Round Up

I’m sorry if you’ve been missing the reviews and features on LAM. Come to think of it, I’m even sorrier if you haven’t been missing them, but then that’s my problem and I’ll just have to get on with it.

To begin with, apologies to Mark Eves. I may be wrong, but I think that Mark’s winning performance in the first heat of this year’s Mastermind is the first regular Mastermind show that I haven’t reviewed on LAM since my own grand final in the 2007 SOBM. If you didn’t see it, well, it was a hell of a heat with which to kick off the series. To give you an idea, Mark Eves, the heat winner, was last seen in Mastermind in the 2006 Grand Final. His main opposition came from our own Gareth Kingston, whose score of 28 would, I am quite sure, have been enough to win many another heat of this series. Without wanting in any way to jinx Gareth, it really has a very good chance of being enough to see him through to a place in the semis as well. My initial impressions, which seem to be borne out by the specialist scores, are that the specialist questions at least seem to be a little more succinct than last year’s, which would certainly be a change for the better. Time will tell, and I await this week’s show with interest.

Congratulations to the Scotland team who won this year’s series of Round Britain Quiz. Congratulations also to our own Stephen Fellows, and everybody else involved in setting questions and putting together this highly enjoyable series.

My apologies to Ted Loveday, Michael Taylor, Anthony Martinelli, and Jeremy Warner of Gonville and Caius, that I was unable to review their magnificent 305 – 105 victory over St. Anne’s Oxford in University Challenge. My apologies too to the St. Anne’s team of Sam Zwolinski, Laura Ludtke, Edward Hicks and Rebecca McKavanagh. A review of last night’s show will follow asap.

Also apologies to everyone who follows the news questions. I freely confess that I have done no work on gathering news questions until this very morning – a fact which undoubtedly cost us points in Sunday and last night’s quizzes – although not fatally so in either. A new set of news questions should be coming your way by the weekend.

So finally, a big thank you all of you who offered best wishes, and were kind enough to enquire how the holiday was going. It was my first holiday away for two years, and I thoroughly enjoyed it (the second quiz notwithstanding). Normal service will now be resumed.