Mastermind 2026 - Semi Final 4

The Tale of the Tape

=6	Danielle Connolly	11	0	13	0	24	0
9	Roger Easy	10	0	12	2	22	2
14	Richard Carr	11	0	9	6	20	6
=15	Alan Hotchkiss	9	0	10	0	19	0

 

Once again we had a decent enough spread of contenders in this semi final, although none of them had quite made the top five in the heats. Last week we saw the best performance of the semis so far with Ross Taylor’s excellent 27. Were we going to see anything similar in this 4^th semi final?

First to chance his arm was Roger Easy. Roger was a top 10 performer in the heats with double figures in both specialist and GK so he was certainly a contender. Tonight he was answering on George Frederick “Easy Grip” Handel. Despite my misgivings in my preview, this proved to be my own best subject of the round. Which doesn’t mean a lot when you consider that I only scored three. Roger did a lot better with 9 and no passes, but it did leave that little bit of daylight for the remaining three contenders.

Danielle Connelly was the highest scoring of these semi finalists in their first round heats. She had scored 11 in her specialist subject and she managed to repeat this with her round on the films of Christopher Nolan. I have really enjoyed many of his films, but I didn’t get much change out of this round scoring just 1. Danielle looked pretty good value for her score and would surely be either in the lead, or close to the leader at the turnaround.

Richard Carr had also scored 11 on his specialist subject in the heats. Answering on Hannibal he found the going a little bit harder tonight. Oh, don’t get me wrong, in the current era of the show a score of 8 is still a good one but you had the feeling that it might be quite a tight contest tonight and a three point gap might prove to be a substantial deficit to overhaul,

Finally Alan Hotchkiss came to answer on the US Masters golf tournament from 1990 until the present day. As with the two previous specialist rounds this set yielded me the grand total of one more point. I did think at one point that Alan was going to get into double figures, but lengthy questions and a couple of wrong answers restricted him to 9. So it was advantage Danielle as the half time oranges were being passed round.

Right, the GK rounds. You know we’ve observed before, you and I, how in some shows there is just something in the air. This was such a show. The first hint that this might be the case was in Richard’s GK round. When you’re in 4^th place, however narrow the margins, what you hope you can do is to just let rip and set a score which will put the fear of God into the other contenders. I’m afraid it didn’t happen with Richard. He’d scored a good 9 in his heat but really seemed to struggle with this set. He finished with 7 for a total of 15.

Roger started his own GK round pretty steadily, but he just couldn’t seem to really get a head of steam going either. Roger had scored a very good 12 in his heat but he never managed to reach those heights with this set of questions and in the end he, like Richard scored 7 although this gave Roger a total of 16 and the lead.

There was something in the air. Alan had also posted a double figure GK score in his heat but like the two contenders before him he struggled to get close to this in his own GK round tonight. Without wishing to come across as mean I have to make the observation that all of our contenders dropped points on questions that you would have expected Mastermind semi finalists to have been able to answer without too much trouble. Alan scored 6 for fifteen. There was something in the air.

So Danielle returned to the chair needing to score 6 for an outright win and a place in the Grand Final. A relatively modest ask, you might have thought. Normally you’d have been right. Danielle, after all, had scored 13 on GK in the heat. However there was something in the air and this round proved to be something of a grim old struggle. Going into the very last question Danielle was tied with Roger, but, crucially, he would have won on pass countback. Danielle kept her nerve, answered the last question correctly, and won. Many congratulations!

Mastermind is a strange beast sometimes. Last week we saw Pete Simmonds score 25, the second highest score of the semi finals so far and still not get to the Final. These things happen and we can often point to top heavy and bottom heavy semi finals as the reason. Not so much this time. All of the semis so far have had fair spreads of contenders. Well, we have two more to go, and who knows what awaits us ? Looking forward.

 The Details

Roger Easy	George Frederick Handel	9	0	7	0	16	0
Danielle Connolly	The films of Christopher Nolan	11	1	6	2	17	3
Richard Carr	Hannibal	8	0	7	4	15	4
Alan Hotchkiss	US Masters Golf – 1990 to the present day	9	0	6	1	15	1