Review: Mastermind, BBC2 (From Lancashire Telegraph)

Review: Mastermind, BBC2

4:47pm Thursday 2nd September 2010

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WHAT has happened to Mastermind? Since Magnus Magnusson quit this, the Everest of quizzes, the questions have definitely got easier.

That has to be the case as I, sure as hell, have not become any more intelligent.

Yet, in the first of this new series, I got 14 right and my partner 19, plus there were about 15 others that we both knew. Yes, we were sad enough to watch this and hold our own competition.

I reckon, presuming you knew most of your chosen specialist subject you would be in with a shout of clocking up a respectable 20 or so, given a few lucky breaks in the general knowledge.

It’s all about narrowing down your specialism — “And you’ve chosen as your specialist subject the first two lines of Tennyson’s poem “Break Break Break” is what you want to be hearing, not “Here we go with your questions on the entire works of Alfred Lord Tennyson”.

A chap this week went for the collected works of Charles Dickens — frankly, you don’t deserve to be on if you haven’t got the wit to go for something a bit easier than that.