Mastermind Round One Heat 9 - Monday 15th September

It works like this. I’ve been away on a sketching trip to Liverpool, which has put me behind with the reviews. Sorry about that. So I’m going to start with last week’s Mastermind and work through to catch up asap, ok?

So, the first subject was the history of Coventry. Up until the time I started researching my family history I had no idea of a family connection to Coventry. It turned out that my mother’s father’s mother, born Emily Rainbow, was born in Coventry, where she followed her father into the silk weaving industry. The two of them moved to London where she met my great grandfather. At one point the Rainbows, descendant from Huguenots, had been very successful in the silk weaving industry, and Emily’s uncle Edwin was even the Mayor of Coventry at one point. So it was nice to see one question answered by Eric Davies was actually about the ribbon industry. It has to be said tha Eric did brilliantly too. Everything was answered correctly until the very last question, so much so that it was a surprise when the final question caught him out.

I had a couple on Eric’s round but there was nothing for me in Gurpal Cheema’s round on “People Just Do Nothing”, which title could have been applied to a number of English classes that I taught over the years. Apparently it was a TV show that I never watched. Gurpal kept on answering and accumulated a good total of 11, which put him just behind Brian looking forward to the GK round.

The next round on the Emperor Nero, offered to us by Annette Fenner, was my banker subject for the evening and I was pleased to take 6 of these from a standing start. Annette did better. I know enough about the subject to know that this was a pretty testing and wide ranging round, and I felt that 9 was a good score. However it did leave Annette 3 points off the lead. It’s not an insurmountable deficit but It’s not easily bridged either.

Finally we had Nigel Haynes who was answering on the life of C.B. Fry. None of the questions concerned my favourite C.B. Fry story – apparently he was once (and only once) invited to be a pundit for a radio sporting occasion. The hapless commentator supposedly asked ‘What do you think, Charles?’ to which Fry replied ‘You do not call me Charles. To you I am Commander Fry.’ I don’t believe he was invited back after that. I took a couple of these about the great all-rounder, but nowhere near as many as Nigel. He completed our third double figure round to lie in 3^rd with 10.

So Annette was first to return to the chair. She did pretty well, too. If we remember that double figures in GK makes a pretty good round, then you can see that Annette was close to this with 9, matching her specialist score. No, 18 was very unlikely to be enough to win, but it didn’t matter so much. She had achieved respectability.

So, as I said, double figures is a mark of a good performance in the GK and that is exactly what Nigel Haynes served up in the next GK round. His score of 11 took him to a total of 21. In all honesty I wasn’t sure that this was going to be enough to win, but you never know, and nothing is certain until the white line of death has completed its circuit around your score.

Sadly, the white line of death had encircled Gurpal Cheema’s score when he had taken his total to 18. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing to be ashamed about with 7 in a GK round in the current era, but I’m sure it will have been less than Gurpal was aiming for. Ah, them’ the breaks. Sometimes the questions fall for you and sometimes they just don’t.

So it remained for Brian, whose round would determine the winner, one way of another. He looked a picture of concentration as he steadily built towards the 10 points he needed to be sure of an outright win. Well, with just a couple of stumbles along the way he managed that alright and added a couple more points, which gave him a total of 24.

Well done, sir. It wasn’t maybe the most flamboyant GK round we’ve seen this series, but it was pretty good. Using last season for comparison, 24 is the kind of score that should put Brian into the top half of qualifiers for the semi finals, and means he could well be one to watch. Brian, I wish you the best of luck.

The Details

Eric Davies	The History of Coventry	12	0	12	0	24	0
Gurpal Cheema	People Just Do Nothing	11	0	7	0	18	0
Annette Fenner	The Roman Emperor Nero	9	0	9	1	18	1
Nigel Haynes	The Life of C.B. Fry	10	0	11	0	21	0