Mastermind : Round One: Heat Eleven

All four contenders on last night’s show came up clean on my contender database. Come to that they also came up clean on LAM, so any attempts to predict the result prior to the first rounds would have been rather futile. So let us, instead, start with Liz Macinally. Liz’s subject, Kathleen Ferrier, resonated with me for one reason. In Magnus Magnusson’s excellent history of the first 25 years of the show, “I’ve Started So I’ll Finish”, he explained how Paul Campion, having taken Kathleen Ferrier as a specialist subject, was contacted by the singer’s sister, and then went on to write a book about her. It would be nice to think that Liz had actually used Paul’s book in her preparation for her round, but that’s pure speculation on my part. As for her round, well I know very little about Kathleen Ferrier, I’m afraid, and so it looked a pretty good round to me. However, I did think that at 10 she might find herself just a few points adrift at half time. Ideally you need at least 12 in the current series to have a realistic chance in the GK round.

Lewis Newburn offered us The History of Everton Football Club. It was nice to see that the old chestnuts about Everton originally being called St. Domingo’s FC, and playing for a while at Anfield, were both asked. I wouldn’t have had many of the others. Once again, it was a pretty good round, but just one or two short of being what was needed for a realistic tilt at the win. Also, 11 would require an extremely good round on GK to get him up to the kind of score which would put him into contention for a repechage slot.

I haven’t read any of the Rivers of London Novels of Ben Aaronovitch, so I can’t really comment on the difficulty or otherwise of the questions. Like both of the previous contenders, Mike Wiles knew his stuff, and tried hard to avoid passing, only passing the once. Like Liz he finished with 10. So looking at the first three contenders it was fair to say that we’d had three contenders who had prepared well, and obviously knew their stuff, but none of them had done quite well enough to blow the opposition away yet.

The last contender, Mark Livesey, offered us another traditional Mastermind subject, “The Albigensian Crusade”. If your reaction to the title of the subject was gesundheit, well, this wsa the crusade ordered against the Cathars of southern France. Now, all three of the previous contenders had prepared well for their subjects. Mark Livesey, though, had prepared exceptionally well. This is not necessarily the kind of subject where you’d expect a contender to have a clear round, and yet that’s exactly what Mark managed to do – 14 from 14, in a textbook display of how to handle going last in the specialist round. A good three points ahead of Lewis in second, he was very much the favourite to go through now.

It was slightly ironic that having taken care to hardly pass in the first round, Liz, going first in the GK found herself falling into a pass spiral. Look, it can easily happen, and you just don’t know how you’re going to react until you sit in that chair. Especially if you haven’t decided on a tactic. Passing on what you don’t know is a valid tactic, but it’s also a dangerous one. Passes have a tendency to beget passes – instead of thinking for a moment the tendency is to say it again if the next answer doesn’t pop into your head immediately. So Liz managed 8 correct answers, but also accrued 8 passes, and ended with 18 – perfectly respectable, but not a winning score. Mike provided a real rarity with his round. He answered the first 5 questions on the bounce before getting one wrong, and was amassing what was looking like a useful score. Then he was asked the name of UKIP’s second MP, who lost his seat in the 2015 General Election, and answered Mark CARELESS, instead of Mark RECKLESS. He cracked up himself, and John Humphrys came close, and actually said after the round that he wished he could give a 50 point bonus. Quite. Thankfully it didn’t completely destroy Mike’s concentration, and he posted the final score of 12 for 22.

Lewis Newburn found his own GK round rather heavy going. As we often say, sometimes it’s just not your night, and when that happens there’s not a great deal that you can do about it. He finished with 18, the same as Liz. All of which meant that everything was down to Mark. The target was 9 for an outright win, or 8 and no more than 2 passes. That’s not a huge score, but it’s enough that you can’t take it too lightly. Apart from the unintentionally funny answer. Mark’s round was similar to Mike’s. He took a number of early answers, lost a couple in the middle, but kept his head, and kept answering what he knew. I’ve said it before, a GK round is a marathon, and not a sprint, and Mark still had plenty of puff left by the end of it. His 26 was clearly the best performance of the week, and well worth the semi final slot. Well played.

The Details

Liz Macinally	Kathleen Ferrier	10	1	8	8	18	9
Lewis Newburn	History of Everton FC	11	1	7	6	18	7
Mike Wiles	The Rivers of London Novels of Ben Aaronovitch	10	1	12	2	22	3
Mark Livesey	The Albigensian Crusade	14	0	12	5	26	5