Mastermind 2023 - Heat 1

Welcome back Mastermind – I’ve missed you. It was  nice to hear Clive pointing out that the show has now been going for fifty years – I suppose an hour long celebration of the show a la University Challenge was out of the question. Not out of the question is the possibility that there will be tears before bedtime over this first heat. I’ll come to that.

Kicking off the series was Ruth Gibbons. Ruth was answering on Francisco de Goya. Well, a few years ago I did visit the Prado in Madrid and enjoyed it very much too. It did not, on the other hand, prepare me to pick up more than the two points I managed. Now, Ruth put in a practically perfect round which saw her answer every question correctly for 13 points. Brilliant performance.

Ruth was followed by Ben Spicer. Ben was answering on popular television drama series ‘Peaky Blinders’. I cannot claim to have ever watched this series, so I couldn’t really complain when I managed to guess a couple of the most obvious ones. And they were far from obvious, some of them and required a really deep knowledge of the events of the series. Ben, like Ruth before him, had a perfect round, however he scored 15 points. Was he really 2 points faster than Ruth? He must have been, because I know that the team take great care to ensure parity in the length of the rounds. But there’ll be controversy over this I dare say.

Follow that, as they say. Well, Alexia Jarvis had a very good go at it. She was answering on Team GB in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which made her a lady after my own heart. No, she didn’t quite get our third perfect round in a row, but it wasn’t far off. She was equal to what proved to be a very wide-ranging set of questions, and again must have been that tiny but faster than Ruth, since she too scored 13.

Last but not least, Davey Jarrett was answering on a good old Mastermind stager, the Philip Marlowe novels of Raymond Chandler. I’ve never read any – nor watched any film adaptations for that matter, so I didn’t add to the 10 points that I’d already scored in the other specialists. So no, I can’t really comment on the set – but what I can say with confidence is that we saw our fourth excellent row in a round. However, Davey didn’t have a perfect round, yet still finished with fourteen, one more than Ruth who actually did have a perfect round.

Well, leaving aside the controversy over that, congratulations to all four contenders. Excellent preparation, which is something I love to see.

With only 2 points separating all four contenders, and none of them having incurred any passes, all of them could win. Now, I don’t ever recall a contender who scored a perfect round being in (joint) last place at the turn round before, but it had happened, and this was what brought Ruth Gibbons back to the chair first. And for over a minute and a half she was racking up the kind of GK score I thought would probably see her take the win. But then that last minute or so just saw her catching a few crabs. Not too many though. Her 13 for a total of 26 looked good, although she did incur 2 passes, which rang a few alarm bells in my mind.

Alexia Jarvis’ round was more like a mirror image of Ruth’s. For the first more than a minute she was behind the clock. Then she began to pick up momentum, and it was starting to look far closer. She’d scored 25 and 1 pass as the warbler heralded the end of the round. However, Clive had started asking the last question. She couldn’t answer the question though and languished a point off the lead.

Davey Jarrett never quite convinced with his round. He didn’t do badly, but his score of 9 left him a little way off the lead at 23. Although he can take solace from the fact that in a weaker heat than this it might well have been enough to bring him a win.

Which only left Ben Spicer. Putting this in perspective, Ben needed 11 and no more than 1 pass for an outright win, 11 and 2 passes to earn a tie break, and anything less wouldn’t be enough. I think it’s fair to say that he struggled more through his round than Ruth had, and at one point he seemed to become so bogged down that I thought that he mightn’t do it. Like Alexia he was a point adrift as Clive started the last question. He thought for a moment, and unlike Alexia, he got it right. Crucially, he had only incurred a single pass.

Such small margins are the difference between victory and defeat. Congratulations to you sir! Let’s also spare a thought for Ruth Gibbon, who scored a perfect specialist, and produced the highest GK round of the night, yet still lost. It’s very harsh, and the sort of thing that the repechage slots used to take care of (hint hint).

The Details

Ruth Gibbons	Francisco de Goya	13	0	13	2	26	2
Ben Spicer	Peaky Blinders	15	0	11	1	26	1
Alexia Jarvis	Team GB in the 2020 Sumer Olympics	13	0	12	1	25	1
Davey Jarrett	The Philip Marlowe Novels of Raymond Chandler	14	0	9	0	23	0