On Mastermind
Mastermind is a hugely popular British quiz show, famed for its toughness. It was first broadcast on BBC1 in 1972 with Icelandic scholar Magnus Magnusson as the ‘interrogator’. The famous theme music by Neil Richardson is entitled, appropriately enough, ‘Approaching Menace’.
The set-up is as spartan as the rules. There’s one inquisitor, four contenders, and a single black chair in a merciless spotlight. Each contender faces two rounds – the first on a subject of their own choosing, and a second general knowledge round. The inspiration for the format is said to have come from producer Bill Wright’s experiences as a prisoner under interrogation in the Second World War, and just as name, rank and serial number were the most the POW was required to divulge under the Geneva Convention, so on Mastermind the equivalents are name, occupation and specialist subject.
And then the grilling begins…
I first applied for the series which aired in 2005, and subsequently wrote up my experiences for the Press Association house magazine, by which point Magnus Magnusson had been replaced by respected political journalist John Humphrys.
SO I SAID TO JOHN HUMPHRYS…
As I set off on the long lonely journey towards the most famous black chair on TV, my only thought was: don’t trip over your shiny new shoes. Plenty of time to make a fool of yourself once you’ve sat down.
I was more keyed up than nervous. After all, this wasn’t my first time on camera. I’d already appeared – albeit briefly – on Fifteen-to-One, and been runner-up in a little-remembered history quiz called Backdate hosted by the excellent Valerie Singleton. But for the committed quiz buff Mastermind is the biggie and, after years of yelling answers at the screen from the comfort of my armchair at home, I’d decided it was time to put my money where my mouth was.
But you’ve got to be prepared for the long haul. I applied towards the end of last year and by the time my programme aired, everyone in my family had had another birthday and we’d even moved house. But throughout the process, every member of the BBC staff I encountered was unfailingly friendly, helpful and supportive. After an initial interview in Bristol, where two very nice researchers asked me twenty sample questions under show conditions, I was finally called to the recording in May. (All travel expenses paid and comfy three-star hotel for self and guest overnight.)
It’s quite a production line. Ours was the third edition of the programme to be filmed that day in the old Granada Studios in Manchester. Big black and white photographs of Albert Tatlock and Ena Sharples scowl down on you as you are conducted to the green room to meet your fellow contenders. Since we were all in the same boat the mood was one of mutual respect and camaraderie.
While nobody taking part could face the cold buffet on offer, guests were allowed to join us so my brother, the real brains of the family who has applied to be a contestant next year (specialist subject: The Grand National), continued to ply me with moral support from behind a big plate of potato salad. And then, after a quick trip to make-up between numerous trips to the loo, and a visit from the producer to check that we were each going to be asked the right specialist questions, recording began.
I was first up and the two minutes flew by. I’d thought there would have been some kind of warm-up or rehearsal, so you could at least maybe pace out your route to the big black chair, but nope – the first time you get to sit in the chair it’s game on. My original choice for this section – the novels of Evelyn Waugh – had been done too recently to be repeated, so I’d opted instead for the stage plays of Tom Stoppard, another writer I’ve always enjoyed and who also has only a finite body of work to revise. I’d reread all the plays several times during the previous few months and made notes on the kind of thing I might be asked. Such cramming seemed to pay off. I scored sixteen points with one pass and one wrong answer. At the mid-point I was tied on first place with Godfrey Newham, a retired care home proprietor from Cumbria.
There’s no half-time break to get your breath back or gather your thoughts; the general knowledge rounds follow on immediately. And it was at this point that things began to slip out of control.
In reality, the little chat you see John Humphrys have with each contestant actually goes on for five or six minutes (or so it seemed). Only edited highlights are shown in the final programme. It’s intended, I suppose, to help the audience get to know you better and maybe relax you a little.
I have to say that for me, it had the opposite effect. He may be a charming man, but I just wanted to get on with the quiz. “I’m intrigued to know how a puzzles compiler goes about his job. What do you do exactly?” He might as well have asked how long is a piece of string. And when we got on to discussing why I’d chosen my specialist subject, I found I’d forgotten all the glib and witty phrases I’d been rehearsing in the train on the way up. Pumped with adrenaline, I had to make it up on the spot. And it showed. “Didn’t understand any of that,” my wife said loyally, watching the transmission later.
