Vintage Mastermind on BBC4

Of course, the silver lining to the cloud of having no new episode of Mastermind tomorrow night is that we do have an episode of Mastermind from 1977 on BBC4. The specialist subjects are The Alps, symphony orchestra instruments, children’s literature and the Old Testament.

I remember the 1977 series well. I turned 13 in 1977 and I’m pretty sure I watched most if not all of the shows in the series. It had really got into its stride by then and was well on the way to becoming a national institution. The 1977 series was won by Sir David Hunt, retired diplomat. I remember that in his heat he was defeated by, if I recall correctly, Lord Timothy Beaumont, when, according to Magnus’ book, he became rather too interested in the questions. He didn’t make that mistake in the repechage or the final.

He’s not in tomorrow night’s show, the first episode of the series, well, not according to the photo on the Mastermind webpage. 9pm tomorrow.

The Chase Around the World Update

4 Mastermind heats without a break and ‘That’s yer lot!’ says Auntie Beeb. Not sure why it’s off the screen tomorrow, but it’s only off for a week. Until the next time, anyway.

I’m still enjoying The Chase Across the World.The previous episode we saw another pair losing to the Chasers and going home from Lisbon. Last week we were in Paris. Now, some of the advertising for the show led me to believe that we’d be finishing in Paris – don’t remember now where I got that idea from. For the first time I incorrectly predicted where Bradders was going to be by the end of the show – I thought it would be the Eiffel Tower but that was just a stop on the way.

In the very first show we saw Ashwin and Nikita make a good stab at the GK and the Chasers make an uncharacteristic couple of errors in the Final Chase and they survived to make it to the next destination. In last week’s show, having made a wee bit of an oreille de cochon of some of the clues Ashwin and Nikita again were the last to complete Where’s Bradley. Again, they made a decent fist of the GK – although not, I fancy, quite as good as their first. Again, the Chasers made uncharacteristic errors and our intrepid pair survived. Once is bad luck for the Chasers. Twice is beginning to look careless.

When you get right down to it, I like that there’s precious little sneakiness being asked of our teams in this show, which I felt was a bit of a jarring note in Destination X last year. Yes, okay, the team in first place one week gets to determine the order in which the teams will be asked starting questions in the next show but that’s it. The show is about answering questions , working out clues, and passing through a few locations that are very easy on the eye and I like that.

Seriously, does anyone actually like the long questions?

Being a quizzer and an ex-teacher means I could probably moan for Britain (England through birth, Scotland through ancestry or Wales through long term residency. I also have Irish ancestry, but too many generations back for me to qualify and French Huguenot ancestry from even further back. )  And one of the things long term viewers of Mastermind do like to moan about is the length and wordiness of too many of the questions. This is not exactly news to anyone, is it? Now, on the odd occasions that I have heard anyone official justifying this the argument has been that it plays fairer to the viewers at home who then have a bit more time to think of the answer yuttah yuttah.

I wonder. Is it maybe just possible that the repeat of episodes from Mastermind – The Original Series on Monday evenings at 9pm will maybe encourage the production team to rethink this? As I noted in a previous post, BBC4 repeated the 1972 Grand Final last Monday. Yes, there were some notable differences between this first final and what Mastermind – The Next Generation has become. But one of the things worth noting was the sheer speed with which the rounds moved . Yes, okay, the specialists were 2 and a half minutes long, and the GK 3 minutes long, but blimey, they didn’t half cover some ground and get through a lot of questions. To me, that’s a lot more exciting than watching the poor old contender sit through a question so long that you’ve forgotten the start of the question before Clive has got to the end of it, who then passes or gives a wrong answer anyway.

And the thing is it doesn’t seem to be only me who feels this way. That bastion of truth, honesty and fair play, the Daily Express, published a thundering article in the week, claiming that angry viewers had blasted the performance of last Monday’s 4 contenders. Typical clickbait rubbish, but what was interesting was the number of comments from viewers unfavourably comparing the questions on the current show compared with the 72 final. With the best will in the world, I do think that the style of questions at the moment makes it very hard for a contender to build up any momentum, and I honestly think that with shorter questions the average GK scores of the contenders at least would increase. Blimey, it’s got to be worth a try, at least.

