Just To Prove

That I'm not a totally quiz obssessed person, I wanted to prove to you that I do occasionally truant from quiz compiling. Today I was supposed to be compiling this Thursday night's quiz for the rugby club. However the weather was so beautiful outside that it needed very little coercion for me to pile Mary and a couple of the girls in the car, and head off down to Mumbles.


That's Mumbles Pier in the picture. Just out of interest, Mumbles Pier is one of only a very few Victorian piers left in Wales, and probably less well known than the others.

Of course, you never totally lave the quiz behind. I looked at the information at the entrance to the pier, and it gave the year that the pier was built, and the original purpose it was built for. No prizes for guessing that one of these pieces of information is going to be twisted into a question for Thursday night's quiz , then.

I have to put my hands up and admit that I know one of the other quiz master often tailors one or two question to fit whatever he has been doing suring the week or two leading up to his quiz. Last year, he asked
"IN which Spanish city . . . " and we didn't know the answer. However we did know that he'd recently come back from two weeks in Seville. So that's what we put down, and that was the correct answer. Its another example of playing the man and not the ball, to use footballing terminology.

Mastermind Semi Final 4/6

Wonders will never cease. The BBC has allowed Mastermind to be shown in two consecutive weeks - AND Life After Mastermind reader James Corcoran informs me that he has been given next Friday as a definite date for his semi final to be broadcast. Have the schedulers finally taken pity on poor fans of the show ? Or is it just that they can't be arsed to go looking for something else ?

Lets get down to the nitty gritty of tonight's show, then. Frank Minns started us off. He won heat 23 in April, offering Italian Politics. Tonight it was the Life and works of Mozart. I think that he was possibly expecting more on the works and less on the life, and didn't reach the heights of his first round performance, this time scoring 8.

By way of contrast, Jenny Dunn we haven't seen since the very first heat, back on 5th September 2008, when she scored 13 points on King Edward IV. Her round on The Ghost Stories of M.R.James didn't quite manage to get into the teens, but you had the feeling that this was the kind of contest where her 10 would give her a fighting chance.

Gary Grant, this time answering questions on the Solar System, had won heat 22 on the life and career of Sir Jackie Stewart, in March. Then he scored 14, tonight he did almost as well, scoring 13. His speed of answer was highly impressive, and by the halfway stage he looked the most likely winner of the 4 contenders.

Roger Canwell I tipped as a potential finalist as long ago as the end of September when he won heat 4. He looked extremely useful answering on The Late Stuart Age then. Now only slightly less effective, a very good start to the round being let down a little by a couple of passes. However 12 meant that he was only one point behind leader Gary Grant.

Poor Frank Minns. Obviously John Humphrys doesn't think much about Mozart, since he ignored the subject completely in the inter round chat, and instead gave Mr. Minns the 3rd degree about people paving over their front gardens. Mr. Minns is a landscape gardener, you see. Mr. Minns had the joint highest GK score in the first round heats, but this particular set of questions seemed tough to me, and didn't do him any favours at all. Bearing this in mind 9 was a good score.

Jenny Dunn explained that a good ghost story should be creepy without being too graphic. Can't say that I've read any M.R.James myself, so I'll move swiftly on to her GK round. Its all subjective, but given the choice I would have rather had a go at Jenny Dunn's questions than Frank Minns, but she put on a good performance of 9, which was only one less than she'd managed in her first round heat. So she pushed the bar up to 19.

Roger Canwell paid the expected tribute to Delia Smith - and why not ? - and explained a little about how tough it is for teams outside the premiership. Like the two previous contenders he pushed towards double figures, but ran out of time before quite managing to get there. Compared with the last few semi finals we've seen, 21 looked like a modest target. However, as I have said before on many occasions, anything can happen in the semi finals.

Gary Grant was hailed by John Humphrys as the 'man with the knowledge of the solar system '. Interestingly, he himself has gone on record as saying that he never expected to get to the semis, or he'd never have chosen that as a subject ! He started off like an express train, but, as he himself has said, he fell into a horrible pass spiral, and just couldn't pull himself out of it. Don't worry Gary. Everyone who saw your performance in the first round knows that you are much better than this - it was just a shame that you had a bad day at the office. He finished on 19.

