Mastermind Catch Up First Round Heat 20

I don’t know if you remember, but it was round about heat 20 last year that the first round fell into a bit of a malaise of pretty unimpressive scoring. Have we reached that stage this year? Well, you must make your own minds up about that.

My friend and fellow champion, Gary Grant, took Tom McAndrew’s subject, the planets of the solar system, as his semi final subject in his first appearance on the show, I think, and if I recall correctly found it a hard subject to live with during preparation. I use this as an excuse for having a sense of foreboding as Tom sat down. He ended up having one of those rounds, and ended up with 4.

Meg Stapledon on the other hand had a fine round on the films of Kirsten Dunst. I knew about the Spiderman films and Jumanji, but not a great deal else. Meg did. She scored a double figure round of 10 and was worth every point of it too.

One of the younger of this year’s contenders , Teddy Fogel, answered on a surprisingly old-school Mastermind subject, the song cycles of Franz Schubert. You know him, the one who needed a pint of Kronenberg to loosen his chords. That’s Schubert, not Teddy Fogel. Well, he may be young (Teddy Fogel, not Schubert) but if you’re good enough you’re old enough and with his double figure round of 10 Teddy was certainly that.

Finally Meena Heath. Now, I’ve never watched Shetland so I have no way of knowing how hard or fair Meena’s questions on the series were, but 9 is a good score in this day and age and that’s what Meena managed.

Spare a thought for Tom McAndrew. He had gone first. Things had not gone his way and he had seen each of the three other contenders whack in good specialist rounds. It can’t be easy returning to the chair under these circumstances. Thankfully there were no disasters in the GK and he scored 7 to finish with 11.

I have to be honest, the GK round proved a bit of an anti climax. We saw Meena score 6 to go to 15 and Meg score 7 to set the bar at 17. Much honest endeavour, yes, but not great rounds. Thankfully Teddy put in a round of 9 to put daylight between himself and Meg.Very well done. Time will tell whether this is a little too early for Teddy to make a realistic tilt at Mastermind this year, but he certainly has potential to work with

The Details

Tom McAndrew	Planets of the Solar System	4	0	7	1	11	1
Meg Stapleton	The Films of Kirsten Dunst	10	0	7	0	17	0
Teddy Fogel	The Song Cycles of Franz Schubert	10	1	9	0	19	0
Meena Heath	The BBC Crime Drama Shetland	9	0	6	2	15	2