Back home from Helsinki, peeps and there’s catching up to be done. So let’s begin with last Monday’s 8th heat of Mastermind.
First up was Taz Modi who was answering on musician Neil
Young. More than a few times during this series so far I’ve watched rounds
where I’ve thought that the contender is very good on specific areas of their
subject, but then they get asked about things which they’re far less secure on.
This seemed to happen to Taz a few times during the round. Oh, don’t get me
wrong, 7 is perfectly respectable in this day and age but it’s not the
definitive marker that you really want to be laying down in the first round.
Charlotte Long was answering on golfer supreme Rory
McIlroy. Answering well, too. For most of the round this looked like it was
going to be a really sterling double figure round. A couple of questions did
trip her up a little on the way to the tape though and Charlotte levelled out
to finish with a good 9 points. I didn’t answer any fewer questions than in the
first round, but that’s not a consolation considering that I didn’t answer any
in either round. Were we potentially looking at a zero aggregate for me on
specialist?
No. Lauren Church gave us a round on US astronaut Sally
Ride. While I don’t claim to know much about her life or career, I do know
enough about US manned space programmes to be able to pick up a few pieces of
low hanging fruit. With her score of 4 by the end of the round, it did look as
if there were gaps in Lauren’s knowledge, but I can’t help feeling that she
seemed to be affected by nerves as well. After all, I’ve no doubt she would
have known Edwards Air Force base in California. I’ll say a bit more about nerves
when we get to the GK.
Finally then Gustav Ader. His subject was British Brutalist
Architecture. Now I don’t instinctively hate ALL British brutalist
architecture. But I do hate a lot of it. The second question concerned Erno
Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower, and I hate that building, an ugly duckling that
has always remained ugly for sure. But leaving aside my own personal feelings,
it’s an interesting subject and it brought me 5 points to push my aggregate for
the Specialist to 8 points. Gustav did better but with 7 points he too looked
as if he’s left a few points behind that he might have managed to get.
So to the General Knowledge. I mentioned about Lauren Church
seeming to be a bit nervous in the first round. Well, there were definitely
times during her GK round when you could almost see her desperately trying to
push the right answer just a little further off the tip of her tongue yet not
quite managing it. Who knows, maybe the first round was playing on her mind. She
at least finished with a double figure aggregate, scoring 6 to give her an
overall total of 10.
Taz Modi delivered a double figure round on GK. He remained
calm throughout the round and accumulated points steadily, not rushing in to
give a wrong answer quickly where a second’s thought might have produced a
correct answer. As a result he pushed through to 11 points. Yes, we’ve seen
better GK rounds this series, but only a couple of them, and with the way
things have been going you fancied that this might well be a winning
performance.
Within the first minute or so of Gustav’s round you couldn’t
help feeling that he wasn’t going to match Taz. He too was not answering very
quickly, however he wasn’t answering as well as Taz. It was an okay GK round
from someone who you’d guess isn’t a quizzer. I’ll say a little bit more about
that generally shortly. Gustav scored 7 to take his total to 14.
Finally Charlotte. Essentially she needed a round of 9
points and no passes to win. Basically, a good general knowledge performance.
You don’t have to be a quizzer to have a good GK performance, but you do need a
cool head, an ability to guess and above all else, just a little bit of luck with
the questions you’re asked. At times it looked as if Charlotte had the first
two requisites but not the third, as the clock ticked down. In the end she was
close but the cigar remained unawarded, for she scored 8 to finish with 17 and
no passes.
Well done Taz! With a good GK round many a tricky position
at half time can be rescued, and if you can really nail down your specialist
for the semi than you are going to be in with a shout. I wish you good luck.
Once again, as seems to have been the case for so much of
this series and the previous we’ve seen contenders whose intelligence I have no
doubt of, but who are not quizzers. Basically, when you’re a quizzer of a
certain standard yourself, there are certain questions that contenders get
asked during GK rounds where you think – if you were a quizzer you would have
heard that question so often that you’d never get it wrong. And they get it
wrong because they haven’t heard it before. Now, I know that it has always been
the case that the non-quizzers greatly outnumber the quizzers among the
contenders on Mastermind. But there just seem to be so few coming through on
the show now who have a good quizzer’s general knowledge. Is it just that
quizzers aren’t applying in decent numbers any more? Or is it that, for
whatever reason, they’re just not getting through the applications process? I
don’t have an answer, but it’s a question that could be asked, certainly.
The Details
|
Taz Modi |
Neil Young |
7 |
1 |
11 |
0 |
18 |
1 |
|
Charlotte Long |
Rory McIlroy |
9 |
0 |
8 |
0 |
17 |
0 |
|
Lauren Church |
Sally Ride |
6 |
2 |
4 |
2 |
10 |
4 |
|
Gustav Ader |
British Brutalist
Architecture |
7 |
3 |
7 |
3 |
14 |
6 |
No comments:
Post a Comment