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.

University Challenge Round One - Guildhall School of Music and Drama v. Darwin, Cambridge

The Teams

The Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Sam Warburton

Jamie Harms

Tara Beavon (Capt.)

Dara Toal

Darwin, Cambridge

Ella Mason

David Lumsden

Rachel Gu (Capt.)

Macsen Brown

Well, good people, after the rather lacklustre Mastermind earlier yesterday evening it fell to University Challenge to provide us with a little quality and maybe a modicum of excitement.

The first question was a pretty topical one, which is surprising considering it was about a Victorian lady called Elizabeth Wardle. I knew she was the driving force behind the Victorian copy of the Bayeux Tapestry. It’s wonderful. All of the naked figures in the original have little shorts and proto bikinis – well, this was the Victorian Era. If you’re ever in Reading go to the museum and see it. Captain Tara Beavon came in very early for this one. Films of the actor Mia “Who?” Goth brought one bonus. When Amol said in the next starter that the creature he wanted can grow up to 2 feet long and is harmless to humans I guessed a snake of some sort and was right, but neither tea, picked up on the clues. Daniel Lumsden opened his team’s account knowing some ancient names for the Caspian Sea. Pairs of words differing only by the replacement of an initial C with a K proved a nice UC special set though it yielded just one correct answer. Rather embarrassingly Guildhall lost five on a music question, allowing Ella Mason in with Alberti Bass, who played Bootsie in the Army Game (ask your great grandparents). Scientific words beginning with the prefix helio – brought Darwin a full house. I as happy to take an early lap of honour for knowing the last two. For the picture starter, I recognized the flag of the Isle of Wight immediately, having a patch of the very same in my collection of patches from places I’ve visited. Macsen Brown – who had introduced himself by saying Hi in Welsh despite coming from Kilburn – was first to win the buzzer race. More flags of islands around the UK brought a good couple of bonuses. Both teams rather sat on their buzzers with the next starter, eventually allowing Daniel Lumsden to take a leisurely buzz and identify the US State of Virginia. 2 bonuses on volcanoes completed a very effective first ten minutes for Darwin and they led 80- 10.

Sam Warburton struck back for Guildhall, recognizing several definitions of the word lobe. 1 bonus was taken from a gettable set on Michelangelo. They could have had another but said the Greek name, Dionysus instead of the roman one, Bacchus, God of Wine, whose brother Tobacchus was the God of Nicotine. (RIP John Browning.) Tara Beavon was the winner of the buzzer race to identify Figaro, from two operas based on a song by the Brotherhood of Man. One bonus on Stockholm was taken. So to the music starter. Nobody recognized a wee bit of Mahler. For the next starter I had eyepatch from Snake Plissken, while Macsen Brown had it after Danger Mouse. More classical pieces dedicated to drinking and alcohol did not, sadly, include J.S. Bach’s “Buy us a pint or I’ll kick yer arse”, and brought one bonus, Darwin missing out on Beethoven and Carl ‘Sod’ Orff. The old quiz chestnut about Percy Spencer’s invention of the microwave oven fell to Sam Warburton. Biographical films about the lives of scientists brought another single bonus. Jamie Harms knew that the R in several abbreviations stood for rights. Granta’s first list of best young novelists from 1983 brought them, well, another single bonus. Still, at least Guildhall were having a bit of a purple patch with the buzzer and Jamie Harms knew that it was Hector whose wife was Andromache. Bonuses on trip-hop (no, me neither) , well, somewhat inevitably they got just the one. Going into the second picture starter on 20 minutes the score stood at 95 – 85 to Darwin.

Sam Warburton won the buzzer race to identify a photo of a swift. Other birds with long migrations at last provided Guildhall with a full house and the lead. Ella Mason knew that the smallest sword used in fencing is a foil. One bonus on early Christian imagery levelled the scores with only 6 minutes to go. Macsen Brown won the buzzer race to identify Orion from Rigel and Betelgeuse. Equations in biology brought two bonuses, and only a slip of the tongue prevented a Darwin full house. Tara Beavon knew the game Cyberpunk for the next starter. The three bonuses were all connected with the word strawberry. They took one, ignoring the time honoured axiom that if it’s an old Swedish film, then the answer is often Ingmar Bergman. I did not know that sarcasm comes from the Greek for flesh tearing, but worked it out from sarcophagus – flesh eater. Nobody had it. Jamie Harms identified the pectoral muscles for the next starter. German prepositions brought them two bonuses and late in the game either team could win, and both could get a repechage score. Macsen Brown recognized a list of people who have all appeared on £10 notes. Poets writing about poetry brought 1 bonus. Ella Mason recognized various types of root for the next starter pushing Darwin back in front. Universities named after people gave them a 20 point lead. It looked as if Guildhall had to get the next starter. Dara Toal got it for them too, recognizing applications of the word screen. They didn’t have enough time to get any bonuses on adaptations to extreme cold, though. Darwin won by 165 to 155.

