Off piste on the Butter Mountain

You must forgive me for going off-piste again with this post. Blame it on me being piste off that there's no Mastermind tonight

In the building where I work there is a ban on putting used Dolce Gusto/Nespresso coffee pods in the bins. And the thing is that I do like a Dolce Gusto when I sit down at my desk in the morning to find out how many calls to the DAP have come in overnight. Normally the empties are taken and disposed of by one of my colleagues. However, she was on leave all last week and part of the previous so on Thursday I took a carrier bag into work in which to carry away the empties and dispose of them elsewhere.

Come the end of the day, as I was taking my empties-filled bag to my car, my boss asked me what I was going to do with them. To which I replied that my plan was to add them to the EU’s empty coffee pod mountain. At this point it’s probably a good idea to tell you that my manager is still in her mid 20s. She looked at me askance. “You know,” I continued, “like the EU butter mountain?” No, of course she didn’t know. Total incomprehension. For one thing, we haven’t even been part of the EU for a good few years (sadly in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.) For another thing, according to my perfunctory research there hasn’t even been an EU butter mountain since about 2017.

I mean, it’s not that I’m nostalgic about the European butter mountain, you understand. I’m only nostalgic about the mental picture it conjured up the first time that I heard the phrase. When I was a kid it conjured up images of various woolly hatted continental types skiing down an unusually yellow and slippery mountain somewhere outside Strasbourg. I suppose I felt it belonged in the same category as Max Boyce’s outside-half factory and Ken Dodd’s jam butty mines. Somehow I can’t see the Destination X team visiting any of those destinations. Well, not in the first series anyway.

It's sodding started early this year.

It’s sodding started, hasn’t it. Look, I get it that the ending of the England v. India 5^th test was a big sporting occasion. Not of that much interest to me if truth be told, but I get it. But come on, don’t take Mastermind off to make room for it. Or if it HAS to be one of the Quizzy Monday trio, then take it in turns. This time Only Connect, next time UC and then Mastermind after that. Not gonna happen. What makes it worse is that I didn’t know Mastermind had been taken off until I actually tuned in for it.

Destination X Review (Spoilers)

Should we talk about the BBC’s Destination X? Of course we should. But it’s not a quiz? So what, it’s my ball and we play by my rules.

Okay, so it’s been inaccurately described as The Traitors v. Race Around the World. I will come to what’s so inaccurate about this a bit later. Now, I love both of these shows and if you’re familiar with both of them you’ll be aware that these are very different shows. Now, the danger of trying of combine the appeal of two very different shows is that you end up falling between two stools and when you fall between two stools you often just fall.

To briefly summarise what the show seems to be about, 13 contestants met in what looked to be a very small and rather fake departure lounge in Baden Baden airport. This was narrowed down to 10 contestants, who were helicoptered away to where 2 buses with windows (temporarily) blacked out– one for the day and one for the night awaited. On each show they were taken to a well-known European destination. On the way there were stops for clues. At the climax of each show, each remaining contestant had to put their x on a high-tech interactive map to mark where they believed they were. The one who was furthest away was unceremoniously ejected.

Does that sound in any way similar to The Traitors to you? There’s no voting, for one thing. Yes, the contestants don’t all get all of the clues, and so they can be sneaky about what they reveal to each other, but it’s all very tame considering how much the promotion for the show has been pushing this angle. As for Race Around the World? Well, both shows see people travelling a lot. That’s about it. In Race Around the World we do at least get a glimpse of the life and culture of the places being visited. There are chances for us to vicariously stop and smell the roses a little. Alright, to be fair we did get to see a little more scenery in episode 2, but there’s only so much they can show you without losing the play along at homeability. And in Race Around the World, an integral factor is players negotiating hurdles with transport. In Destination X, the transport is all laid on.

So, if you choose to watch because you’ve bought the hype about its similarity to those shows you may well be disappointed. Watch it with an open mind and judge it on its own merits and you may find, as I did, that you give it a cautious approval. The first two episodes did enough to make we want to watch episode 3 this coming week. You know me, I’m a bit of a misanthrope but for all that I do find some of the personalities on board to be quite interesting. Having said that, I could do without Nick – the one who has run a marathon in every country on Earth – continually being dragged into the diary room to tell us he is prepared to be ruthless when it is necessary.  Rob Brydon is a good old Baglan (area of Port Talbot) boy, so he will get no criticism from me and he does the job of presenting the show perfectly well. I think he realises that this is not The Rob Brydon show and that a relatively understated approach works.

It all comes down to the game play, though, and I felt that episode 2 did this better than episode 1. The destination of Episode 1 was Paris. I was pretty much certain it would be so after Mr. Brydon said that the destination was one of the first cities in Europe to be electrically lit. Then he gave us a list of European cities with copies of the Statue of Liberty and didn’t mention Paris. Admittedly there was a strange interlude in Alsace Lorraine, where, amongst some red herrings the contestants were given some clues that belonged in Sybil Fawlty’s Mastermind round on the Bleedin’ Obvious while others would not have been out of place amongst the prize clues in 3-2-1 (ask your grandparents).

