Mastermind Heat 9 Specialist subjects

 Here we are then, the subject line up for tomorrow’s Mastermind heat 9. They are:-

The novels of Jeannette Winterson

The films of Nicole Kidman

The BBC radio comedy series Round The Horne

The Paris Commune of 1871

I don’t see myself getting a hatful of specialist subjects. I’ve never read any of Jeannette Winterson’s novels although I did watch the excellent TV adaptation of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit with the late Charlotte Coleman and Geraldine McEwan. Films of Nicole Kidman may be my best chance of 1 or 2 points, while there might be a piece of low hanging fruit in Round the Horne for me.

Adieu, Nobody's Fool

 I was sorry, but not completely shocked by the news that ITV are not planning to make another series of Nobody’s Fool. Back in May ITV aired this hybrid of a Traitor’s-style intrigue game and a quiz, hosted by Danny Dyer and Emily Atack. I liked the show and made a point of watching every episode. In my review of the series after the final episode I said,

“Summing up then I enjoyed “Nobody’s Fool”. It isn’t “The Traitors” (although one suspects that it rather wishes that it was) but I watched the first two shows on demand then made a point of being around to watch each show of the rest of the series as it aired. The big question, though, is whether enough viewers felt the same. I hope so. If it comes back, I will watch it.”

Well, I think that the answer to that big question was a pretty resounding, no, not enough viewers did feel the same. It’s a shame, because I enjoyed it. This comes at a time when ITV are also rumoured to have no plans to make a second series of The Chase Around the World, another quiz based show that I really enjoyed. That’s the problem with what my grandparents would have called commercial television. The bottom line really is the bottom line.

University Challenge 2027 First Round - University College, London v. Royal College of Art

The Teams

UCL

Max Emmett

Alan Hughes

Eva West (Capt.)

Coirle Magee

Royal College of Art

Jack Merriman

Alex Hadyn-Williams

James Bown (Capt.)

Imaan Hyder

When the first starter asked for a novel, of which the author said that when you’ve read it you should be in possession of a minimal Russian vocabulary I immediately guessed A Clockwork Orange. Given the full question James Bown opened the account for the newbies, the RCA. Artists who have designed statuettes for the Brit Awards left me pointless – I haven’t been able to watch the Brits since they were presented by Mick Fleetwood and Samantha Fox. RCA managed 2. I’ll be honest, for the next starter I only got the connecting word Goblin through Christina Rossetti and Spider-man. Alex Hadyn-Williams did the same. This brought a set of bonuses on plays of Tom Stoppard, and again, RCA took two of them. UCL took their first points with the next starter which gave several scientific uses of the word cone. Max Emmett took that one. I took my lap of honour while the going was good. We both managed two correct answers on the anatomy of the ear. I didn’t recognise the badge of Staffordshire County Cricket Club, while James Bown did, and they went on to identify one other member of the former Minor Counties. Coirle Magee knew the Sixth Generation film movement from China for the next starter. The title figures of operas by Thea Musgrave brought a full house to UCL. The score at the ten minute mark was 55-45 to RCA, which seemed to make light of my fears for them. I always feel that specialist institutions, such as RCA, are in danger of not having the coverage across a broad range of subjects, that other institutions do. Having four team members all studying writing seemed likely to put them at a disadvantage in the Sciences. Time would tell.