Guildhall had a BCR of just under 43%, while Darwin’s was 55.5% and so even though Guildhall got more starters, the bonuses won the game for them. As for Guildhall, well, I rather hope that they will make it to the repechage.

Amol Watch

Do you care that Amol was born in 1983? No, me neither. He does like his little autobiographical asides does our Amol.

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

The Adelie penguin makes the longest migration of any flightless bird, at a staggering 8000 miles (and if I was walking 8 miles, let alone 8,000, let me tell you that I’d be staggering too.)

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

What biological concept whereby organisms appear to behave in a way that is harmful to themselves but beneficial to others, is rationalized by Hamilton’s rule? This formula takes into consideration the cost and the benefit of performing a certain action, as well as the genetic relatedness between the two individuals involved.

Altogether now – dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum.

Mastermind 2027 Heat 4

Well, there we are then. In the week that the Beeb announced that they will be putting Celebrity Mastermind out of our misery, how did the latest set of contenders do?

First to go was Ria Drabble . She was answering on British Birds of Prey. Now, in my better late than never preview I suggested that it was possible that I might get some points on each of tonight’s rounds, and in the first half dozen questions or so I raced away to 3 points. I didn’t get any more for the rest of the round, though. Ria too started well but struggled more as the round went on and it was only with a late rally that she managed to post a total of 5.

Josh Duckmanton was answering on my banker subject for the night, the Roger Moore era of James Bond films. He too started very well. Like Ria before him he suffered a mid-round wobble but managed to keep going and lift his score to a respectable 8. As for me, well I did do slightly better than I did on the birds of prey, levelling out at a further 4 points.

I can do nothing more than extend my sympathy to poor Gurdas Singh Sually. He had the horrible experience of pushing his score nicely along to 4 and then not answering another question correctly until the end of the round, which was more than a minute away. I’ll be honest, my three points all came from within the first few questions and I did not get any right after that. Which is not to say that I think that this was a rogue set of questions, but it does go to show what can happen in a specialist round, especially in a show where there seemed to be something in the air, like tonight’s show.

After the previous three specialist rounds you maybe wouldn’t have blamed Bryony Richards if she’d made a run for it at this stage, but she didn’t. Bryony was answering on Sylvia Plath. This was the round where I doubted if I was going to get any points, but I managed the one and that was enough to take me to an aggregate of 12. Bryony always seemed calm and self-possessed throughout the round, but she did not find it notably easier than the rest of tonight’s contenders. With 6 points she’d have been out of contention in the average show, but in terms of what was happening this did not appear to be an average show.

First back was Gurdas. I thought that his round was marginally tougher than the other GK rounds in tonight’s show, and it’s fair to say that it turned out to be a bit of a grim old struggle. He scored 6 for a total of 10. Chalk it up as one of those nights, sir, and put it behind you.

Ria, then, had an outside chance of taking an unlikely win if she could produce a really good general knowledge round. Well, it didn’t happen. To be fair, she scored 7, one more than Gurdas had managed, but in all honesty it wasn’t a great round. Well, Ria, it’s a story you can tell to the kids that you teach. Thank you for playing – we’d have no show if people weren’t prepared to give it a go.

Bryony, as I said, was in with a shout, despite her modest GK score. She adopted the tactic of trying to get through as many questions as possible by passing anything where an answer didn’t occur to her straightaway. And who is to say that the tactic didn’t work? She scored 9 to take her total to 15. Normally this would not be a winning total. Tonight though it looked as if anything could happen. The number of passes she had incurred looked worrying, though.

Josh, then, needed an achievable 8 points to win. I say achievable, but only Bryony had beaten it all evening. Josh had scored 8 on specialist. As with so many rounds this evening, the pace slowed, and Josh seemed to be wading through treacle in the last 30 seconds. He had 15, but the 16^th point to make it certain just would not come. In the end though, Bryony’s pass total was just too high, and Josh won. Well done, sir, and good luck in the semis

Alright then, let me tackle the elephant in the room. In terms of quality, that was not a very good heat. It’s difficult to guarantee that you’re not going to have 4 modest scores in the same heat – combinations of subjects can throw this up. It happens. It’s not the sort of thing you would want to watch every week, I know. But no contender deliberately achieves a modest score and as I said earlier, if we don’t have contenders willing to put themselves into the firring line, then we don’t have a show.