So by the time the general knowledge questions began, I’d lost focus and by the time I got it back, it was too late. I ended up with roughly equal numbers of right answers, wrong answers and passes – which, as it happens, is about par for the course even when I’m playing along at home – a total of twenty-three overall. Godfrey Newham, the Delius expert, kept his cool, answered concisely, and pipped me by two points.
And that was it. My fifteen minutes of fame were over. Handshakes all round, a couple of celebratory bevvies in the pub with my fellow survivors, and a sleepless night spent shaking with delayed reaction, nerves and excitement.
It was a full three and a half months before my edition of the programme reached the screens. Next day at work friends and colleagues were generous. The consensus of opinion was that my second-round questions had been harder than everyone else’s. But while it’s true I may have scored more with theirs than I had with my own, any question is only easy if you know the answer, and the luck of the draw is the name of the game. On the day, I simply didn’t know the right stuff.
Would I do it again? Like a shot. Millionaire may have the money, Weakest Link may have Anne Robinson, but for me, Mastermind has the kudos. Doing the show was a fascinating experience. I felt good about myself for having made the effort, I’ve got a videotape that I’ll be able to bore visitors with for years to come, and my CV now contains an interesting and unusual entry.
And last but not least there’s my signed photograph of John Humphrys. “Until the next time,” he wrote. Say no more, John. My application form is already in the post.
MY GENERAL KNOWLEDGE QUESTIONS
1) A Touch of Class and The Germans were the first and last episodes of the first series of which TV comedy?
2) In Muslim countries which word used for an Arab chief or a Muslim leader comes from the Arabic ‘to be old’?
3) A regular octahedron is a solid figure each of whose eight faces have what specific geometric shape?
4) Which Virginian is said to have given his name to the execution of a presumed offender by a mob without trial under the pretence of administering justice?
5) What, in An Essay on Criticism, did Alexander Pope say is a dangerous thing?
6) What was the name of the non-fiction series launched by Penguin in 1937 with Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism?
7) What is the common name of the tree Aesculus hippocastanum which has a spiny green fruit containing one or more shiny red-brown nuts?
8) Which former prime minister is the best-known old boy of Rutledge School in Merton Park, South London?
9) What name is given to fabrics made by matting or bonding fibres, especially of wool?
10) In Greek legend, who was punished in Hades by having to push a huge stone ceaselessly up a hill only to have it roll back to the foot of the hill each time he reached the top?
11) To which part of the body does the adjective lingual refer?
12) Who wrote the 1999 book A Vision of Britain in which he criticised modern architecture?
13) First patented in 1795 by the Reverend Samuel Henshall, what is called a tire-bouchon in French, a koeketrekker in Holland and a cavatrappi in Italy?
14) Which city has been the home of the National Railway Museum since 1975?
15) Which teenage soul singer released her second album Mind, Body and Soul in September 2004?
16) Which Cambridge-born economist married the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopakova in 1925?
MY ANSWERS
1) Fawlty Towers (knew it)
2) Sheik (guessed right)
3) Equilateral triangle (Square – guessed wrong)
4) Liam Lynch (Pass – rather than say ‘kangaroo’ – just couldn’t recall it)
5) A little learning (I said “A little knowledge” – shit)
6) Pelican (Pass)
7) Horse chestnut (Prickly pear – guessed wrong)
8) John Major (Pass)
9) Felt (Pass)
10) Sisyphus (knew it)
11) The tongue (knew it)
12) Prince Charles (guessed right)
13) Corkscrew (guessed right)
14) York (knew it. Been there with the family)
15) Joss Stone (L’il Kim – guessed wrong)
16) John Maynard Keynes (Galbraith – guessed wrong, only other economist I’d ever heard of)
AND SO TO 2010
There was quite the hoo-ha when I reapplied for the show in 2010, none of it my doing, and some of it quite chagrinating. But there was also a silver lining.