Alex Hadyn-Williams recognised references to Rachael Whiteread for the next starter. Bonuses on the Bible and the scientific method – strange bedfellows, I would have thought – brought one correct answer. Max Emmett came in early for the next starter on Thomas More – why were they all Thomases in Henry VIIIs reign? You’ve got yer More, your Wlsey, your Cromwell and your Cranmer. They were all Francises by the time of Elizabeth I’s. The famous midfield trio of Drake, Bacon and Walsingham. The Polish National Film School brought one bonus. UCL captain Eva West knew the term plexus for the next starter. Indian sweets brought two bonuses that put UCL into the lead for the first time. Max Emmett recognised the intro to Soft Cell’s cover version of Tainted Love – lovely little bit of early 80s, that – and for the bonuses that all sampled wee bits of Northern soul tracks, UCL proved that they know as little about it as I do as the only one we could manage was Fatboy Slim. Alex Hadyn-Williams correctly guessed that it was Thomas Paine’s remains alluded to in the next starter.(see below) Terms in Physics that share part of their names with animals showed that my fears for RCA were not that ill-founded. Blank looks and a failure to add to the score followed. Alan Hughes recognised various dromes – hippo- syn- and velo unless I’m much mistaken – for the next starter. This took UCL into triple figures which they compounded with a full house on actresses in history. Eva West knew that Jericho was the first city attacked by the Israelites under Joshua. Literary works with corvids in their titles brought another full house, which meant that they led comfortably by 140 – 85 at the 20 minute mark. The match had been competitive so far but that 50 point spurt in the last 2 minutes looked decisive.

Nobody recognised the usually unmistakeable colours of Gauguin for the second picture starter. Likewise nobody knew the author Henry Miller – dirty boy. Position created by Charles II gave me Astronomer Royal, and Eva West thought so too, given a little more of the question. More paintings with geese in them for the picture bonuses brought a correct answer.  Max Emmett recognised a description of Stockholm for the next starter. Learning Spanish saw me get a few answers because of the grounding in Latin grammar given to me in Elthorne High School by good old Mr. Rose in the late 70s. Thanks Lionel. The term hyperpop, in the words of Ultravox, means nothing to me but Alan Hughes knew it for the next starter. The play Woyzeck and its adaptations seemed to have the same effect on UCL and they failed to score. Max Emmett knew that the word Alligator derives from Spanish for lizard for the next starter. There was a reprise of Ultravox’s Vienna for me when the term ‘hauntology’ was introduced as the theme of the bonuses. However, I did remember how Derrida has been a UC staple over the years and he brought me a bonus. I’m a little bit surprised that, with at least one Welsh team contestant nobody knew Hafren means the River Severn in Welsh but there you go. Alex Hadyn-Williams recognised biographers of Stalin for the next. They got Science bonuses for their pains, the number of hydrogen atoms in a molecule of blahblahblahrium etc. They got more than I did with a correct guess. Jack Merriman knew the next starter about a lockdown performance of Hamlet. World events and British monarchs brought 2 bonuses. The contest was gonged while Amol was asking the next starter. UCL won comfortably by 210 to 115.

I’m glad that RCA reached triple figures. Their BCR of 42.8% would probably have been a bit higher if they hadn’t had those Science bonuses. Without a scientist somewhere in your team you are always at a disadvantage. UCL achieved 60.6%, and look to be a pretty useful outfit, as you’d expect from UCL.

Amol Watch

Maybe it was me but I did think Amol’s incredulity at UCL’s answer of Salt N Pepa to the second music bonus to be a little bit feigned. We know you are ‘down with da kids’ Amol, you don’t need to labour the point.

Interesting Fact That I Didn’t Already Know Of The Week

Thomas Paine’s remains’ (that sounds like the start of a nonsense poem.

Please don’t block my drains

With Thomas Paine’s remains)

whereabouts have been reported in places as far afield as Manchester, France and Australia.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

Penguin diagrams are a subtype of what family of diagrams that represent contributions to particle interaction probabilities in quantum field theory? This family of diagrams are named for the scientists who introduced them in 1948. Dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum.

Mastermind 2027 - First Round Heat 8

Back home from Helsinki, peeps and there’s catching up to be done. So let’s begin with last Monday’s 8^th heat of Mastermind.

First up was Taz Modi who was answering on musician Neil Young. More than a few times during this series so far I’ve watched rounds where I’ve thought that the contender is very good on specific areas of their subject, but then they get asked about things which they’re far less secure on. This seemed to happen to Taz a few times during the round. Oh, don’t get me wrong, 7 is perfectly respectable in this day and age but it’s not the definitive marker that you really want to be laying down in the first round.