So Roger Canwell marches on to the Grand Final. On this performance, and bearing in mind the strength of the other 3 qualifiers we've seen so far, you'd have to say he's something of an outsider, but semi final form is not always a good guide to what is going to happen in the final.


The Details

Frank Minns	The Life and Works of Mozart	8 - 5	9 - 4	17 - 9
Jenny Dunn	The Ghost Stories of M.R.James	10 - 3	9 - 7	19 - 10
Gary Grant	The Solar System	13 - 2	6 - 7	19 - 9
Roger Canwell	Norwich City Football Club	12 - 2	9 - 3	21 - 5

Personality Test ?

Ahead of tonight's show I thought that I'd post about a topic that has been sparking some very interesting comment on the IQAGB website today. This is the inter-round chat interval that has been so much a part of the John Humphrys era of Mastermind.

In the late Magnus Magnusson's day, there was nothing more personal in the way of chat than Your name and your profession. I can't help feeling that we were better off when it was like this. Now, don't misunderstand me. The production team put a hell of a lot of time and effort into getting angles that John Humphrys can talk to you about your subject, and I think they genuinely want you to look like more than someone who has just absorbed a book on your specialist topic. But it doesn't always make for very interesting telly. While its ok when you're the one participating in the chat, its excruciating if you're one of the other contenders, just waiting, and it goes on for quite a bit longer than the edited version you eventually get to see in the broadcast version.

Do we need it, anyway ? After all, you don't get it in competitive sport, do you ? Yes, after the match you might grab the participants for a brief, snatched interview, but not before or during. Think of it,
" So, Tiger Woods, you're about to start your opening round in this year's U.S. Masters tournament. So, tell us if you would, what's this green jacket nonsense all about then ? "

We all know that there are shows where they are far more interested in your personality than in your knowledge or ability. But please, Mastermind ? Give us a break. If personality was that important, then I'm sure I would have had little or no chance.

Watch this space for a review of tonight's show.

Too Much Information

Sometimes the clue really isn't in the question.

If you quiz regularly I'm surely you've experienced this sub-phenomenon before. You're asked a question - which seems at first to have an obvious answer - then the QM goes on to give you additional piece of information, which sends you off on a tangent, gets you to change your answer, and leads to you changing a right answer for a wrong one.

I mention this because it happened to me again last night. For reasons which I will be posting about later on in the year, I haven't been around to take part in a pub quiz for the best part of a fortnight, so it was a huge pleasure to get back to a proper quiz in the Duke of Wellington in Cowbridge last night. You'll remember I've mentioned this quiz before. A pound goes in for each player, and then another pound for the team that goes towards the jackpot. Sandwiches for everyone at half time. 7 questions for the jackpot at the end.

The last two times we've played we've lost the quiz on a tiebreak. Last night we won by two points - not a huge win, but certainly a comfortable one compared to the last few times we've played. I was particularly pleased with the guess the year question - in which year did Princess Margaret marry Anthony Armstrong Jones ? Against a little doubt from the team I plumped for 1960.

So, as I say, we won the quiz. Then the lucky 7. John and I independently dredged up that it was Dubrovnik that Byron once described as the Pearl of the Adriatic. From somewhere I recalled that it was the actor David Threlfall who starred in Shameless. The only question that gave us a problem was this : -
Which band have recently released their new album "No line on the Horizon".
Now the fact that we didn't know it straight away will tell you that we are far from pop music specialists. Still, working on the principal that you always go for the percentage answer when you haven't a clue - we were going to go for U2. Which would have resulted in us scooping the pot in its entirety, since nobody else was close to getting 7. However the QM went on to add that they've been in the news recently. This put us off the scent. You see the fact is that the Manic Street Preachers have recently released an album using material written by their long disappeared member Richie Edwards, and this has certainly made the news in Wales. So we changed U2 to the Manic Street Preachers.

Having said all of that I am quite sure that it wouldn't have gone down so well if we'd taken the jackpot as well as winning the quiz. But looking back on last night it does prove that where a quiz is concerned, sometimes there really is such a thing as too much information.

Have YOU ever been banned from a pub quiz too ?

