I’m fine, there’s no need to worry, and you can tell the King to stop blubbing. Alright, I don’t actually know that His Majesty is a LAM reader, but I’d like to think so. I didn’t post last night after the show simply because I’d had a full day of teaching followed by a three hour Parents’ evening with appointments non stop from 3 until 6 pm. I was cream crackered.
Enough excuses then. Let’s begin with the observation that
for the third semi in a row we had another rather polarised lineup. No
aspersions meant towards any of the four worthy semi-finalists, but again, no
contestants from amongst the top half of my table of the first round scores.
Here’s how they did in their heats.
None of Alison Rose’s questions on the History of
Transportation to Australia concerned my several times great uncle Jabez
Rainbow. Not surprising really. For the record, once his sentence was up he
became a postman, and his descendants still live in Tasmania. I did not manage
to sneak any points in this round. How long do you think Transportation to
Australia actually went on? It’s funny – I knew when the First Fleet arrived in
1788, but I didn’t know it was still going on until 1868. Somehow I’d conceived
that it ended about 1850. Oh well. This was, I would think, one of those tricky
subjects where you don’t know how wide the parameters are going to be set by
the question setters. Under those circumstances I think that Alison did very
well indeed to get into double figures.
Sam Swift was answering on the TV series Parks and
Recreation. Once again, the questions were almost exclusively about details
from individual episodes. I mean, I can understand this, but surely they could
ask about 1 or 2 production details. I don’t know how many episodes there were,
but I believe that there were 7 series. That means a hell of a lot of time
needing to be spent watching through them all to try to glean the details, some
of which were I would have thought pretty obscure. Me? Although I have never
watched it, there was just one question about a song request at Halloween. I
threw in a guess of The Monster Mash and it was right. I don’t care where they
come from, if I’m right I’m having it.
So I’d reached my predicted target of 3 points on the
specialist aggregate with one contender to spare. As it worked out fourth
contender James Davidson was answering on my best subject of the night, Queen
Anne. I mean it wasn’t my best subject by much. I only answered 3 of them
correctly, and sitters all three were, too. Still an aggregate of 6 is twice my
target of three and I have to be satisfied with that. The target was 10 and
James’ round couldn’t quite match that score. Crucially though it was very
close, just one point less giving him 9. All to play for in the second half.
Sam came out and gave us a rousing double figure round on
General Knowledge. In fact it was something of a round of two halves. Hardly
anything passed him by at the start, but he slowed down from the middle, and
the wrong answers started cropping up. When this happens it is absolutely
crucial that you don’t dwell on what you’ve got wrong – I rather did in my own first
ever appearance in Geoff’s 2006 series. Concentrate on the next question and
try to get it right, then the next and the next. I think that Sam did this.
For all of that, though, 17 did not look like a winning
total. Next to go was James. He too put in a good shift at the quizface,
delivering a double figure round. He scored 11. Now, to put this in context
within this semi final, it didn’t look as if the kind of score that would
guarantee a win by blowing all other contenders out of the water. However
bearing in mind how well matched these contenders all seemed, it certainly
looked competitive.
Darren couldn’t beat it. His score of 8 reflected a
perfectly decent effort, but from about halfway through the round he did look
as if he was going to struggle to reach the target. Nothing to be ashamed of.
All four contenders are now Mastermind Semi-Finalists and I do know a few
people who would give a lot to be able to make that boast about themselves.
Only Alison remained. There was hardly anything to choose
between her own performance in the heat and James’ so it was difficult to
predict whether she was going to do it or not. From some of the answers that
Alison missed I got the impression that she is a bit of a casual quizzer at
best. Nothing wrong with that either. You can get a long way just by playing
the percentages and making your guesses to what you don’t know of the more
obvious variety. If it might be right, go for it. For me Alison didn’t quite
manage to do so enough in her round, and this is why she fell agonisingly one
point short, scoring 9 to finish with 19. Bad luck.
So James takes the third place in the semis. I enjoyed his piece to camera at the end, where he seemed genuinely surprised and delighted at getting to the final at his first attempt. If I could give a little piece of advice, it would be not to let reaching the final be the limit of your ambitions. I didn’t think I would win my final, and when I said as much to a friend, she replied ‘well, if that’s your attitude then you definitely won’t win.” So I took this to heart, and thought – well, look, I don’t THINK I’ll win, but I’m going to act as if I do think so, and I’m going to prepare as if I do think so. I suppose it was a little bit of kidology. So act as if you think you can win. You’ve nothing to lose by doing so.
The Details
|
Darren Ross |
The PDC World Darts
Championship |
10 |
0 |
8 |
1 |
18 |
1 |
|
Alison Rose |
The History of
Transportation to Australia |
10 |
0 |
9 |
0 |
19 |
0 |
|
Sam Swift |
Parks and Recreation |
7 |
0 |
10 |
1 |
17 |
1 |
|
James Davidson |
Queen Anne |
9 |
0 |
11 |
0 |
20 |
0 |
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