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

What's happened to UK Gameshows website?

 I have to ask, has anyone else had an error - not found message every time they try to get onto UK Gameshows today?

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.           

Destination X - 7&8 Spoilers

Destination X ground inexorably onwards and at least we had two eliminations this week. If you’ve been watching the show you’ll know that it was in episode five last week that we saw for the first time one of the contestants – Pilot Josh – winning an advantage that could have affected the elimination in that show – the option to move one of his opponents’ x 250km further from the destination. As it happened it still didn’t get that contestant eliminated, and I’m glad about this. I don’t want to see someone whose X was no furthest from the destination being eliminated.

So after an ineffectual episode 6 which saw our jolly travellers messing about in Venice we’re onto episodes 7 and 8. I’ll be honest, while I do find some of the personalities on the bus interesting, I did find some of the tensions which seemed to come out on the bus in the early parts of episode 7 to be a little tedious. Suddenly out of seemingly nowhere we had marketing Saskia taking marathon Nick to task and accusing him of continually whining about how much he is hating the experience. This was a little naughty of the producers, since we, the audience, had not been show any instance of Nick doing this previously. Well, there we are.

The early cluefest provided as our intrepid half dozen were pulled off the bus by fake police made me convinced Pula in Croatia was the destination. Namely a photo of a dalmatian dog, a wanted poster showing Nikola Tesla and a cryptic crossword clue calling for an anagram of Paul.

The contestants got to play for this episode’s sneaky advantage. Basically they were taken to a dockyard at nighttime, where cranes lit up in coloured lights in sequence in a way rather reminiscent of 70’s/80s electronic Simon game. I got rather good at that. So I did pretty well. The game involved watching the sequence ad identifying a given colour – eg – which came 8^th in the sequence? Get it wrong and lose a life.

Sergeant Claire won and was given the option of saving herself and two teammates from the map room. Saving Nuclear Judith and Taxi Daren left Marathon Nick, Marketing Saskia and Pilot Josh to face the Map Room. Smart cookie Marketing Saskia told Pilot Josh it had to be Pula. Marathon Nick knew it had to be Pula, but just couldn’t find it on the map. Zbogom Nick.

So to episode 8. Now, I’ll be honest, I could see the point of the challenge, which involved balancing a football on a stick to win the chance to look at a clue. I just couldn’t see why the team had to be taken to a football pitch in Piran in Slovenia to do it. Likewise, the team had to elect one person to receive a clue, and they plumped for good old Taxi Daren. Who got to look out over the beautiful town of Piran. Why? To me there was no point in the clue whatsoever, other than giving the viewers at home a beautiful scene to look at. Speaking of challenges, in the next contestants had to play on behalf of another contestant. They had to kayak out into a lake, pick up blocks, bring them back and construct a tower. Highest would win. Dotted around the lake were clues, and it was two of these – one combining the symbol for pi and the word as, the other hinting at an anagram of the Spanish word pais, together with the tower they were building and the emphasis on balance that gave me Pisa.

Okay, but the challenge to me had just a whiff of something not quite kosher. We saw Nuclear Judith not only fail to pick up Marketing Saskia’s paddle to help her when she dropped it in the lake but seemingly push it further away, and then we saw her topple her own tower too, since she was representing Saskia. Which did seem a little out of character. Was there, perhaps an off camera member of the production team egging her on as it would make better telly?

Whatever the case, the only person she unintentionally sabotaged was her ally, sergeant Claire. Despite getting to share winner Daren’s clue, showing a lady in classic – holding up the leaning tower of Pisa - pose neither she nor Daren got it. Judith had found a ticket back in Piran for a match against San Marino, and so pushed the San Marino destination as hard as she could. Which was a little daft – the clues are not that simple to be fair. Which meant that she and Judith both plumped for the tiny republic, with Claire being a bare kilometre further away from Pisa that Judith. Daren, bless his cotton socks, couldn’t find San Marino so opted for a pin the tail on the donkey approach and seemed to stick his X in the middle of Italy. Which all goes to show that sometimes, knowing a little is more dangerous than not having a clue.

Semi final next time, and presumably the final after that. Great – the show has not outstayed its welcome.  