The Ultimate in Sore-Losing ?

I had an interesting conversation with a brilliant and high profile quizzer yesterday, who surprised me when he said that he has never yet been banned from a pub quiz. He went on to say that he has been banned from pubs before, but not why, and I didn't feel I knew him well enough to press him for explanation. However, I digress. It leads me to beg the question - is it unusual for a quizzer to be banned from playing in a particular pub quiz ? The reason why I ask this is that it brings to mind the fact that I have been - sort of - banned from three pub quizzes in my time. Allow me to explain.

In each of the three cases I have been banned in a different way. These are : -

a) Direct banning by the will of the public.

It must be the best part of a decade that John and I have been playing in a variety of pubs throughout the Bridgend - Swansea section of the M4 corridor. In one pub in Morriston we formulated our creed in the face of some pretty hostile responses from one of the teams whose top dog status ended when we began our reign of terror. We sanctimoniously declared this to ourselves - If anyone who doesn't like us winning all the time has the guts to come up to us and say 'look boys, you're obviously good at this, its only meant to be a friendly quiz, you're not giving anyone else a chance , so would you mind giving us a rest ? ' then we'd go with good grace.

It never quite happened like that. However a few years ago a pub in Neath began advertising a weekly quiz with a £100 first prize. As you know this is a serious amount of money for a weekly pub quiz, so we smelled a large rodent, but all the same we decided to check it out. We posed as two old codgers just having a quiet drink, and made the landlady explain to us all about what was involved in a pub quiz. Then she told us that the first prize was a gallon of beer - you only got the £100 if you scored 50 out of 60 or more. Nobody had managed that yet. An hour later we were 54 points and £100 to the good.

We didn't overdo it, only going every three weeks or so. However, after another 2 wins I got greedy. I went back on my own when John couldn't make it, and the landlord banned me before the quiz started. His justification was that his locals didn't like it. Well, I'm not being funny, but none of them had got close to the money in 18 months, so I didn't see that as fair. Its not as if we were stopping anybody else from scooping the pot - none of them were ever likely to do that whether we were there or not. If I was a mean spirited sort I would suggest that it was the landlord himself who didn't like us taking the money. Still, the best you can do is give in with good grace in such a situation. I have no intention of naming the pub either. They will get no free advertising from me.

2) Banning by proxy

So to Bridgend, where John and I discovered a pub with a far from edifying Sunday night quiz, but a serious amount of cash on offer for a very winnable jackpot. In two attempts John and I took away £200. The landlady wasn't happy about this from the start, but kept her comments to a very polite,
"Do you take part in many quizzes , then ? You seem very good ? " to which we gave a civil answer, along the lines of , yes, its a fair cop guv, don't worry , we'll restrict our appearances in future. Just as we were leaving someone who knows John came in, and they chatted for a while.

The next day, a message was relayed to me via a chain of acquaintances that we wouldn't be welcome in the Sunday quiz again - John's acquaintance had told the landlady something of our quiz pedigree apparently. Name of the pub withheld for the same reasons as the last.

3) Banning by brute force and ignorance

OK - so I haven't actually been banned from the Culverhouse Hotel Sunday Night quiz in Cardiff. Regular readers will recall that I wrote about this a couple of months ago. Basically we beat a team who were cheating by using their mobiles. The quiz went to a tie break , and we KNEW the correct answer. Despite the fact that we had watched them cheating throughout the whole of the quiz using their mobiles, they had the cheek to accuse us of cheating in the tie break, because my daughter took out her mobile a couple of minutes AFTER we had given our answer in.. The question master, despicably in my opinion, took their word for it and gave us a lecture about how it is acceptable to use a mobile in the quiz - which it most certainly is not - but not acceptable in a tie break. As we left the hotel , one of the blokes from the other team stepped in front of me as I was going to the gents, and called me, and I use his words,a
"F * * * ing cheat. "
If you wish to think the worst of me for not sticking up for myself, and walking round him without saying anything, then you must feel free to think so, although I would advise you that
a) There were four of his mates behind him,
b) he was a little the worse for alcohol - although not so much that I would have fancied my chances if it had come to blows, and
c) what could I have achieved if I had responded anyway ? For all I know he was looking for an excuse to belt me.
Effectively, that has had the same effect as if the landlord had banned us from going to the quiz. If we went back we would be looking for trouble. However, I also wouldn't go back to any quiz where the question master is so much under the thumb of one loud and leery team that he will ignore them cheating during the quiz, and accuse a team that beats them of cheating because they can't take being beaten.

