The Mastermind host on why this year we need Christmas more than ever, his admiration for the Ukrainian president and the reason we all love quizzes
Clive Myrie has just emerged from having his photograph taken – the Mastermind chair, tangled up in tinsel, has turned sleigh, yanked along by cuddly reindeer. I meet him as he is having fake snow dusted from his hair and is, in his good-humoured way, getting into the Christmas spirit, singing: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…” under his breath. Myrie is a top-notch journalist and a good sport. He is 58 and has worked for more than 30 years at the BBC, familiar to viewers as a distinguished foreign correspondent and as the quizmaster who took over in 2021 on Mastermind. Now he is briskly changing out of his Christmas trousers and back into mufti: “You don’t mind, do you?” Not at all, I say, and launch into quizzing him about quizzes: how far do quizzes go back in human history? “Erm… Roman times? I don’t know. Victorians loved a quiz… didn’t they?” A comically stumped moment follows. He sits down. Is this “pass” or double fail – I can’t answer my own question (over to you, readers)?
All right, then: why do we love quizzes so much? “We like to be reminded how smart we are and, because we’re a self-effacing nation, we’re not embarrassed by not getting something right… My whole family would watch University Challenge and Mastermind and if you got a few answers right, you’d think: ‘Hey!’ If you didn’t, it’s only telly – it’s a bit of fun.” I’d have thought the fun was more complicated and had been about to explore the minor mortifications of quizzes. For it is surely no accident that Mastermind, which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, has a torture chamber of a set with inquisitorial chair, impenetrable darkness and a pitiless searchlight on the quizee (if such a word may be allowed).