University Challenge 2026 First round Cardiff v. Bristol

The Teams

Cardiff

Harri Slaughter

Aeron Wheel

Carenza Danko (Capt)

Freddie Lancett

Bristol

Lewis Jenkins

Lois Connolly

Hugo Goodwill (Capt)

Nathaniel Joyce

As soon as the first starter mentioned Ilich Ramirez Sanchez Freddie Lancett went for his shooting irons and hit the target with jackal. Philosophers brought us both a brace of correct answers. We had gone an awfully long way with the next starter before the words Sonic and Mega Drive signposted the way to the answer of Sega at which point Lois Connolly opened Bristol’s account. Perennial favourite Old Cat’s Book of Practical Possums yielded a full house and put Bristol in the lead. Nobody really fancied the next starter but Nathaniel Joyce had a punt with imprinting and he was right. France’s Ecole Polytechnique (who was also a mid 80s mime artist who appeared in the Edinburgh Fringe Festival) brought two bonuses and took us all up to the first picture starter. This was a great UC special. Silhouette maps of Britain and France had three red dots showing the places of death of three Kings with the same regnal name. I thought it would be Richard because the locations seemed right and so did Lewis Jenkins, earning Bristol three more of the same thing. They took their second full house of the night. The next starter was one of those where one word suddenly makes everything clear. Joanna Bonger and artist did not seem to do much to enlighten us, but the name Theo sent Carenza Danko for the buzzer and the Cardiff skipper gave the correct answer of Van Gogh. Operas of the 1830s brought two bonuses, but at the 10 minute mark Bristol were comfortably ahead with 70 – 40.

For the next starter I followed the dictum that if it’s a 20^th century German dramatist its probably Brecht. So did Freddie Lancett. Artists with the same surname but unrelated to each other brought us both just the one correct answer. None of us knew that Kil as in Kildare and Kilkenny means church. Lewis Jenkins knew the south Asian cookery term dal. Instruments for land surveying beginning with the letter t brought two bonuses. So to the music starter and Lois Conolly was the first to recognise the distinct stylings of the Stone Roses, a popular beat combo of the 90s, so I’m told. A lovely UC special set of bonuses asked them to identify bands whose song was also used as walk out music for a Premier League Football team. And yes, I did get The Dave Clark Five and no, that’s not where my parents took my name from even though I was born in 1964 at the height of the short-lived Tottenham Sound. For the first time Bristol only managed 1 bonus. Play word association for the next starter – dinosaurs – literary award – Manhattan Concert Hall. Did you say Carnegie? Freddie Lancett did. Japanese cinema was the subject of the bonuses, specifically films with a prime number in the title, and yes, Seven Samurai was one and no, none of us got any of the others. As soon as Amol reached ‘inventor sent a signal in 1901’ with the next starter a buzzer races ensued, won by Hugo Goodwill. The Great Whin Sill only provided a single bonus. Isabella of Castille showed a clean pair of heels to both teams, and Lewis Jenkins lost five with an injudicious interruption. This meant that at the 20 minute mark Bristol led 115 to 70.

Bristol looked the more likely winners now, but a Cardiff purple patch might change everything. It didn’t begin with the next staretr as Lewis Jekins, unflustered by his previous incorrect buzz, came in with Arthur Schopenhauer, much to Amol’s approval. Stuff about making cheese – and don’t forget, blessed are the cheesemakers – brought Bristol a full house and increased the height of the mountain Cardiff would have to climb. For the second picture starter Harri Slaughter recognised the work of Rembrandt. 3 more paintings also made for city governments brought two bonuses and narrowed the gap to 50.I’m surprised nobody had the literary term corpus as in a body of work for the next starter, but there you go. Bristol buzzed early and lost five. Nobody got the word nitro for the next starter, and Cardiff in their turn came in too early and lost five. When you hear ‘Anglo Saxon’ and ‘rampart and ditch’ you buzz and say King ‘Make Me An’ Offa. Aeron Wheel did. Well, the Offa bit anyway. The latin phrase Cuius Regio Eius Religio brought one bonus, but the result was still in doubt since over tree minutes remained. It looked less doubtful after Lewis Jenkins buzzed in with the correct answer of Burkina Faso to the next starter. You know Burkina Faso – it has a capital city named after the group that had a 1983 hit with Too Shy Shy (hush hush, eye to eye). Formula 1 drivers who took more than 100 GP starts to win one brought two bonuses. What small chance Cardiff had with Lewis Jenkins’ correct buzz for the next starter to identify references to the word lag. A full house on Shakin’ Shakespeare only served to apply some gilding. Freddie Lancett gamely fought on, identifying Ely Cathedral as the Ship of the Fens for the next starter. The inaugural winners of the Kyoto Prize did nowt for me but brought 1 correct answer to Cardiff. That was it. Bristol won by 180 to 115.

For what it’s worth Cardiff achieved a BCR of 47 while Bristol achieved an excellent 74 – a coincidental inversion there. Bristol didn’t thrash Cardiff, but they were better on both buzzer and bonuses and that pretty much sums it up.

Amol Watch

We all of us have our go-to phrases. Jeremy Paxman could never introduce UCL without the phrase ‘Godless Institution of Gower Street’ and Amol always suffixes a mention of Bertrand Russell with ‘my hero’. Fair enough.

We saw the rare sight of Amol having to ask ‘anyone fancy a go?’ when both teams showed extreme reluctance to try their luck with the imprinting starter.