Sticking to my policy of choosing a specialist subject based on a favourite author with a strictly limited corpus of work to revise (it is, after all, only meant to be a bit of fun), I selected Clive James’s wonderfully funny series of five autobiographies, Unreliable Memoirs, and, for the first round, the Television Plays of Alan Bennett.
Then just before the new series went to air, and without my knowledge, the Radio 4 arts programme, Front Row, interviewed Mr Bennett and decided to ask him the same Mastermind questions about his own plays that they had asked me. The results were printed in various national newspapers as a way, I suppose, of publicising the TV quiz. Given their similarity across the board, I suspect the articles were taken almost verbatim from the same press release. Here, for instance, is the Daily Mail:
Alan Bennett beaten by Mastermind contestant in quiz about his own plays
Starter for 10: Alan Bennett failed to get as many questions right about his plays as Mastermind contestant Robin Seavill
Playwright Alan Bennett knows less about his own plays than a Mastermind contestant who chose the writer as his specialist subject.
Questions about Bennett's TV productions are to feature in tomorrow night's BBC2 quiz as the specialist round for hopeful Robin Seavill.
But in a challenge set by Radio 4's Front Row arts programme, the writer performs less well than the contestant - despite actually creating the plays.
Presenter Mark Lawson quizzed Bennett for a programme to be aired tonight using the same set of questions.
And during the two minutes of questions for which Mastermind hopefuls are quizzed, he achieved fewer correct answers - and more passes - than the man in the black chair.
Eventually, Bennett scored a higher total of right answers. But he had been given seven more questions than Mr Seavill - a puzzle compiler - and was answering questions for more than three-and-a-half minutes.
Comparing just the two-minute sections, Mr Seavill, who works for the Press Association, was actually four points ahead.
And comparing the first 18 questions - the number which Mr Seavill faced during the allotted time under the spotlight - he would have been two points ahead.
Mastermind producers did not wish to reveal Mr Seavill's actual score for his round - the television plays of Alan Bennett - in order to preserve the tension of tomorrow night's programme.
Front Row editor John Goudie said the writer had no hesitation in taking part in their version.
'He agreed straight away. He was very sporting,' he said.
Bennett was keen to find out how he compared but Lawson said he was not allowed to say.
Asked how he felt to be a Mastermind subject, he said: 'It makes you feel dead - but lots of things do that. Watching television or reading the Sunday papers makes me feel dead.'
The modern phrase is “WTF?”
To begin with, ‘Starter for 10’ in the caption under the picture of the playwright comes from University Challenge, not Mastermind, and that is not the iconic Mastermind chair by any stretch, the photographer obviously just shouted over his shoulder at one point, “Sharon luv, bring in your typing chair from the front desk a minute will you? Oh, and a cuppa tea.”
Another modern phrase is “reached out”. I “reached out” to Mr Bennett in the aftermath to offer my profound apologies. Of course I knew his plays better than he did. He’d only written them once; during my preparations I’d watched each one at least three times, I’d read the scripts, studied them, made notes on them – I was, after all, boning up for an exam. Of course I knew the plays better than the man who wrote them! And then to be told that my choosing him made him feel dead… This was a man whose work I revered, the way Sydney loves Kafka in Mr Bennett’s own play Kafka’s Dick (Royal Court Theatre, 1986). I was frankly mortified by the whole business.
I never found out whether my grovelling email ever reached the great man’s ear. If it did and he chose to ignore me, I wouldn’t blame him in the slightest.
On the other hand, of course, I can see why they wanted to drum up a bit of publicity for the show because it had turned out to be a bit of a corker. In the first round, the main competition boiled down to two of us. I went second and managed to score fourteen while Chris Harrison to my left, a software developer from London, got fifteen on the codebreakers of Bletchley Park. In the general knowledge round, I had an equal number of happy guesses and dropped sitters with my usual number of passes (they say don’t pass, but I’d rather get on with it than sit there struggling to find an elusive answer when the next question might be easier. If you can score enough to get clear, the number of passes may not need to be taken into account at all.) In the end I managing to score another thirteen. Not enough, I thought, especially when Chris started coolly knocking off his answers with the reliability of a Chaser. I was playing along in my head, of course, trying to keep track of the score on my fingers, but very quickly resigned myself to having to deploy my brave loser’s smile once the time came to shake his hand at the end.