Charlotte Long was answering on golfer supreme Rory McIlroy. Answering well, too. For most of the round this looked like it was going to be a really sterling double figure round. A couple of questions did trip her up a little on the way to the tape though and Charlotte levelled out to finish with a good 9 points. I didn’t answer any fewer questions than in the first round, but that’s not a consolation considering that I didn’t answer any in either round. Were we potentially looking at a zero aggregate for me on specialist?

No. Lauren Church gave us a round on US astronaut Sally Ride. While I don’t claim to know much about her life or career, I do know enough about US manned space programmes to be able to pick up a few pieces of low hanging fruit. With her score of 4 by the end of the round, it did look as if there were gaps in Lauren’s knowledge, but I can’t help feeling that she seemed to be affected by nerves as well. After all, I’ve no doubt she would have known Edwards Air Force base in California. I’ll say a bit more about nerves when we get to the GK.

Finally then Gustav Ader. His subject was British Brutalist Architecture. Now I don’t instinctively hate ALL British brutalist architecture. But I do hate a lot of it. The second question concerned Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, and I hate that building, an ugly duckling that has always remained ugly for sure. But leaving aside my own personal feelings, it’s an interesting subject and it brought me 5 points to push my aggregate for the Specialist to 8 points. Gustav did better but with 7 points he too looked as if he’s left a few points behind that he might have managed to get.

So to the General Knowledge. I mentioned about Lauren Church seeming to be a bit nervous in the first round. Well, there were definitely times during her GK round when you could almost see her desperately trying to push the right answer just a little further off the tip of her tongue yet not quite managing it. Who knows, maybe the first round was playing on her mind. She at least finished with a double figure aggregate, scoring 6 to give her an overall total of 10.

Taz Modi delivered a double figure round on GK. He remained calm throughout the round and accumulated points steadily, not rushing in to give a wrong answer quickly where a second’s thought might have produced a correct answer. As a result he pushed through to 11 points. Yes, we’ve seen better GK rounds this series, but only a couple of them, and with the way things have been going you fancied that this might well be a winning performance.

Within the first minute or so of Gustav’s round you couldn’t help feeling that he wasn’t going to match Taz. He too was not answering very quickly, however he wasn’t answering as well as Taz. It was an okay GK round from someone who you’d guess isn’t a quizzer. I’ll say a little bit more about that generally shortly. Gustav scored 7 to take his total to 14.

Finally Charlotte. Essentially she needed a round of 9 points and no passes to win. Basically, a good general knowledge performance. You don’t have to be a quizzer to have a good GK performance, but you do need a cool head, an ability to guess and above all else, just a little bit of luck with the questions you’re asked. At times it looked as if Charlotte had the first two requisites but not the third, as the clock ticked down. In the end she was close but the cigar remained unawarded, for she scored 8 to finish with 17 and no passes.

Well done Taz! With a good GK round many a tricky position at half time can be rescued, and if you can really nail down your specialist for the semi than you are going to be in with a shout. I wish you good luck.

Once again, as seems to have been the case for so much of this series and the previous we’ve seen contenders whose intelligence I have no doubt of, but who are not quizzers. Basically, when you’re a quizzer of a certain standard yourself, there are certain questions that contenders get asked during GK rounds where you think – if you were a quizzer you would have heard that question so often that you’d never get it wrong. And they get it wrong because they haven’t heard it before. Now, I know that it has always been the case that the non-quizzers greatly outnumber the quizzers among the contenders on Mastermind. But there just seem to be so few coming through on the show now who have a good quizzer’s general knowledge. Is it just that quizzers aren’t applying in decent numbers any more? Or is it that, for whatever reason, they’re just not getting through the applications process? I don’t have an answer, but it’s a question that could be asked, certainly.

The Details

Taz Modi	Neil Young	7	1	11	0	18	1
Charlotte Long	Rory McIlroy	9	0	8	0	17	0
Lauren Church	Sally Ride	6	2	4	2	10	4
Gustav Ader	British Brutalist Architecture	7	3	7	3	14	6

Rumours about The Chase Around the World

There was a report in one of the torchons this week that The Chase Around The World will not be commissioned for a second series. In the same article it did say that ITV had neither confirmed nor denied this – well, I have no idea if there is any more substance to it than a rumour. I hope not. As I’ve said consistently I really enjoyed the series. There’s still a lot of water left to flow under our bridge before the awards season comes round, but if it makes a strong bid for this year’s LAMMY I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised.