I enjoyed the second episode more especially the set piece where the contestants were separated into two teams, put in cable cars which stopped at the same point, high above the ground, and then told to carry out activities to earn a clue. That was fun. Mind you, the big clue that the winning team earned couldn’t have made it a lot more obvious that we were going to the Matterhorn. I mean, it wasn’t quite the full Alpen box, but even so. Mind you, only Marathon Nick seemed to understand it.

Well, as I said there was enough to make me want to give it another go for episode 3. I have to say, though, normally when I like a reality game show, I’d like to play in it myself. In the last 9 years or so I’ve visited over 20 European countries. I love travel, and the idea of travelling all around Europe – and never seeing hardly ANY of it! – is something which just seems wrong.

Mastermind Heat Four subjects

Good morning all. I’ve just had a glance at tomorrow night’s specialist subjects on the Mastermind website. They are – the playing career of Sunil Gavaskar, The Hunger Games, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and Edvard Munch. I’ll be honest, it’s a case of - pools dividend forecast poor - for me. Cricket is not my favourite sport (unlike several relatives. Both my first cousin and my daughter’s soon to be father-in-law work in cricket in the South East.) I’ve only seen the first film of The Hunger Games series and never read any of the books. I know very little about Leonard Bernstein and as regards Edvard Munch, I’ve seen one version of the Scream in Oslo, but that’s about the length of it. I hope there will be some pieces of low hanging fruit in at least a couple of these rounds, because if I get any points, that will be where they’re most likely to come from.

We got a lot of points in Thursday night’s quiz, but typically it was one of the points we didn’t get that I remember most. Thursday night’s question master, whom I like a great deal as a person, is the same one who has been nicknamed Captain Slapdash by my team. It’s a nickname he’s earned, I’m afraid, by giving some answers that he could have found were just plain wrong by the simplest google search. Well, he was going great guns on Thursday until we got to round 7 out of 8. “Sport.” He announced. “Who was the only British swimmer to win a gold medal in the 1980 Summer Olympics, and you can have a bonus if you give me the event.” – Easy – said I – Duncan Goodhew, 100m breaststroke.- The answer the Captain gave ? Sharron Davies – 400m individual medley.- I couldn’t stop myself from protesting but it did no good.

Being the kind of person I am I thought – well, Duncan definitely won gold, and Sharron definitely got silver on the podium, but in light of revelations about the East German doping programme, and Gold medal recipient Petra Schneider’s subsequent admission that she was doped, has Sharron Davies, I wondered – been retrospectively awarded gold? Apparently not, which is a bit of a scandal if you want my opinion. It’s not even as if she was the only silver, either. Phil Hubble – who I think was swimming for Hounslow at the time - won silver in the 200m butterfly.

Is it some comfort that at least the East German cheating was eventually revealed to the world, even though Sharron Davies has yet to receive the gold medal that her performance deserved? You’d have to ask her that. She’s been quite open about the fact that everyone in the sport knew the East Germans were at it at the time.

Still, it is interesting to speculate how many cheats who won Olympic titles who have never been conclusively revealed as such. The first three Olympic Marathons have all had the finger of suspicion pointed in their direction. First across the line in 1904, Fred Lorz, was definitely cheating, and found out too. He said he had caught a lift after dropping out, and ran into the stadium after being dropped off a mile or so away as a prank. In 1900 baker’s roundsman Michel Theato has been accused of using his local knowledge to take shortcuts enabling him to win. A similar accusation has been levelled at the inaugural 1896 winner, Greek shepherd Spiridon Louis. Host nation Greece were without a win going into the final event, and to an outpouring of national joy the first three men to finish the race were Greek. However, 4^th placed runner Gyula Kellner from Hungary reported that the third placed man had boarded a carriage for at least part of the journey. Kellner was awarded third while the hapless cheat had the athletics vest stripped from his back in front of the stadium. The speculation goes that Louis, the winner, may have cheated in a similar way. I suppose you have to say, though, that considering any Greek winner had been promised free haircuts for life, you can understand the temptations.

Probably the most famous case of a disqualification in an Olympic Marathon, in 1908, wasn’t a case of conscious cheating at all. Dorando Pietri entered the White City stadium comfortably ahead of the field. However he was in a bad way. A group of officials kind of gathered him up and ushered him over the line, by the Royal Box. When the second person over the line was an America athlete called Johnny Hayes the US officials protested and Pietri was disqualified. Urban myth has it that one of the officials in the photograph taken as Pietri was bundled over the line was Sir Arthur Coan Doyle. I suppose there is a vague resemblance, but it has been proven that it wasn’t.

Dorando’s is not quite as sad a story as it may sound, since there was a huge outpouring of sympathy for him and he was presented with an inscribed silver cup by Queen Alexandra. This cup is still in existence and is currently kept in the vault of the Unicorp branch in Carpi in the province of Modena in Italy. For the centenary of the Dorando Marathon, it was displayed in London during the London Marathon.