Mastermind 2026 First Round Heat 8

Look, what can I tell you? It was Mrs. Londinius’ birthday yesterday so Quizzy Mondays were outers yesterday and I didn’t get to watch Mastermind until this morning. Still, sitting here chuntering on about it isn’t going to make up for lost time, is it?

So, as we were promised last week, Ruaidhri O’Donnell offered us Bob Mortimer. I really like Bob, and funnily enough I like him more in his (presumably) unscripted appearances. I love Mortimer and Whitehouse Gone Fishing even though I have never been fishing in my life, for example, and his appearances on Would I lie to You are legendary. So I wasn’t unhappy to get three of these. Ironically, these were two of the ones that Ruaidhri didn’t get – not that there were very many of these. He managed a good 8, although will maybe be kicking himself for not getting Norway on the Gone Fishing Christmas special.

Marine biologist Lucy Fleming was answering on Dolphins and porpoises. It’s a very long time since I was on the show, but when I did go on I was clearly told that I could not do any subject connected with my job as English teacher. Ostensibly the reason is a good one – it stops anyone embarrassing themselves by having a bad specialist round on something which could bring their professional expertise into question. Well, maybe the rules have been relaxed a bit. Not that Lucy was in any danger of embarrassment. She produced a perfect 12 from 12. Game on.

Beth Leonard was answering on Eva Cassidy. Her cover of Fields of Gold is one of my favourite song performances of all time, but sadly I can’t claim to know much more about the late, great singer or her work. Beth produced a very fine round and scored 11 and no passes which put her just one point behind Lucy with one contender still to go.

That contender was Roger Early. Roger was answering on the England Cricket team under Mike Atherton. I surprised myself by getting 4 of these. Heaven alone knows how, as it’s never really been my favourite sport, but never look a gift horse in the eye, I say. This gave me a good aggregate of 11. Roger, like the two contenders before him managed a double figure round, scoring 10 and no passes.

So it looked like it could be anyone’s game as we reached the turn around and began to head for home. Ruaidhri was first back. At 4 points off the lead he was the underdog, but you have to believe every time that you sit in the chair you’re going to produce a great round. Ruaidhri certainly gave it a lash.He reached double figures and scored 10 to give himself a total of 18. No, it didn’t look as if it would be enough but he’d certainly given a good account of himself and could leave with his head held high.

So to Roger. It’s worth studying Roger’s round as it was a great example of a contender possibly being too keyed up at the start of the round who manages to calm down, settle, and build a potentially willing score. Roger took the first then missed the next three on the bounce and seemed to be getting agitated. Then he pulled himself together, took the next and continued to build a competitive score. Roger put on 12 to give himself a total of 22.

Beth Leonard had one point over Roger at the turn around. But she would need a round of at least 11 to have a chance of the win, and double figure rounds are not easy to come by. Beth’s round was perfectly respectable, as she added 9 to her total. However at the end of the day it left her high and dry on 20.

Which just left Lucy Fleming. Her bravura performance in her perfect specialist had earned her a two point lead over Roger at the halfway point. However that lead can soon evaporate over the course of a GK round. It looked touch and go throughout the round and in the end it all came down to the last question. If Lucy could answer which country has an automatic rifle on its flag then she would win on pass countback. Oh, but she went for Angola. That’s the answer to the matched pair question – which country’s national flag features a machete? The correct answer is Mozambique. Oh, on such small margins can contests be decided.

Bad luck to Lucy but congratulations Roger! Best of luck in the semi finals.

The Details

Ruaidhri O’Donnell	Bob Mortimer	8	0	10	2	18	2
Lucy Fleming	Dolphins and Porpoises	12	0	9	0	21	0
Beth Leonard	Eva Cassidy	11	0	9	3	20	3
Roger Easy	The England Cricket team under Michael Atherton	10	0	12	2	22	2

Mastermind 2026 Round One Heat 8 Specialist subjects

Did the continuity announcer last week say that Bob Mortimer was going to be one of this week’s subject or did I imagine it? It doesn’t really matter, but the great Bob is one of tomorrow’s specialists. The others are

Dolphins and porpoises

Eva Cassidy

The England cricket team under Michael Atherton.

All of the have the potential to bring me 1, possibly two points. Equally each of the four has the possibility of bringing me nowt, although I will be disappointed if I don’t get any points on Bob.

Mastermind 2026 - First Round Heat 7

For me the big question as I sat down to watch last night’s show was this – was this going to be another show where I ended up praising the contenders’ effort – which I am quite happy to do – or would there be some real quality on display? Well, see what you think.