A Small Bouquet

Contrast this with another pub which went out of its way not to ban us. A small virtual bouquet, then, to the Dynevor Arms in Groesfaen. The problem with this quiz is that its only once a fortnight. Which meant that even with John and I only going once a fortnight, we still ended up playing in every quiz, and winning probably more than our fair share - although we never won every quiz as some other teams claimed.

The number of teams started to drop off, and when it came to head last year, we asked Ralph the question master, and he very quietly, very calmly and politely explained that the number of teams had dropped off because we kept winning. One team in particular, which often boasted 7 members stopped expressly because of us. So, Ralph explained, the response was not going to be to ban us, but to introduce a bingo-quiz. The rules as he explained them were long and tedious, but basically it meant that even if you had every question right it didn't mean that you would win. John and I made the instant decision that we would stop going, and I believe that they dropped the bingo idea, but impose a handicap on the winning team from the previous time.

What strikes me, as I look back, is that the whole thing was done without any unpleasantness. With hindsight, they didn't do the easiest thing, which would have been to ask John and me to give it a miss, but rather they said that we had every right to play, but they needed to introduce a format which allowed for a fairer share out of the money. I hope that the quiz is going strongly there now.

Mastermind Semi Final 3/6

Remember Mastermind ? I often think that the BBC look on the show as little more than an afterthought. Still, thank Heaven that when Mastermind is good, it is very, very good, and tonight's semi final ( amazingly shown on a Friday for once by BBC Wales ) was top notch.

Richard Heller, tonight's first contender, won heat 14 which was shown back in December, when he answered questions on W.C. Fields. Mr. Heller you might remember played in the 1996 Grand Final , so he was battling to become the third member of the two grand finals club, after my predecessor Geoff Thomas, and Roger Stein. he certainly gave himself every chance of doing just that with a magnificent perfect round of 16 questions and 16 correct answers on the Napoleon dynasty. Yes, apparently there were tons of them !

Paula Keaveney offered us Herbert Asquith. She won heat 19 at the end of February answering questions on the Seinfeld TV series. Its a difficult thing to do, getting more than one subject you can really excell on, and while Paula Keaveney's score of 10 and 1 pass was a good one, it really left her too far behind to make a successful bid for the win.

Thomas Armer had won heat 10 in November, with the Le Mans 24 hour race. In that heat he had achieved the rare feat of going through both Specialist and General Rounds without a single pass. Tonight he was answering on Slade - the band. I will cheerfully date myself here by admitting that Slade were the first ever band that I saw live - in their slightly later period , in the Hammersmith Odeon in 1980. Great stuff ! Alas, after a bright start Thomas Armer lost his way a bit, and found the round rather hard going, ending with 8 points and 2 passes.

John Beynon had won the 11th heat with the joint highest score of the first round, 29. His specialist subject had been Grigory Rasputin. Like Thomas Armer he too had not passed at all in his heat. Tonight he produced a sparkling round on the naturalist Gilbert White, which gave the specialist round a very pleasing symmetry since like Richard Heller he too posted a perfect round of 16 questions and 16 correct answers.

So, with two fine quizzers both already on 16, were we at last going to see this seasons first 30 point haul ? The omens were good. However as it was Thomas Armer and Paula Keaveney were to have their say first. Thomas Armer explained how Slade were something of a cut above other 'glam rock' bands since they wrote their own songs. Well said , sir. A haul of 11 points and 1 pass on GK in a semi is a very commendable achievement, and he finished with 19.

Paula Keaveney agreed with John Humphrys that Herbert Asquith should be better remembered by the great British public than he is . She too produced an impressive general knowledge performance, with 11and 5 passes. This is what a semi final is all about - good quizzing .

