Recorded Celebrity Mastermind. Researching and studying for that has been a lot like learning a stage role, like the Beckett a few years ago. Once committed, I can’t help myself. I don’t care a lot about winning, coming first, but I care a great deal that I can believe deep down that I did my best. It was torture, frankly. I was much more nervous about it than I’ve ever been about any show of my own. Up to the last minute, after make-up and the director’s pep talk, I was still cramming from my notes. My subject, T. S. Eliot and Four Quartets, was broad and deep enough. I visited Burnt Norton, the Jacobean Manor house near Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds and the title of the first of the four poems, where Eliot had gone surreptitiously in 1934, and where, in its formal garden, he found magic and inspiration that would inform him for the rest of his life. I, too, found a little magic, but nobody was home, and no soul approached me while I ambled for twenty minutes or so among the rose bushes and fruit trees. I was technically trespassing, so didn’t stay long. I made plenty of noise with big car on gravel! Still, nobody came out to question me. I wanted them to: I could have explained it all and maybe get clearance for a private tour of the gardens, set among 2,000 acres of farmland. On the way home, I was passing within a handful of miles of Little Gidding, the title of another of the quartets. There I found a 17th Century chapel, where Eliot had knelt (“You are here to kneel where prayer has been valid”) in the ‘thirties.  It, too, is a special place, tranquil and over-brimming with mystery. I sat alone in that tiny place of worship and took a few deep breaths. Seldom have I felt calmer, and it was there and then that I realised I could do that quiz without making myself look foolish and dim.

As for the General Knowledge, how do you practise that? I didn’t really. Just read the daily paper, as I always do, did the crossword, as usual, including a couple of General Knowledge ones each week…..turned out fine in the end.

Can’t tell you how I fared, can I? It will be broadcast among ten shows over two weeks across the Christmas/New Year period on BBC 1, and I don’t want to spoil it for you by giving away the ending.  But I can admit to making a couple of incredibly stupid bloopers…you will want to laugh and mock. And I will deserve it!

It was a big and nerve-wracking event for me, but then like Virginia Woolf put it, and as I have lived most of my life so far, “to speak of knowledge is futile, all is experiment and adventure”. Enjoyed a little banter with Mr Humphreys between the two rounds; our chat lasted five minutes or so, which I imagine will be edited to 90 seconds or so. I never miss Mastermind proper, but I’m not sure I want to watch myself going through the agonies in that big black chair. As it happens, once I got on a roll with the specialist subject, I didn’t want the interrogation to end! There’s a certain satisfaction in realising you know something about something.

On the down side, all that study, plus the long days of ISDN Line interviews with radio stations the length and breadth of the British Isles to promote the December tour, along with the news that my favourite engineer had been unwell for several weeks, the final preparation of the Live band CD has been put on hold. I am free now, and he is well again, so the process will certainly re-start. But there’s Norway now, then the long UK tour, so in reality, with artwork and Mastering to be done, then the factory pressing, there won’t be a Live CD on sale until the end of January. Still, with so few concerts to come next year, it’ll be a project for me, and hopefully a cheering package for many of you as the long dark winter days and nights continue on depressingly.

The tracks do sound good, and I guess it will need to be a double-album to make sure we get in the salient tracks. Just need to boost the bass-end somewhat. And erase a few musical glitches…..all mine!