Ian Walmsley was offering us Post War Great Britain Rugby League Tours. I always feel that with this sort of sport subject there’s a chance that you’re going to get a couple of pieces of low hanging fruit, and questions on Billy Boston and Martin Offiah were examples of this, kicking me off with two points. Neil knew his stuff and was just stopped short of the psychologically important double figure total, ending his round with 9.

Next up was Diane Howe, answering of Henry VIII’s last queen, Katherine Parr. Now, you can work really hard and prepare your subject really well and still fall just short of a perfect total. When someone does achieve a perfect total it very often looks as if they know their subject so well that they could go on for another two minutes without dropping a point. Such a round was Diane’s. She brilliantly reeled off 12 points, immediately putting herself in the driving seat for the rest of the show. I had 2 of these.

Jonnie Walker, the youngest of last night’s line up, gave us the Pierce Brosnan Years of James Bond. Never my favourite Bond, his films were all watchable enough, but remembering the kind of details that were likely to be asked was going to be a tall order and I was grateful to get 2 of these again. Jonnie knew his stuff, but just missed out on a couple. He nonetheless earned himself a double figure round of 10.

Bringing the round to a close was Maurizio Giacometto. He was answering on possibly the most ‘out there’ of the subjects last night – LL Zamenhof and the early history of Esperanto. My prediction that there might be a question about him being an ophthalmologist did not come to pass. However I had wikied him on Sunday and remembered that he’d been born in Bialystok and that the previous attempt at a universal language was Volapuk. That brought me two for a specialist round aggregate of 8, pretty decent though I say it myself. Maurizio himself scored 9, bringing to an end a high quality set of specialists.

Ian, then, had the dubious honour of setting the target for the rest in the GK round. He did it pretty well, too, scoring 11 to take his total to 20. In the previous 4 shows we have only seen 1 winning score higher than this. Just an observation.

20 is a high enough score to put any contender in the corridor of doubt. Yet Maurizio frankly didn’t seem the least bit perturbed. He seemed confident that his GK would be up to the task and he was right to be so. He produced an excellent 14, one of the best rounds we’ve seen in the series so far. It took him to 23 and it meant that both of the two remaining contenders had their own mountains to climb.

Jonnie Walker gave it a lash and what’s more it was a pretty good lash. Like both of the contenders thus far he achieved a double figure GK round. In his case it was a score of 10 which brought him level with Ian, but behind Maurizio. Nevertheless it was a good round, and suggests that if he decides to pass this way again sometime in the future he should not be found wanting.

Only Diane was left, then. I reflected that we had not had anything other than good rounds so far in this episode and it would be cruel indeed if we got a bad one now. Thankfully we didn’t. Instead what we got was another high quality display of general knowledge quizzing. Diane never lost her composure and kept calmly racking up the points until she got the 12 she needed to overhaul Maurizio and added another 2 for good measure, finishing with 14 for 26. When we come to look back on the heats I dare say that this will put her in the top 5. Best of luck in the semi finals.

This was a terrific heat. This is the sort of thing I always hope we’ll see. The three runners up leave with the bittersweet feeling that on the one hand they each produced a fine performance, but on the other hand they each produced a performance that could have won some of the other heats we’ve already seen. That’s knock out tournament play, folks. That’s Mastermind.

The Details

Ian Walmsley	Post War Great Britain Rugby League Tours	9	0	11	0	20	0
Diane Howe	Katherine Parr	12	0	14	1	26	1
Jonnie Walker	James Bond:The Pierce Brosnan Years	10	0	10	0	20	0
Maurizio Giacometto	LL Zamenhof and the early history of Esperanto.	9	0	14	0	23	0

Mastermind 2026 Heat 7 Specialists preview

I’ve had my obligatory look at the BBC’s Mastermind page and tomorrow’s specialist subjects are:-

Postwar Great Britain Rugby League Tours

Katherine Parr

James Bond films in the Pierce Brosnan Era

L.L. Zamenhoff and the early history of Esperanto

I think that I can rule out the chances of me getting any points on Zamenhof unless they ask about him being an ophthalmologist. At the other end of the scale, with Pierce Brosnan only making 4 Bond films I think there’s maybe a point or two for me there. Incidentally, I was surprised to see Brosnan cast as Ron in The Thursday Murder Club. It’s a role I always felt was tailor made for someone like Ray Winston. I read an interview with Pierce Brosnan today in which he said the same thing!

Katherine Parr  - well there’s always a point or two in the Tudors and you never know with the Rugby League tours either.