Interesting Fact That I Didn’t Already Know Of The Week

Kil- in Irish place names derives from a word for Church.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

Sorry to disappoint but there was nothing to initiate the chorus of dum de dums this week

Repechage Table

Sheffield	170
SOAS	170
New College Oxford	150
Cardiff	115
-----------------------------------------	------
Newcastle	105
Bath	70

 Last week we saw Bath elbowed out of the repechage slots to become the first team to definitely leave this year’s competition. This week Newcastle joined them. I can’t see it being long before Cardiff follow.

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

30 Years a Question Master

I’ve compiled a quiz for the rugby club which we’ll use this Thursday evening. I made my first for the club in July 1995 so this is the first one I’ve made since I reached my 30^th Anniversary mark. I’ll be honest, 30 years ago a) it was a whole lot more work to make a quiz for the club – and – b) somehow it was more fun.

It was more work because this was five years before I had the internet. I had amassed a small but very comprehensive quiz reference library, but checking your answers could still be quite a labour-intensive process. . Even writing out the questions was a bit of a drawn out affair. First you’d gather the different categories of questions and write them by hand ( 8 sport, 8 history/current affairs, 8 Geography etc. etc.) Then you’d write them in rounds by hand. Then, after roadtesting them in school and making final changes and corrections, you’d type out the rounds (on my Sharp electric typewriter). And one thing you did achieve through this process was by the time you made the final quiz, the questions were as clearly written as you could write them.

The picture quizzes were a whole different level of work. You’d collect newspapers, colour supplements etc. in the weeks between quizzes, and be continually selecting pictures for the next quiz. Then it was a matter of literally cutting and pasting, with real scissors and real paste. Then there was the photocopying in the local library.

It all certainly built your anticipation, I can tell you that. And sometimes it didn’t go down well which was very disappointing, but sometimes it went well, and that was just the best feeling you could have. I do think that it was all of the time and effort that I put into compiling quizzes for the club in the first ten years that made me a good enough quizzer to at least have a chance of winning Mastermind. You couldn’t help learning more about your weakest subjects if you were doing it properly.

I’ve looked back to a post I wrote in the first couple of years of this blog, in about 2009, where I pontificated on my advice on setting a quiz. This is quoted directly from it :-

“* As a rule of thumb, people never complain that the quiz is too easy. If you're in any doubt about whether a question is too hard, then simplify it, or ditch it.

* Don't go making a quiz to appeal to your own interests. Your quiz will go best when there's something for everyone in it.

* I don't think that everyone realises just how important it is to phrase a question clearly, so that it is absolutely clear what you are actually asking. Even if you do take care, you'll still get asked for clarification sometimes. But if you don't take care it can be a very frustrating experience all round.

* You will make mistakes anyway. Some questions you've included in good faith from quiz books, for example, will be wrong. That can't be helped. Making up your own questions and not checking that your answer is correct CAN be helped, and its something you really should avoid.

* Aim to write a quiz for the middle ability teams rather than the most or least knowledgable. I know that if the majority of teams are scoring about 60 out of 80, then I've pitched it just about right.

* Listen to constructive criticism. Unadulterated praise is nice, but not exactly helpful. Neither are comments along the lines of "Your quiz was crap ". If people tell you that they liked something or disliked something, then think about it. if it’s not fair comment - OK, but if it is fair, then use this to help you make your next quiz.”-

Well, to be fair to myself I was a lot more serious about quizzing in those days. Having said that, I still don’t think it’s bad advice, and if I was being particularly bitchy I’d say it was advice that would make quite a few of the quizzes in the club a lot better if some of our semi regulars followed it. Not referring to my own team here, I hasten to add. I do try to be patient. Now. Time was when a qm would ask “What is the fastest bird?” and leave it at that. Chances are, you’re sitting there thinking – fastest where? Underwater? On land? In flight? (straight line or diving?) Well, time was I would have expected a question master to have considered this when they wrote the question. So when I asked “Do you mean etc. etc.?” it used to really pee me off when the qm would say ‘I don’t know. It’s the one I have here.” Because the QM really ought to know what they’re asking. But as I said, you mellow as you get older, so when this happened a few weeks ago I just said ‘Fair enough’ and wrote down peregrine falcon. It’s usually the answer.

For over 10 years I was as keen as mustard to compile the quiz and would have done it every week if I had been allowed. Now though. . . well, by Covid it had become a chore, and even since I won’t volunteer but will aways try to do it when asked. But I’ll be honest, I only really enjoy making sets of connections questions. I was the first to introduce connections to the rugby club quiz, and many have adopted the gimmick since. Why not? I stole it myself from Geoff Evans of the Neath quiz league.

Well, considering my ‘butterfly mind’, the fact that I’m still interested enough to be doing it after 30 years is something of an achievement in itself. That’s my opinion and I’m sticking with it.