But what was this? Suddenly my opponent began to falter, even dropping a few sitters of his own. As the clock ticked on, tension mounted, and I’d run out of fingers so I didn’t have a clue where we stood. And then suddenly it was the last question, and the buzzer sounded just as John Humphrys finished reading it (“I’ve started so I’ll finish”): “In which city did Jane Austen live from 1801 to 1806? Two of her novels, Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, are partly set there.” “Bath,” I thought simply, “everyone knows it’s Bath. I used to work in an office just a few doors down and over the road from her lodgings in Gay Street.” “Winchester,” my opponent replied. There was a pause. “No,” John told him, in some surprise. “It’s Bath. And that was a very crucial point for reasons I’ll tell you after I’ve given you your pass…”
I had scored a total of twenty-seven with a number of passes. But Chris had scored just twenty-six. If he’d got that last question right and our scores had been tied, he’d have been handed the victory by dint of having had far fewer passes. As it was, he hadn’t, and I’d won.
An instant wave of exaltation coursed through my body, followed immediately by a second, greater wave as the realisation struck home: I was through to the next round and was going to have to bone up on Clive James for the semi-finals.
Mastermind semi-finals line-up, 2010. (l to r: RAS, Min Lacey, Peter Watkins, James Collenette, Paul Steeples. Whenever I’m on TV I always do my best to look like a nervous sack of hatchets)
I’ve loved Clive James all my life. For ten years, starting in 1972, he was the TV critic of the Observer, and he collected the best of those columns into three wonderfully funny and insightful books – Visions Before Midnight, The Crystal Bucket and Glued to the Box. In one review he’d shocked and delighted my mother with his description of David Attenborough standing up to his knees in a pile of bat poo in a cave in Borneo, with a smile on his face as radiant as the Queen Mother at the races. Anyone who can make my lovely hard-working old mother laugh like a schoolgirl on a Sunday morning gets my vote. But ever since my brother first brought home the LP A King at Nightfall, I had been equally familiar with his lyrics. Clive had met singer-songwriter Pete Atkin at Cambridge in the sixties and together they went on to produce a dozen albums of songs full of rare tenderness and beauty (see peteatkin.com).
But even despite all the books of essays and the poetry and the novels and the TV presenting and the travelogue Postcards, it was still Clive’s wit that most people remember him for. Everyone knows his famous line about Arnold Schwarzenegger looking like “a brown condom full of walnuts” – but I also appreciated his wordsmith’s ability to evoke familiar objects in new and imaginative ways: a condensation trail, for instance, ‘like a spear of snow’, is a simile that works on so many levels – the coldness, the straightness, the distance, the speed, the fuzziness around the edges. And he once drew a parallel between two things which had often seemed linked in my mind, but I couldn’t work out how until he explained it: “Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.” Clever people, I’ve found, are often the funniest people, and vice versa, and this, he had finally explained, was why. But my absolute favourite was when he conjured the vision of actress Hilary Dwyer playing opposite Gerald Harper’s eponymous hero in ITV’s Hadleigh in the early 1970s: she was, opined Clive, “one of those leggy jobs, all Botticelli shoulders and no bra.” I mean, it’s as vivid as a photoshoot isn’t it? (I was lucky enough to catch Ms Dwyer live on stage some time later in Brian Clark’s Whose Life Is It Anyway? opposite Tom Conti, and she was every bit as lovely as Clive’s description had led me to expect.)
So with my love of the man’s work and character firmly established, an easy familiarity with the books enthusiastically and enjoyably bolstered by a further reading of each, and the card index system fully committed to memory, I had no reason to feel nervous going into the arena.