Mastermind Preview

I won’t actually be in the country for tomorrow night’s Mastermind, peeps. Yes, the English Fool is heading off Abroad with his sketchbook again, this time to Helsinki. Still, I haven’t gone yet so I thought we might at least cast a glance over tomorrow night’s subjects – I will catch up with the show next weekend when I’m back.

The specialist subjects are :-

Neil Young

Major-winning golfer Rory McIlroy

American Astronaut Sally Ride

British brutalist Architecture

Interesting subjects. Sally Ride is of course the only one to feature in the lyrics of Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire. I reckon I might get one or two on all of these subjects. I have to say that the last one, British brutalist architecture is a particular hate of mine. Be fair, I was born in the 60s and grew up in London in the 70s and we had more than our fair share of these eyesores. I mean, I am not a fully paid up member of the all-buildings-should-have-columns brigade and I accept that there was a need to put up cheap mass housing in our cities after the devastation of World War 2. But did they have to make them quite so pug-ugly? Alright, I know, it’s not everything that was built between the 40s and 70s – just too much of it.

See you next weekend.

A Case of the Pot and the Kettle

It was my turn to be question master in the club last Thursday. It has been an incredibly stressful week – I won’t go into details – and I did consider whether I needed to cry off. I had several offers to do the quiz for me under the circumstances. But I made the decision to do it.

31 years ago I introduced the concept of the connections question to the quiz, having stolen the idea from an open quiz I’d attended in Neath. I tend to use them whenever I do a quiz at the Rugby Club – between 3 and five seemingly unconnected questions in a round, and the teams have to decide what connects the answers. Now in the last round I always do a nine part connection. When I was making the quiz, I found that the lyrics of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” are a treasure trove of question sources. So much so that not only did I use them in a nine part connection for the last round but I also used them for a nine part connection for round four, the last before the half time break.

Now, as the papers were being handed back after the last round, one of the players made quite an audible comment that this was an unfair connection. Now, in one way, I can kind of see where he was coming from. After all, if nobody in your team knew the song very well, then not only were you going to be unable to answer one connection, you were going to be unable to answer two. But I couldn’t take the criticism quite as philosophically as that because of the person making the criticism. It was none other than Captain Slapdash. I called out to him that I felt that this was a case of the pot calling the kettle black and left it at that.

You see, the good Captain will persist in using his own connections questions. And the problem is that although capable of coming up with the occasional connection so good that I wish that I’d come up with it myself, his general slapdashery means that a lot of his connections are pretty poor, and for want of a better word – cheats. I’ll try my best to explain that.

I don’t know if everybody works this way, but the way I do it is to come up with what I think is a good idea for a connection. Then I have to find, or improvise questions that have answers that fit the connection. If I cannot quite make at least three that perfectly fit the connection, then I bin it. The captain doesn’t work like that. So many of his connections use answers that might be close to the connection, but don’t actually work. For example, the Captain often uses connections of US state Capitals. One time one of the questions leading there was – which actress won the Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Queen? Who of course was HELEN Mirren. Well, Captain, there ain’t no US Capital called Helen. Or Mirren for that matter. Well, as far as the Captain was concerned Helen is close enough to HELENA, and what the hell, he couldn’t be arsed to create a question about, say, Helena Bonham Carter , which actually would have worked. Or the time that he got mixed up between Thomas the Tank Engine and Ivor the Engine that I’ve written about several times before. I mean I do feel that if you've made a quiz at the club you have more right to criticise than someone who has never tried, so I give the Captain that much, but it just rankled with me that someone who has perpetrated more bad connection sets at the club than the rest of us put together would criticise mine. 

So hopefully you can understand why I was feeling a little prickly about someone with his track record criticising my connections. Never mind.