Saturday 23 March 2019

Mastermind 2019 - First round heat 21


Well, we’re coming towards the end of the first round, dearly beloved. It seems as if the contenders have been walking through the portal of portent for years now, but there we are, just a few more heats and then it’s the semis.

First to try to earn his place in aforementioned semis was Abhi Chatterjee. Abhi was answering on The Goons. Now, although I wouldn’t call myself an expert, or even a great fan, I do know a little bit about the Goons, and I managed to get 9 on this round. Yes, I was sitting on the Clark sofa, not in the studio. Still, when Abhi managed to get 7, you got the feeling that either nerves or some under-preparation had affected his performance, and it was likely that he was going to have some catching up to do after half time.

I had another good round on Kathy Bracy’s questions about the Trojan War. Greek mythology was my specialist subject in my first ever Mastermind competition (Elthorne High School Mastermind 1981 – won thanks very much) and I once rewrote the Iliad in double dactyl verse – don’t ask. So this time I took 10. However this was not as good as Kathy, who managed 12. Trust me, on those questions this was a fine performance and meant that she would certainly be in contention going into the GK.

My run of good rounds soon came to an end, though. I provide that I don’t know a great deal about the artist Egon Schiele. Sean Climo, though, proved that he knows a great deal indeed about him.  This was a terrific round, where Sean had obviously thoroughly prepared, and he made pretty short work of it. A score of 14 on GK in this day and age is a really terrific performance, and the way that he’d answered his questions made him a pretty safe bet for the Clark 50p.

Which wasn’t to dismiss the chances of Jeremy Baker. He was answering on the novels of Mary Wesley. Now, apart from having watched a couple of episodes of The Camomile Lawn back in the day – ah, Jennier Ehle – I am a stranger to the works, which I proved as the round progressed. Again, Jeremy obviously knew his stuff, but the round found out a few gaps in this knowledge. 9 is a perfectly respectable score, but it left him 5 points behind, and that’s the kind of gap which is very, very difficult to bridge.

So Abhi returned to the chair, then, probably knowing in his heart of hearts that the gap was too wide to have any realistic chance of winning. Sadly what followed was not a great GK round. The questions didn’t fall his way, and he joined the ranks of those who failed to score more than 6 in GK – and I don’t want to bang on about this but there have been far more contenders this series who have done so than there were in the previous. Hopefully the new production team will reverse this trend next year. Apart from any other consideration, it looked like quite a painful experience for Abhi, who shook his head in pain when John announced he had 6 passes.

Jeremy gave his own GK round a good old lash, and emerged with a fighting 12 points to take his score to 21. I did think that he’d started too far behind Sean to have a realistic chance, and I was sticking with that, but it was still a decent round, and gave him a score over 20. This was put into perspective by Kathy’s round which followed. Kathy had started with 12, 3 ahead of Jeremy, but she never looked convincing in her round. She came close to matching Jeremy’s total, but couldn’t answer the last question as the blue line of death completed its stranglehold of her score while it still languished on 20.

Yes, if I’m honest I did think it was all over bar the shouting as Sean took his seat in the chair, knowing that 8 would be enough to win outright. But then I’ve thought that before and been proven wrong. But no, Sean didn’t quite produce an outstanding round, but then he didn’t need to. He still produced the best GK round of the show, and added a good 13 to take his total to 27, which gave him a winning margin of 6 points. Very well done Sir, and you never know, he may just be one to watch in the semi finals.

The Details

Abhi Chatterjee
The Goons
7
5
5
6
12
11
Kathy Bracy
The Trojan War
12
0
8
4
20
4
Sean Climo
Life and work of Egon Schiele
14
0
13
1
27
1
Jeremy Baker
The Novels of Mary Wesley
9
2
12
2
21
4

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