Mastermind 2026 Semi Final 1

The Tale of the Tape

Position	Contender	SS	Passes	GK	Passes	Total	Passes
=6	Lorna Frankel	12	0	12	0	24	0
11	Elis Matthews	11	0	9	0	20	0
=12	Peter Glanvill	10	0	10	1	20	1
=15	Teddy Fogel	10	1	9	0	19	0

Evening. The relative first round performances of our 4 semi finalists in tonight’s show did not contain any of our top 5. Lorna Frankel was clear of the field but you could barely slide a cigarette paper between the other three. If any contender could dredge up their best specialist form and have a blinder on GK, then any of them might make it through.

First to chance his arm was Elis Matthews. He’d won his heat with a good specialist and solid general knowledge. Tonight he was answering on the TV comedy series Fleabag. In my preview I predicted that I wouldn’t get any right. I was right too. Elis didn’t quite manage perfection but he equalled his score from the heats with a good 11. He would still e incontention at the turnaround, whatever else happened.

Well, what happened was that out highest scorer from the first round, Lorna Frankel, delivered a perfect round answering on Michael Faraday. I scraped 1, which paled into insignificance compared with Lorna’s 13 from 13. It really was a superb round, and from the moment she answered the first question it never looked like she was going to drop a point, even had Clive continued to ask questions about Faraday for the rest of the show.

Did this have an effect on the contenders who had to follow Lorna in the specialist round? Who knows. What we do know is that Teddy Fogel, answering on the presidency of Ronald Reagan, didn’t do as well as he would have hoped. It’s a big subject that , not just because Reagan was a two ter president. There were areas of the subject that Teddy just didn’t seem to have covered in his preparation and sadly by the end of the round he had only scored 6 to be 7 points off the lead and out of the contest to all intents and purposes.

Completing the SS round was Peter Glanville. For ¾ of the round on British marine invertebrates he was mightily impressive, but one question where the answer refused to take a dive from the tip of his tongue just robbed him of a bit of momentum. He still managed 10 which meant that we would have 3 contenders fighting it out for the spot in the final. I failed to score in this round but at least the 3 points I had scored on Reagan bumped my aggregate up to a 4.

Fair play to Teddy. You would have forgiven him for baling out a little in the GK round. Instead he showed great concentration, picking and answering what he knew and guessing what he didn’t. As we know, any double figure round is good in the current era of Mastermind and Teddy scored 10 for 16 and could leave the series with his head held high.

With all due respect though, Teddy’s score just wasn’t going to win this heat. Peter Glanville though was certainly in with a shout. AS it was, he did manage to post the highest GK score of the match, with 11. I somehow suspected this just left enough daylight that one of our remaining two contenders would be able to squeeze past on the inside in the run up to the tape.

Elis Matthews did not match Peter’s GK performance. But he didn’t need to. He’d scored 1 more point in the specialist round. He scored one less point than Peter in the GK and this meant they were tied. However Peter had used the tactic of passing to maintain momentum and this meant that Elis just snuck into the lead on pass countback.

Lorna had scored 12 on GK in the heat, and she could afford to fall short of this by several points which would still bring her a win. What she produced was a perfectly good GK round of 10. Credit to all of our contenders tonight, it is a pleasure to see all four contenders posting double figure GK rounds. Lorna’s total of 23 brought her the win and the place in the final. Da iawn! I wish you the very best of luck in the final.

The Details

Elis Matthews	Fleabag	11	1	10	3	21	4
Lorna Frankel	Michael Faraday	13	0	10	0	23	0
Teddy Fogel	The Presidency of Ronald Reagan	6	0	10	0	16	0
Peter Granvill	British Marine Invertebrates	10	2	11	4	21	6