Mastermind 2026 Heat 6

Nice Bank Holiday peeps? Me? Lovely thank you. My new laptop arrived from Amazon and what had become a chore on my poor knackered old warhorse I’ve been using for the past few years becomes the pleasure it always used to be. Speaking of pleasures, let’s talk about tonight’s Mastermind.

Part of the pleasure was that I managed to answer questions on each of the specialists tonight. My second highest score came on Susannah Croft’s round on the life of Oscar Wilde. I scored three – not bad but nowhere near as good as Susannah Croft’s 9. Again, I couldn’t help feeling that this was a round that might have earned double figures only a couple of seasons ago. Looking on the positive, if you’re close to double figures on specialist in the current era, you’re still gonna be in contention by half time.

Courtney Campbell was answering on what I predicted might be my banker, and indeed I kept pace with her at the start as we both reeled off the first three answers in fairly quick succession. I got one more after that. Courtney correctly answered another 5 for 8. Not the lead, but a pretty decent showing that meant at the moment she was only one point behind.

Pub landlord Jonathan Wilkins was answering on The Dambusters raid of 1943. I’m not an expert but I’ve watched the film on several occasions and seen several TV documentaries. So I thought that my two points was certainly no less than I deserved. As you’d expect, Jonathan looked a great deal better and was probably unlucky to not quite join Susannah in the lead by the end of the round. Like Courtney he scored 8 to be handily placed on Susannah’s shoulder.

Which left Max Bougeard to bring the round to a conclusion with his round on Real Madrid 2000 – present. In my preview yesterday I identified this as my least favoured round and I only managed the one sitter on Zinedine Zidane. Nonetheless it made sure that I reached double figures with an aggregate of 10 for the specialist rounds.As for the contest, Max joint top scored with 9 and everything was nicely poised as only one point separated all four contenders.

First to step up and set the target was Courtney. I was afraid for her after the first 40 seconds or so, but she steadied her nerves, rallied, and pulled herself up to a decent score of 8 for the round and 16 overall. Unlikely to win, yes, but enough to make it tricky for those who came after.

For the first minute or so Jonathan looked like a shoo in to take the lead, but then he suddenly became becalmed in mid-round. I did wonder whether it was going to come down to passes, but he just managed to get himself over the line, despite falling into something of a pass spiral. He scored 9 to take himself to 17 but it was at quite a cost in passes.

The contenders had been close in the specialist round and so they were proving to be in the GK as well. Susannah had just a point in hand over the previous two and this meant that she ended ahead of Courtney, whose GK score she equalled. She was level with Max on 17, but she too had incurred quite a number of passes – too many in fact.

So Max sat back in the chair, knowing that he needed 8 and no more than 4 passes to take the win. Within half a minute I felt that he was probably the best GK quizzer of the four, although like Jonathan he was afflicted by a mid-round wobble. Unlike Jonathan he did not fall into a pass spiral, and kept his head to pick off what he knew and build the score. By the warble ending the round he had managed our only double figure round of the night.

Well, there we are. It wasn’t the most exciting match we’ve ever seen and it wasn’t the highest scoring we’ve ever seen. But you know, there’s something to be said for honest endeavour, and the little bit of grit that each of tonight’s contenders showed at times during their rounds. Congratulations Max – a good performance. I wish you the best of luck in your semi final.

The Details

Susannah Croft	The Life of Oscar Wilde	9	1	8	5	17	6
Courtney Campbell	Barack Obama	8	1	8	0	16	1
Jonathan Wilkins	The Dambusters Raid	8	0	9	5	17	5
Max Bougeard	Real Madrid 2000 - Present	9	0	10	0	19	0

Mastermind 2026 Heat 6 Preview

Heads up, quiz fans. Tomorrow night’s specialist subjects are:-

The Life of Oscar Wilde

Barack Obama

The 1943 Dambusters Raid

Real Madrid 2000- Present         

To use the vernacular, if I should only score 1 on the specialists again like last week I will be bloody annoyed. I reckon that Barack Obama may just about be my banker, but there’s nothing really in it for me between the first three. None of them are fill yer boots subjects for me, but I reckon there’s a decent chance of 1 or 2 in each of them. It’s not impossible there might even be a point for me on Real Madrid, but that’s by no means a given, I’m afraid.           

Mastermind 2026 First Round Heat Five

Well, I know what you’re asking yourself. Did Dave live up to his prediction of doing worse on the specialists last week and end up with zero? Well, no, actually. Go figure.

