Mastermind 2020 - First Round - Heat 9

Good morning, dearly beloved. Let’s begin with last night’s Mastermind, then, shall we? First into the chair was retired English teacher – and how I would love to be able to describe myself as such – William Donnelly. He was answering on the “Pax Britannica” trilogy. Never having read them, I thought that I was going to struggle on this. However, apart from one question which focussed on one volume’s subtitle, this didn’t prove to be much of an obstacle, since what followed was largely a round on the history of the British Empire. In fact, I rattled off 9 answers, the same score as William did. 9, as we’ve seen, is usually enough to keep you in contention going into GK.

I raised a speculative eyebrow when our next contender, Ash Cattell, announced that he was taking The Musical “Les Miserables” as his specialist. However that was totally unjustified on my part, since the setters had managed to produce an admirably diverse and testing round of questions on all aspects of the musical itself, its creation and productions. This highlighted just how good Ash’s round of 12 really was.

One of the problems with having to follow such a good round, is that if you don’t hit the heights yourself, then this is thrown into stark relief by what has gone before. Such was the fate that befell Melissa Bookbinder’s round on Anne Rice’s “Vampire Chronicles”. There is always a danger with taking a series of books that you greatly love, which I would guess is what Melissa did. You love the books, and you may well have read them many times. However, that does not mean that your memory will dredge up some of the minutiae when you need it, not unless you have really prepared for your round in a way which goes much deeper than just reading the books again. Poor Melissa’s round seemed to unravel after a couple of wrong answers, and in the end she finished with 6.

Our final contender, Steve McMillan looked somewhat familiar, yet came up clean on my database. He was answering on UK number 1 singles of the 1960s, another subject which should come with a government health warning. Producers, writers, record labels, backing musicians – you can be asked for so much more than just the name of the song or the name of the artist. Judging by the expression on his face, Steve was a little taken aback by a couple of the questions, and he too scored 6, and in all honesty seemed none too happy with his round as he returned to his chair.

So, contest effectively over by half time? Well, no, not necessarily. If you have serious ambitions at winning a particular Mastermind show, be it heat, semi final, or final, you should be fairly confident of defending a 3 point lead. However we’ve seen in this particular season that nothing can be taken for granted with GK. So it was still at least a two horse race, even if the two back markers looked well out of it.

Melissa Bookbinder, to be fair, made a decent fist of her round to add 8 to her score. Her total of 14 was never going to win this – or any – heat, but at least it did give her a few minutes in the lead. Now, in the comments over my review of last week’s show, having made the point that I felt that a lot of the GK rounds this season had been rather on the gentle side, I did say that while consistency between shows was not such a huge issue if there are no repechage slots, it was still of paramount importance to achieve consistency within a show. Well, I did think that Steve McMillan was given one of the tougher GK rounds we’ve seen this series. I say this because it’s relatively rare for me to have two consecutive questions wrong in a GK round, and it happened twice during Steve’s round. Scores only tell you so much – my average GK score for this show was noticeably lower than on any other heat this series, but on the sae hand you can only go as fast as the contenders go, and nobody was answering particularly quickly on this show. By the end of the round Steve, poor chap, looked as if he’d been beaten with a blunt instrument for two and a half minutes. His overall total was 9.

So then, it fell to William to take his 9 from the first round, and add as many points as possible to mean that Ash would be starting his round from as far into the corridor of doubt as possible. To be fair to him too, he did have the highest GK score of the night. Looking at it in a glass half empty stylee though, it wasn’t a double figure score. He started very well, although rather slowly, but the wrong answers began to build up, so that while it looked for the first minute as if he would end with a 20+ total, in the end he levelled out at a score of 9 to take the target to 18.

I don’t want to be harsh about Ash, who, alone out of all 4 contenders in last night’s show actually seemed to be enjoying himself, but faced with a target of 7 for an outright win he should have managed to achieve this. As he just managed to squeeze out a 6^th correct answer at the end of the round, he at least guaranteed himself a tie break.

I’d like to say that the rarely seen tie break did at least inject a little more excitement into the proceedings, however, having witnessed Ash’s previous 180 seconds of GK I think we probably all knew what the outcome would be.

Fair play to William, his responses to the 5 tie break questions at least showed a good range of knowledge – although he missed out on Denali/Mount McKinley, a good old quiz chestnut which has been doing the rounds for quite a while now.

The Details

William Donnelly	The Pax Britannica Trilogy	9	2	9	0	18	2	4
Ash Cattell	The Musical “Les Miserables”	12	0	6	2	18	2	1
Melissa Bookbinder	“The Vampire Chronicles” by Anne Rice	6	0	8	0	14	0	/
Steve McMillan	UK number 1 singles of the 1960s	6	0	3	1	9	1	/