Mastermind 2022: Round One: Heat Sixteen

Well, here it is, dearly beloved, the last Mastermind before Christmas. Which is some recompense for feeling like absolute poop again. No, it’s not covid again, but it feels like the flu. Ironic really since it’s not long since I had my flu jab. Oh well, enough of such things.

Dev Kumar Parmar kicked us off, answering on Eric Cantona. I picked off a couple, but I was just a little disappointed that there was no reference to possibly the greatest soundbite ever to fall from a French footballer named Cantona’s lips – seagulls following trawlers, etc. Mind you, a few old chestnuts were there. Dev knew his stuff, but just failed to push into double figures, ending with 9 and no passes.

Tonight’s was one of those shows when I knew just a tiny bit about each of the subjects. Second contender Daniele Gibney’s specialist was Charlie Booker’s inconsistent but always interesting anthology series ‘Black Mirror’. It’s worth going to Netflix and having a look at some of these to see what you think. Of course, Daniele has done considerably more than just taking a look at a few. Her knowledge of the show is comprehensive, and she laid down a marker with an impressive 11 and one pass.

If her score was impressive, though, Sarah Trevarthan’s score on Rocky Horror, both stage and film versions, was even more so. I do like to see contenders who have got their preparation pretty much absolutely right. It would have been so easy to have gone to town on the film version, and not so strongly on the early stage productions. The question setters put together a testing set, but they didn’t manage to expose any weakness of Sarah’s whatsoever. As we say in Port Talbot, da iawn.

This left Sean Smith to answer on one of my favourite 20^th century novelists, John Steinbeck. There’s been a couple of times during this series so far when contenders have been answering on novels, and something seems to have gone wrong with their preparation. I don’t know for certain what went wrong with Sean’s round, but judging from the questions about books by Steinbeck that I’ve read I’d venture to say that he didn’t know the novels as well as he thought he did. It’s a shame. He finished his round with 4 points.

Even more of a shame is the fact that Sean, first to return to the chair  was actually doing pretty well in his GK round, and heading for a good score in the low teens, when he was given three consecutive stinkers in a row – questions which I’d never heard before myself, didn’t know the answers to, and couldn’t guess. Once is not unusual, twice in a row is, and three times is very bad luck indeed. Nonetheless he did add 9 to his score to finish with 13.

If we’re talking about rounds which didn’t work out – alright, that’s what we’re talking about now – then I point you in the direction of Dev’s GK. He’s obviously a highly intelligent guy – he’s a lawyer for one thing – but this set of questions just seemed to unerringly hit his GK blind spots. If you quiz for long enough you’ll sooner or later experience a perfect storm of a set of questions like this, and it just didn’t work out for him. Dev finished with 14 overall.

Our first double figure GK round of the evening came from Daniele. Being two points behind Sarah while the halftime oranges were being passed round, there was everything to play for, especially if she could whack in a high enough title to place Sarah within the corridor of doubt. To be fair, she gave it a lash, setting the bar at 21. This meant that the least Sarah would need was 8 and 2 passes.

In the end, Sarah achieved this quite easily. In the same way that her specialist round was clearly the best of the evening, so was her GK. Not perfect mind you, but the way she kept firing out answers maintained a good momentum right up until the line of death had encircled the score, leaving her with an impressive 15 for 28. That’s a really good performance, and you never know, this may well be a contender to watch in the semis. Well done, and I wish you good luck in your semi final.

The Details

Dev Kumar Parmar	Eric Cantona	9	0	5	0	14	0
Daniele Gibney	Black Mirror	11	1	10	2	21	3
Sarah Trevarthen	Rocky Horror	13	0	15	0	28	0
Sean Smith	The Novels of John Steinbeck	4	0	9	2	13	2