Richard Heller explained that Napoleon, far from being the megalomaniac dwarf portrayed by cartoonists such as James Gillray, Napoleon was a man of about average height, who inherited most of his enemies from his French Revolutionary predecessors - whose only mistake was to invade Russia. Well, if you're going to make a mistake . . . Right until the end of the round Richard Heller hardly made any mistakes in his. Halfway through the round you'd have put your shirt on him getting to thirty. A couple of wrong answers towards the end saw him stuck on 28, with just the last question pushing him up to 29 and 1 pass.

John Beynon scored 14 and no passes on General Knowledge in his first round heat. Elementary arithmetic revealed that if he could repeat his best performance, then he would do it by the narrowest of margins. Alas, there was a little hiccup, when John Humphrys asked him what HIP stood for in estate agent terminology. At first he seemed to accept John Beynon's answer
"Home Information PLAN ", but then corrected himself, and asked him to repeat. Then he explained it was a wrong answer, since it means
"Home Information PACK. " Quite right. The answer as given was wrong. what bad luck though to have to waste valuable time repeating an answer.

Very bad luck to John Beynon, but for what its worth I thought Richard Heller deserved his win, and I have to say , we have another strong contender through to the final. Three semis down - three to go. Please, BBC, let us watch the last 4 shows without any more interruptions . I am well aware that Wimbledon is rapidly approaching.

The Details

Richard Heller	The Bonaparte Dynasty	16 - 0	13 - 1	29 - 1
Paula Keaveney	Herbert Asquith	10 -1	11 - 5	21 - 6
Thomas Armer	Slade	8 - 2	11 - 1	19 - 3
John Beynon	The Naturalist Gilbert White	16 - 0	12 - 1	28 - 1

The DOND Syndrome - Patient update

ITV1 Not perhaps a Terminal Case After All

Back on the 29th March of this year I wrote about the 'Deal or No Deal Syndrome'. In case you missed this, I'll reprint what I wrote in part here : -

'"The Colour of Money" is worrying confirmation of what I call the "Deal or No Deal " syndrome. Put in simple terms, for me it is proof that the big prize quiz show bonanza which we have enjoyed since "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire " first burst onto our screens in 1998 seems to be over.

Why call it the "Deal or No Deal " syndrome ? Well, the afore mentioned show is the first show that Channel Four have managed to come up with that replicates the popularity of the much missed Fifteen To One. I feel ashamed to say it, but I quite enjoy DOND, but Fifteen to One it's not. Who cares ? Not Channel Four, and certainly not the daily audience. Look at the appeal to the makers. Everyone wins something eventually. Incredibly simple format. No questions to compile. The first time I ever saw DOND actually was in the Yorkshire TV studios in Leeds when I was a stand in for the Mastermind semis of 2006. They make Countdown there, and so I guess that they had been watching it in the green room, and couldn't be bothered to change channel. When I saw it I did think that this was a development that could spell trouble for genuine quiz shows.

So where does the Colour of Money fit into this ? Well, its different from DOND in as much as not everybody wins something on the show. However it is about making the correct, or should I say lucky , choices, and knowing where to stop, and that's pure DOND. But its prime time Saturday night. I don't know what the ratings are like on the show, but if its a success, then I'm thinking we can kiss goodnight to the chance of any more massive jackpots for a genuine quiz show. "

Well, I might not have known what the ratings were like for the show when I wrote that, but I do now. Apparently the ratings for the Colour of Money have been so much less than ITV expected or demanded that they are not even going to show the last one in the series. OK, now you all know I'm sure that I much prepare quiz shows to game shows without any form of quiz in them at all. However this post is not meant to be a gloat in any way. For one thing I have an awful lot of time for Chris Tarrant. I found him to be a damn good bloke when I appeared on Millionaire . The Colour of Money wasn't in my opinion a terrible show. However on reflection I think that it was rather overblown. Cut down the prize money. Cut it down to a half hour long, and make it move a bit quicker, and you've got a nice, early evening show that Channel 4 / Five/ or ITV2 would be proud of. However putting it out at an hour long and expecting it to hold a big audience on a Saturday night was asking too much.

Does it mean that we'll see another prime time big money quiz show coming along on ITV again ? Well, its a little early to say that yet. Time will tell.