No reason, but no chance to be anything else either. So much for all those years of acting and playing in college folk clubs and being on Fifteen-to-One. I was as skittish as a cat in a sauna; you can see it on the tape (now copied to DVD), my blink rate is off the chart. And it didn’t help that I was in the first chair, and the second question in my specialist round contained a small but nasty booby trap:
“James grew up in which town, after spending the war years in his aunt Dot’s house in Jannali?”
“Sydney,” I said.
“Kogarah,” I was told.
I knew it was Kogarah. Anyone who’s read the first book in the series knows it’s Kogarah. Clive even wrote a poem with it in, explaining that if you suppress the second syllable (as you should) then it scans: “Kog-rah.” And yes I know Sydney is a city not a town, but Kogarah wasn’t a town either, it was a suburb or a district or an area or a neighbourhood or a vicinity. It couldn’t have been a town… could it?
They’d told us going in that if you had any qualms about the questions at any point you were to raise them immediately so they could be addressed, but under the circumstances who’s got the presence of mind? You’re already nervous, you might have misheard, you’re too busy castigating yourself about the slip and the next question is already coming at you. And look at all those lights and the cameras and the crew and the audience – it must all be costing thousand of pounds a second, you can’t very well hold all that up just for a tentative query can you? Especially since you may be wrong… So I eventually scored twelve on my Clive James knowledge and something else on my generals, and in the end it didn’t make any difference because I was third at the halfway point and that’s where I stayed until it was all over.
I had no reason to feel cheated. Not really. One lousy question wouldn’t have changed the outcome. But here’s the silver lining I mentioned.
I’d emailed Clive to give him the traditional heads-up, and mainly to warn him in case Radio 4 came sniffing round trying to pull a similar stunt like the Alan Bennett, and he kindly replied to assure me he would be on the lookout. Sadly, it was around this time that he was starting to show the first signs of the illness that would eventually claim his life nearly ten years later, which meant there would be no more wonderful albums of songs with music by Pete Atkin and lyrics by Clive James, no more illuminating collections of articles about culture and politics and celebrity and literature, no more knotty essays about the influence of European writers I’d never even heard of, no more glittering novels about ultra-clever people who didn’t know they were born, no more travelogues, no more interviews, no more insights, no more laughs, no more him. But while he could still write, he wrote back to me. And one of the last things he wrote to me was on the day after the Unreliable Memoirs show was televised. And what he wrote was this: “You were stiffed on the Kogarah question.”
Thank you, Clive. I knew you’d understand.
STATS
FIRST APPEARANCE
Televised 30/8/2005
2 mins & 2 mins
THE CONTENDERS
Robin Seavill
Puzzles compiler from Bristol
The stage plays of Tom Stoppard
16 / 7 – 23
Nick Spokes
Librarian from Ilford
King Louis XI
13 / 5 – 18
David Wilson
Artist and translator from Cardigan
The TV series The Prisoner
13 / 8 – 21
Godfrey Newham
Retired care home proprietor from Cumbria
Frederick Delius
16 / 9 – 25 winner
SECOND APPEARANCE
Televised 1/10/2010
2 ins & 2½ mins
THE CONTENDERS
Paul Hardy
Software engineer
FA World Cup 1970–2006
8 / 9 – 17
Robin Seavill
Puzzles compiler
The television plays of Alan Bennett
14 / 13 – 27 winner
Chris Harrison
Software developer
Bletchley Park
15 / 11 – 26
Steve Taylor
Vicar
U2
13 / 8 – 21
THIRD APPEARANCE – Semi Finals
Televised 8/4/2011
1½ mins & 2 mins
THE CONTENDERS
Robin Seavill
Puzzles compiler
The Unreliable Memoirs of Clive James
12 / 10 – 22
Min Lacey
Unemployed
The Discworld novels of Terry Pratchett
8 / 10 – 18
Peter Watkins
Retired IT specialist
The Navy Lark
13 / 12 – 25
James Collenette
Retired
The novels of Raymond Chandler
10 / 6 – 16
Paul Steeples
Civil servant
Victorian churches of London
12 / 15 – 27 winner