Mastermind - Heat Three

Heat 3

Yes, stop panicking at the back there – I did see last week’s Mastermind. However, I was in Spain at the time, and you can’t get the iplayer there. When I write the reviews I like to do it with the iplayer, so I can stop it, rewind if necessary, which makes it easier to keep track of scores, passes etc. Mind you, I still make mistakes, but I guarantee there’d be more of them if I was trying to do it in real time.

First up then was Gill Taylor,(not our own Gillian) offering us a real, Mastermind specialist subject old stylee – the Honey Bee and Bee Keeping. The only thing about a round like this is that I really have no way of knowing how easy, fair or obscure the questions are. Basically all I have to go on is the knowledge that if I get more than 1 or 2 of them right, then the round is probably too easy. At the distance of a week I can’t remember how many of this round I had. Gill, though had 12, not outstanding, but not out of contention at the turnaround.

This heat’s teacher Jim Goldstraw not only had to struggle with the curse of support from the Clark sofa (metaphorical as it was actually the Hancox armchair in Spain) he also had a very wide subject in the Royal Navy in the Second World War. I did rather better in this round, knowing obvious stuff like the Royal Oak being sunk in Scapa Flow, and only 3 members of the ship’s company surviving the sinking of HMS Hood. Did you know that the late great Jon Pertwee had been a member of the ship’s company until a very short time before this? Jim could maybe have gone a little more quickly – however, he could not have gone more accurately. 14 questions and 14 correct answers. A perfect return on his 2 minutes’ investment.

Follow that, as they say. Well, Gareth John made a pretty decent fist of his attempt. I proved to myself that I know absolutely nothing about Mark E. Smith and The Fall, having my first round without troubling the scorer. Gareth’s 12 looked perfectly competent, and as with Gill’s round, certainly put him in with a shout by the halfway stage.

Which left just Ed Kent to bring the SS round to its conclusion. He answered on John Le Carré’s Quest for Carla trilogy, of which I have neither read nor seen any. I venture to say that Ed’s round was perfectly satisfactory, but scoring 11 put him a point behind the joint seconds, and 3 points behind the leader. In a game where the pressure of sitting in the chair is pretty high anyway, it can be quite mental hurdle to overcome, even though a lead of 3 is by no means a winning lead necessarily at this stage of the game.

If you’ve read my first couple of reviews you’ll know that I think that the General Knowledge round so far this season have been  - right, it’s difficult to find the right word here. I don’t say that they have been easy. I don’t really want to say that they have been gentle either. But I do think that they have been the kind of rounds where there is little to trip up a good, regular, fairly serious quizzer. If this is the level of the whole of the first round – and it would not be fair were it not – then I think that if we get a good grand prix quizzer taking part we could see a quite exceptional GK score. As it was, Ed’s GK wasn’t at that level, but at least his 14 meant that all three contenders yet to come would at least have to negotiate the corridor of doubt.

Gill Taylor, for her part, did just that. Without necessarily being a great general knowledge quizzer, if you have a good general knowledge anyway, then you can amass a good score on these questions by just  keeping your head, not panicking when an answer doesn’t come straightaway, and not fretting about the answers you get wrong. That’s a pretty good description of the way that Gill took herself through the corridor of doubt and emerged the other side, to lead with 27. I must say that the Director decided to make what looked to me to be a rather mean cut to Ed’s face then as a moment of disappointment passed across his face when he realized his score had been beaten.

Both Gareth and Jim posted double figure scores, but in the current series if you don’t manage a score in the mid teens on GK, then chances are you’re going to be overhauled in this second round. Gareth kept ticking along, but never really quite looked as if he was up with the clock, and there was still some daylight between himself and the target when he breasted the tape. I don’t know if Jim struggled with nerves, having found himself in the lead after a brilliant SS round, then seen Gill set a high target. However, of all of the contenders he seemed the most nervous in the GK, and never really settled into his round. Make no mistake, a double figure score is nothing to be ashamed of, but he must have felt that the round was slipping away from him, and he too was 3 points adrift when the buzzer put him out of his discomfort.

Well played Gill – good luck in the semis.

As for heat 4  - well, I believe that Mastermind moves back to Friday this week.

 The Details

Gill Taylor	The Honey Bee and Bee Keeping	12	3	15	4	27	7
Jim Goldstraw	The Royal Navy in the Second World War	14	0	10	4	24	4
Gareth John	Mark E. Smith and the Fall	12	1	12	1	24	2
Ed Kent	John Le Carré’s Quest for Carla trilogy	11	0	14	1	25	1