The Continuing Saga

If you’ve been following my recent posts about the changes to the marking system in our quiz at the Aberavon Rugby club and my suspicions about the scores emanating from one of the teams during our ‘mark your own’ era then you’re maybe feeling that it’s all rather distasteful and shows me up as small-minded and petty. Probably guilty as charged if I’m being totally honest. Well, if you are of this opinion, this post is the latest installment of the mini-saga and you might want to give it a miss.

Right, now they’ve gone, let me tell you what happened last night. To recap, from the end of lockdown until a fortnight ago we had a marking policy in the quiz that everyone would mark their own answers, relying on the fact that it’s just a fun quiz with no prizes to be able to trust teams not to inflate their scores. For all bar one team I trust their scores implicitly. With the other one, no, ‘fraid not.

I’ve mentioned these suspicions on the blog from time to time, but never tried to discuss it at the quiz. Just didn’t think I could, really. Blimey, the way that team reacted when I asked them how they managed to score 15 on a 14 point round would put anyone off making a scene in the club. Then  a fortnight ago our esteemed and valued organiser, Dai Norwich (his name is David and he has spent a lot of time in Norwich) announced that with Covid hopefully receding ever further behind us we would be switching to swapping our answer sheets with another team for marking. The team I have my suspicions about were not there. Last week, when I was the question master, two of that team were there. Now, bear in mind that they have several times played with just two of them there. I gave them the answer sheets, and the picture handout and they did not say a word about not playing. I announced we were carrying on swapping answers for marking. Then, when it came to swap answers they said that they weren’t playing.

Right, so what happened last night with them then? Answer – nothing. They weren’t there. Maybe they were all away on holiday. One of the guys has an injury at the moment I believe as well. On the other hand, I just can’t help wondering whether the change in marking policy has anything to do with it. Dan, Jess and I were discussing this in the car on the way home and we all agreed that we’d just really like to be certain about it all. Yes, I think that they were inflating their scores somehow, but all I have is evidence, not proof. I’d just like to see how they perform in a few quizzes where someone else is marking their papers and knows what they really, honestly scored. And if they still score as well as they were scoring when they marked their own papers then that’s absolutely fine. We’ll know. Likewise, I really don’t want to thrash them week in week out – it’s not that kind of quiz. I don’t want them to be driven out of the quiz. But I do want to feel we can trust the scores that teams are saying they had , and I don’t want to be leaving the quiz on a Thursday evening feeling that one team is taking us all for mugs, which to be honest is a feeling I’ve had a lot over the last 5 years.

I Wonder

In conversation yesterday I reflected that my grandparents’ generation lived through the Second World War. In fact in 3 of my grandparents’ cases, they lived throughout both First and Second World Wars. My youngest grandparent, my father’s mother, was born in 1915, so she at least lived through part of both wars, although she was too young to remember the first at all.

Both of my grandfathers died before I was born. Neither of my grandmothers ever seemed to want to talk about the Second World War. Which is ironic really because when we talk about their generation, we tend to remember them specifically as the generation that lived through the war, rightly so. Yet in both grandmothers’ cases the war was something they didn’t particularly want to talk about.

Both of my parents were born in London in the early months of the war. Both were only 5 when it ended and neither of them had particularly strong memories of it. But their generation was the generation of war babies who got to grow up during the post war austerity of the late 40s and the 1950s. I can’t help thinking about what Sir Billy Connolly once said about the 1950s. He was talking about that period before Rock and Roll hit our shores. And he basically said words to the effect of – I remember the 50s. I was there and it was like living in the Eurovision Song Contest in a school uniform. The world was beige and the music was crap.- I’m guessing he meant Eurovision as it was in its first couple of decades and not as it is now.