Ria Drabble	British Birds of Prey	5	3	7	4	12	7
Josh Duckmanton	James Bond: The Roger Moore Years	8	1	7	3	15	4
Gurdas Singh Sually	King Charles I	4	2	6	3	10	5
Bryony Richards	Sylvia Plath	6	2	9	5	15	7

 

Mastermind Heat 4 Specialist subject preview

Sorry I’m late guys. Still, with over an hour to go there’s just time for me to preview today’s specialist subjects.

We have:-

British Birds of Prey

Roger Moore’s tenure as James Bond

King Charles I

Sylvia Plath

If I can scrape a point out of Sylvia Plath I reckon there’s just a chance I might get points in all 4 of these rounds. The banker round? Well, I usually do okay on British Kings and Queens, but the Roger Moore years of James Bon look an even better bet for me. Now that I’ve said that I’ll probably score 0 on it.

Coming back to Sylvia Plath, I distinctly remember when I was studying English Literature over 40 years ago, whenever Ted Hughes’ name was mentioned a sizeable chorus would always pipe up “The wife-murderer!” Of course, Ted Hughes did not murder Sylvia Plath. They were separated when Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963.

And on that note . . .

A Purely Hypothetical Question

Allow me to ask a hypothetical question. Let’s suppose that there is a quiz (a hypothetical quiz) on a Thursday night (a hypothetical Thursday night) in a rugby club in Port Talbot (a hypothetical rugby club). Since the end of lockdown, the procedure at the (hypothetical) quiz has been that (hypothetical) movement will be limited by each (hypothetical) team marking their own (hypothetical) papers. Alright, so let’s take the hypothetical thing for granted, shall we? So we have one of the teams who have been stuck in the bottom half of the table for decades before covid, suddenly becoming the second best team after covid, whose scores are miles better than all of the others apart from the top team.

Okay. Now in our quiz, the organizer institutes a new procedure whereby every team swaps with a nearby team for marking in a clockwise direction. The first week that it’s trialled, the suspect team are absent. Then the next Thursday, they turn up. Let’s say that the question master is a hypothetical (sorry) me. I give out the answer sheets and scrap paper to the team. Not a word to discourage me from doing so. I give out the picture hand out sheets to the team. Not a word to discourage me from doing so. Then I announce that we’re going to be using the new marking procedure again and say which team is going to be switching with which. I deliberately do not look at them while I am doing this, so can’t be sure how they react.

I know how they react when I ask the teams to swap at the end of round one, though. ‘We’re not playing.’ they say. And they don’t.

Now, before I ask the question, I think you should be in possession of all the facts. The team normally consists of 4 or more players and there are only two there this night.

So let’s get to the hypothetical question. Bearing in mind the suspicions that have been felt about the team, what hypothetical conclusions would YOU have drawn about their decision not to participate last night?

I know what I think.

Rather unpleasant

Actually, speaking of Mastermind, I had rather an unpleasant experience on Sunday. My mother-in-law had a TIA, or mini-stroke. Before I go any further I should add that she seems okay and recovering well and is at home. That wasn’t just unpleasant, it was shocking.

The unpleasant thing was this. Mary and I were at a quiz. She was out in the afternoon with her friend Helen, and found that the pub/hotel they were in up the Afan Valley, the Afan Lodge, was holding a quiz later. I said I’d join them there for the quiz.

You may find this hard to believe but when I go to a new quiz in a new place I haven’t been before I never go boasting about having been on Mastermind, never mind having won it. Well, when I arrived on Sunday I soon discovered that Helen had been doing just this, broadcasting to all and sundry ‘Mary’s husband’s coming to the quiz and he won Mastermind!” So in part it’s her fault.

We had just completed two handout rounds and were halfway through the first round, on lateral thinking, when Mary received a phone call about her mum. We got up and rushed out, and as we were going the 20-something question master boomed out over the mic – “Mastermind’s going! The quiz is too hard for him!”

I had no time to stop and put him straight. Helen says that she ripped him a new cakehole, but then Helen says a lot of things, which was one of the causes in the first place.

But if by any chance you are the question master from the Afan Lodge last Sunday and reading this – well, now you know. We left for reasons which had nothing to do with your quiz – which to be honest had by that stage showed no signs of being anything to write home about.