Two of my 6 points came from the first of the specialists and that was Robert Cohen’s round on the History of Sheep. Look, I live in South Wales so I can guarantee that I’ve probably heard more jokes involving sheep than most and I have no intention of adding to them. This was one of those left field subjects that must have been difficult to prepare for, but it’s also the kind of round that just might offer a couple of pieces of low hanging fruit that the non expert can guess. There weren’t 8 of these though, but 8 was the score that Robert Cohen managed. This was good, but did leave quite a bit of room for the other three contenders, and if one of them managed a perfect round then Robert might be in a spot of bother.

Right, let’s get to Liz Bain’s round on the Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante. I have never read any of these and I managed none of these. I want to be honest about Liz’s round but on the other hand I really don’t want to be horrible. Liz scored four, and looking at the questions she missed my gut feeling was that she had probably not prepared carefully enough. It’s not always about the amount of time or effort that you put into it. I have never tried to learn a set of novels for Mastermind, so I don’t know, for certain, but I wouldn’t trust my memory to retain what I needed to know just from re-reading the books however many times. It’s a shame. The last thing I want to see is contenders not having a really positive experience. I pay credit to Liz for putting a brave face on it, but she still appeared a bit shaken.

I couldn’t call myself an expert on the music of Katy Perry, a noted chanteuse of recent decades, so I gathered. Nonetheless a couple of decent guesses provided a couple more points for me to add to the aggregate. At one point I thought that Katie Stoyle was looking good to take the outright lead but just a couple of stumbles slowed her progress just a little. Like Robert she finished with a good 8.

What might have been going through Maxim Sinclair’s mind as he approached the chair, the last of the contenders to go in the specialist round? Was he thinking of what had happened to Liz in her round and hoping lightning would not strike twice in this heat? Or was he looking positively at the lead, and hoping for a round that would blow the others out of the water? Well, what happened was neither of these two extremes. I took two of his questions to pull myself to a respectable enough aggregate of 6. Maxim scored 7. I often make the point that sometimes there seems to be something in the air in a show, ad this show was a case in point. It meant that while Maxim would have been out of contention in many of the other heats at this same stage, he was handily placed on the shoulders of the leaders in this one.

Poor Liz Bain. When you’ve had a testing time in the specialist, the thing you need most of all in the GK round is a couple of questions you know the answers to at the start of the round in order to get you moving with a bit of momentum. Liz just didn’t get that. Maybe I was reading things into it which weren’t there, but even though she tried to maintain a brave smile I think you could see that she was suffering. She rallied to post a total of 9.

Maxim, on his return to the chair, did not seem to be suffering at all, on the other hand. It was an admirable display of sang froid considering that a lot of questions just would not fall for him at all. He kept picking up what he could, and in the end added six to his total to raise the target to 13 overall.

Robert returned to the chair and gave us what seemed to me to be a better round than his specialist had been. In this day and age it takes a bit to get at least a dozen in GK but that’s exactly what Robert did. It wasn’t a perfect round and it wasn’t the best GK round we’ve seen so far in this series but it was good and despite all of the honest endeavour of all of the contenders we really hadn’t seen a contender having a genuinely good round, rather than a respectable one in this heat. Robert reached the psychologically significant 20, and Katie was going to have to match this score with only 1 pass to win.

Well, she gave it a lash and you can’t realistically ask for more than that. But by halfway through it was clear that what we were looking at was another decent round. Decent but not good enough. Katie managed the second highest GK score of the night, with 7 and that was good enough for the runner up spot.

So, well done Robert. I’m sure that your children who egged you on to enter are very proud of you. Best of luck in the semi-finals.

The Details

Robert Cohen	The History of Sheep	8	1	12	1	20	2
Liz Bain	The Neapolitan novels of Elena Ferrante	4	3	5	3	9	6
Katie Stoyle	The Music of Katy Perry	8	0	7	0	15	0
Maxim Sinclair	Gerald Winstanley and the Diggers	7	2	6	2	13	4

Mastermind Heat Five specialist subject preview

Well, presuming that this week the BBC will actually let us watch it, in the next heat of Mastermind the specialist subjects will be –

The History of Sheep

The Neapolitan Novels of Elena Ferrante

The Music of Katty Perry

Gerald Winstanley and the 17^th century protest movement, The Diggers

Right, you know how I only managed to answer 1 specialist question last week? Well, this looks potentially worse to me. I haven’t wikied before Mastermind for several years but I really don’t want to get zero if I can possibly avoid it. There is not one of these subjects where I think there is even a chance I might scape a guess.I will let you know tomorrow after the show.