I can’t help wondering, in the future, when my grandchildren are grown up and have children and grandchildren of their own, how will they think about our generation, that is, the kids who were born in the 60s and grew up in the 70s. Because looking back, I can’t help feeling just a little bit blessed that I was born when I was. I grew up in a Britain with a functioning NHS, went to a comprehensive school just 2 years after the local authority had ended the 11 plus system that in a lot of ways determined the future course of kids’ lives from some tests they did before they reached puberty, went to a University and not only did not have to pay tuition fees, but got given a grant to support me when I studied. Off the top of my head it’s difficult to think of anything in my lifetime anything like as hard or traumatic as what my parents’ and my grandparents’ generations lived through. There was Covid, certainly, which was unusual and very frightening at the time. Thousands and thousands of people died who should not have died at that time, and it’s easy to forget this as the memory of lockdown recedes into History. Growing up we lived with the fear of nuclear war, but that was just it. We lived with it, it didn’t seem to affect our lives that much. Who knows what they’ll say about us? Time alone will tell.

 

Museums

In 2022, a couple of years before my years of working at the chalkface came to its blessed end my school held a craft fair in an evening during the summer term. I was offered a stall and I sold a couple of paintings and a couple of prints. Lovely jubbly, thank you very much. Now one of the stallholders came up and invited me to take a stall in another craft fair, nothing to do with the school, being held in a couple of weeks in Neath. I had to take out some public liability insurance, and this meant that I was going to need to sell more pictures than I’d sold in the school to make any kind of profit. But hey, she told me, it was being held in a much bigger venue, for longer, all day rather than a couple of hours in an evening and it was being well advertised, locally.

Well, it was certainly a bigger venue and there were more stallholders. I don’t know how well it had been advertised, though, because there was hardly anybody there all day. I sold precisely nowt. Adding insult to injury the organisers came round asking stallholders for donations to charity. I replied that I would gladly make a donation as soon as I broke even for the day, knowing full well that this was unlikely to happen.

The only good thing about the day was that it did enable me to meet and start to get to know a real-life costumed hero. Captain Beany. If you don’t know about the captain, it’s probably a safe bet to say that you don’t come from Port Talbot or the local area, or you haven’t lived there for a long time, or you don’t visit it a great deal. We’ve all heard of national treasures. Well, Captain Beany is a Port Talbot local treasure. By his own efforts, he has become something of a legend.

Which is not something I would have predicted 40 years ago. I moved to Port Talbot on Friday 12^th September 1986, having got married on the 10^th. On the 15^th I started the primary school observation stage of my PGCE teaching certificate. Quite a week. One item of local news that same weekend was an eccentric gentleman called Barry Kirk and his attempt to break the world record for sitting in a bathful of beans. He succeeded too, as I recall, and from then on he and his alter ego Captain Beany from the Planet Beanus would become a fact of life in Port Talbot that just was not going to go away. Beany legally changed his name by deed poll to Captain Beany in 1991. Over the years he has raised tens of thousands of pounds for charities and good causes in the area.

In 2009, Beany opened his Baked Bean Museum of Excellence in his own council flat. It was opened by TV’s Danny Wallace, who featured it in one of his TV shows. Hunter Davies, the man who wrote the official biography of the Beatles, visited and wrote about it. At one stage it was Trip Advisor’s most popular attraction in Port Talbot. Beany invited me to visit, but I never quite got my act together to do this before the museum closed in 2023, when the council sent Tai Tarian in to renovate the flats.

I love museums. Whenever I’m off on a trip somewhere one of the first thing I do is google to see what museums are there. But somehow I seem to have missed out on a lot of the strange museums you can find in different places, even when it would have taken little or no effort to get there, like Beany’s. Just off the top of my head, I missed out on the Devil Museum in Kaunas when I visited in 2018. That wasn’t strictly my fault, having said that. It was Easter time, but Spring had come later in the Batlic than it did in the UK that year, and it was bitterly cold for most of the time I was there, and like an awful lot of places, the museum was closed when I went.

Then there was Reykjavik’s Phallological Museum. Yes, that word Phallological does mean what you think it means. Sorry, but I just didn’t fancy popping in when I had so much else to do and see in my short time in Iceland. My daughter and son-in-law went to Reykjavik the same year. My daughter gave it a miss, but James, my son in law did have a look. When I asked him about it he said, ”I found it quite interesting . . . even if it was just a load of willies.” There you go.

