Mastermind, review: Clive Myrie's black chair is getting a little too comfortable
Few things on TV last more than five years, let alone 50, but Mastermind (BBC Two) is up there with Gardeners’ World and Corrie as one of television’s great survivors.
This year marks the half century for the famous black chair, and it’s not hard to see why this is the quiz show that has outlived all others bar two (bonus point if you can name them): it’s because it makes people look both very clever, and yet not as clever as they think they are, all in a crisp half hour. There is a delicious schadenfreude to watching someone nail it in the specialist round, and then be unable to remember that Vin Diesel is the star of the Fast & Furious films in the general knowledge segment. I mean, come on.
Watching the first episode of the new run, now hosted by Clive Myrie after Magnus Magnusson and John Humphrys, it’s striking that this is a programme almost entirely without bells and whistles. While refreshing, this means it is at times quite dull – watching someone trying to answer questions that surely only a negligible percentile of the audience know or care about. As it happens, I both care, and would like to think know, a little bit about last night’s four specialist subjects – Peaky Blinders, Goya, Raymond Chandler and Team GB at the 2020 Olympics – but Myrie and his four mavens plonked me in my place: I got six out of a potential 60.
What saves Mastermind from total torpidity is the general knowledge round. No one likes a smart arse, and this format gives most rope for the smartest arse, if you will, to stuff it up. Oh how I laughed when the guy who knew everything about Chandler from Philip Marlowe’s lung capacity onwards, said that the top London Women’s Super League team last
year was Wigan Wanderers.
This is Myrie’s second series, and he’s as slick here as he is on the News at 10 – firm but fair. My only complaint is he needs to get his own catchphrase. It took 13 minutes for him to chime in with an “I’ve started so I’ll finish…”, and even then it was a half-hearted interjection. My preference would be for each round to end with Myrie turning to camera and unleashing a hearty “Zig-a-zig-AHHH!” Alas, at Mastermind’s glacial rate of change, it will be at least another 50 years before we get there.