Mastermind 2026 First round Heat Four

Maybe unfairly, I often feel that when Mastermind returns after arbitrarily being taken off for a week or more the BBC owe us a top class edition. As we saw after the prolonged Christmas break last season, we don’t always get it. So would last night’s show go with a bang or turn out to be a damp squib?

Well, it certainly started brightly enough. Basab Majumdar was answering on the playing career of the great Sunil Gavaskar. Now, when I tell you that of all four of last night’s subjects this was supposedly my banker, then all that tells you is just how little I know about all four subjects. To be precise, I got none of these, even by randomly shouting out cricketing test playing countries whenever given the opportunity. Basab was very well prepared, and from where I was sitting a double figure score seemed the least that he deserved.

Alright, I have seen the first Hunger Games movie. That’s not where I got my singular specialist point from though. No, in a unit of work I taught for the last few years we used a passage from the original book which is how I knew Katniss’ little sister’s name. Thus concluded the specialist round for me. Not so for Hannah Mimiec. Like Basab before her she seemed very well prepared and a double figure round of 10 seemed only fair. I don’ know, there was something in the specialist rounds last night, which meant that each of them ended up with a point less than I would have said they were worth.

On with Miles Searle. Miles was answering on Leonard Bernstein. Again, this was another very well prepared contender. I don’t know much about Mr. Bernstein – as demonstrated by my zero points on the round – but this was a wide ranging, testing round. I thought that Miles was unlucky to miss out on double figures. Still, being realistic it did mean that he was only one point off the lead, with only one other contender to go.

That final contender was Devon Krohn. Devon is a teacher trainer. I’m not sure if that means she trains people to be teachers, or she delivers INSET to train people who are already teachers. Well, even if the latter is the case we won’t hold that against her. Ah, INSET, or as I like to think of it, the best part of 1000 hours of my life that I will never get back. However, I digress. Devon was answering on Edvard Munch, brilliantly, as it happened. She scored a perfect round answering every question correctly, yet only scored 11. It wasn’t as if she was going particularly slowly either. As I said, something in the air in last night’s show?

Normally you wouldn’t be first back to the chair for GK if you had scored 9 in the Specialist round. However that’s exactly what happened to Miles. How did he respond? By going like billy-o, showing an impressive breadth of knowledge and answering 13 questions correctly. All of which shows just how important momentum is. When you go first in the GK round all you can do is post the best score that you can and hope to do enough to at least put the others within the corridor of doubt. In Miles’ case this was a job well done.

It's relatively rare to see a round come completely off the rails. Poor Basab Majumdar had the horrible experience of needing to score 12 to just draw level, then seeing his first four answers miss the mark. I give him full credit for taking stock on the fifth, dredging up the right answer and building a score from there, but in all honesty it looked a struggle. He finished with a total score of fifteen. Sometimes it’s just not your night, I’m afraid.

To get 13 in a Mastermind specialist round you either need a very good general knowledge – you might almost say a quizzer’s general knowledge – or a lot of luck. Only having Hannah Mimiec’s round to judge by, I would say that luck didn’t seem to have much to do with it. She scored 9, a good total in this day and age, but not a great one. Not a quizzer’s one and not a heat winner’s one. She finished on a very respectable 19.

Only Devon remained. If you’re an experienced quizzer the answers contenders give to one or two specific questions will give you an idea whether the contender is going to finish with a big score or not. Devon gave a couple of these early doors in her round which made me think she was going to fall short of the target. Like Hannah before her she scored 9. That’s a good score and in the current era anything in the 20s is a good total. But even so it meant that she finished outside the winner’s enclosure.

So very well done to Miles. He hinted that he is a very young Masterminder indeed by saying that he is on a gap year before starting university, which means he may be 18 or 19. If he went on to win the series he would in that case be the youngest ever. Such talk is premature, so when he did explain that his Dad is a taxi driver and he thought he could maybe chalk up another one for the cabbies by going all the way, namechecking the great Fred Housego, I did worry a little. I just think that this sort of thing unnecessarily tempts Fate. Nonetheless, I give you my congratulations, Miles. Well done and best of luck in the semi finals.

The Details

Basab Majumdar	The playing career of Sunil Gavaskar	10	0	5	1	15	1
Hannah Mimiec	The Hunger Games	10	0	9	0	19	0
Miles Searle	Leonard Bernstein	9	0	13	0	22	0
Devon Krohn	Edvard Munch	11	0	9	0	20	0