9	0	19	0
Michael Thompson	Thomas Paine	7	0	10	0	17	0
Simon Pinnell	The Navy Lark	10	0	8	0	18	0