I mention all of this chaff because I took a long weekend on leave from work last week and made a visit to the Helicopter Museum in Weston Super Mare. It was one of a few museums I’ve never visited that I think would make a nice trip in a single day. The Helicopter Museum won out because it is closest to my home and is home to the few remaining bits of the Fairey Rotodyne. The Fairey Rotodyne was one of a number of aviation initiatives post war Britain came up with and somehow managed to make the least of. Basically the Rotodyne combined a rotor that was powered by jets on the tips of the blades during take off and landing, but spun free like an autogyro during level flight. It performed very well in tests, but there were concerns over the noise the jets made during take off and landing, and only one prototype was built then the government pulled the plug before any orders were received. I’ve become a little obsessed with it I suppose and even painted it a couple of weeks ago.

The other museums on the list? Well, I would really like to go to the Hovercraft Museum in Lee on Solent and have long meant to visit the Tank Museum in Bovington. Which sets me wondering, is there any mechanical means of transport that there is NOT a museum dedicated to in the UK? Did you know that there is a Lambretta scooter museum in Weston Super Mare? No, me neither or I might well have been tempted to make it part of a double header when I went to Weston last week. The National Cycle Museum is in Llandrindod Wells, a place well worth a visit in it’s own right. Amazingly , there is even a Bubblecar Museum! It’s in Lincolnshire, near Boston. Now that’s too far for a day trip for me, but it’s a definite addition to my must-see list. Sorry, but I absolutely love the Isetta, Messerschmidt and Heinkel bubblecars. Should I ever win the lottery – highly unlikely since I never buy a ticket – I want one of each.

Entrepreneurs might note that there is not yet a Segway Museum nor a Space Hopper Museum, so it Is still possible to get in on the ground floor with those.

Mastermind Grand Final 1972

I don’t know if it was planned because the BBC knew that a pretty underwhelming edition of Mastermind was showing earlier in the evening and they wanted to give the fan something more meaty by way of apology, but after UC last night, over on BBC4 we had Sally Magnusson giving us her memories of the show during her much missed Dad’s 25 year stint as question master. I really rather enjoyed this 15 minute show – although even if I hadn’t I would have forgiven her anyway because when I met her in person she was handing me my Mastermind bowl.

This was followed by the 1972 Mastermind final. I found this really interesting as I’m pretty sure I have never seen it before. Although much of what we remember about the show during the Magnus years was in evidence, there were some quite unusual aspects. Firstly there were only 3 contenders – Nancy Wilkinson, Beryl Leatham Thomas and Joan Taylor. Secondly, these rounds were long – 2 and a half minutes on specialist and 3 minutes on GK. Much of this has been written about in Magnus’ own “I’ve Started So I’ll Finish”, his history of the first 25 years of the show. But to continue – the specialist categories were extremely broad, and I can guarantee that they’d be a lot more narrowly defined if taken today. As it was, I got double figures on Nancy’s round on the History of Music just from my general knowledge.

There was no mention of passes being counted in the event of a tie, and indeed all three contenders showed no hesitation and passed a lot more than you would have expected.

Anothr thing that intrigued me was that Joan Taylor, the last contender to go in the GK round, had reached 35 in response to Nancy’s 37, and immediately after Magnus asked the question, the buzzer went. AT which the audience burst into applause, and she never answered. Under the established rules, Magnus would have said that she could answer at this stage, but she didn’t even try. It wouldn’t have made any difference, but I found it a bit surprising.

You knew that this was recorded in the early 70s when Magnus came across just a little bit patronising when he made the point that all 3 finalists had to beat male opposition to get to the final.

One thing you didn’t see is a story that Magnus tells in the book, where he explains that with the GK rounds being 3 minutes long, Nancy went so quickly that he ran out of questions! Bosworth Taylor had to get a copy of the World Book and make up some more while Nancy waited. You couldn’t tell from watching the show, though.

Do you know what? I wouldn’t mind watching a few more like this.