Hello again, dearly beloved. Yes, I’m a day late again. Couldn’t be helped, I’m afraid. I’m back at school after the half term break, and that has to come first.
So, let’s begin with Julian Sutcliffe. Julian offered us a
round on the novels of Alan Hollingshurst. Now, I’ll be honest, the only one of
his oeuvre I know about is The Line of Beauty, since that was the answer to a
quiz chestnut which did the rounds for a few years after he won the Booker
Prize. Crucially, though, I haven’t read it. So when you get right down to it I
was lucky to get one point for guessing the Director of Public Prosecutions.
That having been said, it’s impossible for me to judge whether the majority of
the questions were hard, fair, or gentle, but Julian certainly produced a good
round, good enough to get him into double figures. With the current series it
seems that this is always going to be enough to keep you in contention at the
halfway mark.
‘Bodyline’ fast bowler Harold Larwood, which was the
specialist subject chosen by Gary McKenzie, is one of those subjects where I’m
never going to score a huge amount, but I always feel I have the chance of
getting one or two. Two in this case, the first of which came when Douglas
Jardine reared his controversial head. Like Julian’s round before him, Gary’s
wasn’t perfect, but it was still good, good enough to put him into double
figures. I’ll say more about that in a moment.
I felt that my best chance of adding to my aggregate would
come with Krittika Bhattacharya’s subject, “The Vicar of Dibley”. I certainly
scored more on this round than the other three, but this still only added up to
4, which is hardly a hatful. Now in this case I do know the subject well enough
to confirm that this was a testing set of questions, and to get even close to
Krittika’s score of 11 you’d need to really know your subject. Good
performance.
I did wonder if Alison Jay’s subject, the Life and Work of
Edouard Manet, might offer me just enough to get my aggregate up into double
figures. In a word, nope. Two points left me high and dry with an aggregate of
9 on specialists. Alison didn’t ever quite look comfortable to me, but whatever
the case she managed a perfectly respectable 8. Which meant that once again we
had a show where the last placed contender was close to the leading contender,
and everything would come down to GK.
Maybe it was me being grumpy, since I haven’t quite managed
to shift the chest infection that has been bothering me for the last couple of
weeks (not Covid – in that period I’ve done 5 lateral flows and 2 drive in
tests, and they’ve all been negative) , but with one exception I didn’t feel
that the GK rounds were all that great this week. Alison was first to return to
the chair, and she posted 8. Which, as I said about the specialist rounds, is a
perfectly respectable score. However, it’s just not what you want when the
leader has a three point head start.
Julian returned next, and he too achieved respectability with
7. This was enough to put him into a temporary lead – well done! However, it looked
like it was only going to be temporary. It’s a bit of a quandary for most
contenders, I would think. You know that you have to do well on your specialist
and need to spend as much time as you can on preparing for it. However, the
fact is that however well you do on your specialist subject, the chances are
that at least one person in your heat is going to have a good GK round, and if
yours isn’t then you risk all of the good work on specialist being undone. Yet
it’s difficult to prepare for GK, far more difficult than preparing a
specialist. I personally never prepared for GK for my first round or semi in
2007. I did prepare for the GK in the final, by taking my weakest general
areas, and rather than trying to become expert in a short space of time, just
trying to make sure that I wouldn’t drop points on anything simple. I might
post about the whole of idea of preparing for GK in the next few days. In the
meantime, though, let’s get back to last night’s show.
I did imply that one of last night’s GK rounds was pretty
good last night, and this was Alan McKenzie’s. It wasn’t perfect – they very
rarely are – but it was good, and his score of 12 pushed the target up to 22.
Except that it didn’t. For Gary had chieved this without incurring any passes,
while the half time leader, Krittika, had already passed once. This meant that
she actually needed 23 to win, so had to equal Alan’s score of 12. Well, it
looked as if this wasn’t going to happen from as early as the 1 minute mark,
and in the end she scored 7 to finish second with 18.
Well done Gary – best of luck in the semi finals.
The Details
|
Julian Sutcliffe |
The Novels of Alan Hollinghurst |
10 |
1 |
7 |
3 |
17 |
4 |
|
Gary McKenzie |
Harold Larwood |
10 |
0 |
12 |
0 |
22 |
0 |
|
Krittika Bhattacharya |
The Vicar of Dibley |
11 |
1 |
7 |
2 |
18 |
3 |
|
Alison Jay |
The Life and Work of Edouard Manet |
8 |
0 |
8 |
0 |
16 |
0 |
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