Just as a footnote to last night’s heat 6 of the current series a couple of things struck me about the latest edition of Mastermind 1977 on BBC4 last night.
The first of these is the way that memory can cheat you. As
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, this was the series won by Sir David Hunt
and I thought he was beaten in the first round by Timothy Beaumont, Lord Beaumont
of Whiteley. Yet last night was Lord Beaumont’s heat, and Sir David Hunt wasn’t
in it. What I suppose that I remembered was thinking how unusual it was to have
a Lord and a Sir in the same show. But maybe they were in the same semi final.
Or maybe what I really thought 50 odd years ago was it was unusual to have a Lord
and a Sir in the same series. Well, time will tell on that one.
The other thing, though, was that in terms of what happened
on the show, it wasn’t a million miles away from what we often see in the first
round now. A couple of specialist rounds that didn’t quite come off. Three of
the contenders giving their best but not having a strong enough GK to make it
stick. Maybe the talent was as thinly spread back in the day as it is now.
There were a couple of noticeable differences. Firstly, I
repeat the comment I made previously about people being much more profligate
with passes back in the day. Also the really notable difference was at the top
end of the score board. Both top scorers in the specialist round made a few
errors but scored 13 – you’d need to go like the clappers AND have a perfect
round to do that today. Likewise, Lord Beaumont won very comfortably with 26, having scored 13
on both rounds. But again, with the GK I wouldn’t have said, looking at what he
missed, that it was a great round. It was a round that might have scored about
9 today – a good score but with quite a bit of room left for someone to score
more highly.
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