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).
But Myrie is not about to reinforce any mean-spirited suspicions about the UK’s competitive psyche. He sees his role wholesomely: helping people feel unintimidated, celebrating right answers and triumphant scores. “Mastermind is the pinnacle of quizzing, in my humble opinion, and pulls in 2 million viewers or more. The people who go on the show are people in little leagues who do it in the pub every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday night. They train for it in the way an athlete would for an important event. Some contestants have been waiting for this moment for years.”
But he does admit that it is particularly stressful competing against the clock (Mastermind, he says, is “the only timed quiz of its kind”). Sometimes, he watches “the confidence draining out of contestants’ eyes, and their brains whirring – trying to survive – as if in quicksand”. He has seen contenders who “look as if they are going to throw up or are visibly shaking. I had to ask one woman in the middle of a round: ‘Are you OK?’ She was that nervous. But she calmed down, took a deep breath, stormed it in the general knowledge round and managed to get through to the semi-finals.”
About specialist subjects, Myrie himself has no clue. “I’ve no idea about the flora and fauna of the Galápagos Islands,” he laughs. He is not bothered, marvelling at “the breadth of subject matter ordinary Brits are interested in… toy breeds of dog… the geography of Switzerland… the songs of Madonna”. He reckons that he might fare OK with general knowledge questions but describes himself as “a typical journalist – I know a little bit about a lot of things”. My bet he is that he would shine on Italy (he has a new travel series, Clive Myrie’s Italian Road Trip, airing on BBC Two next spring). Or on opera or jazz (he loves both). I ask for a seasonal musical recommendation and he singles out We Three Kings in a version by that most immaculate of trumpeters: Wynton Marsalis.
Supposing he were invited on Celebrity Mastermind (“I was asked twice – and said no!”), which charity (each celeb has to choose a charity) would he choose? “Prostate Cancer UK. My brother Peter died of it seven years ago.” And he tells me he has worn the charity’s wristband for years. He looks suddenly sad. He explains he was one of seven children: “I come bang in the middle and was first to be born in the UK.” His parents came to the UK from Jamaica in 1962 – part of the Windrush generation. And now he recalls childhood Christmases in Bolton with gusto. He would get excited “a month and a half beforehand” and became adept at seeking out the stashed presents: “We’d have a quick look behind the sofa or in the kitchen cupboard.” On Christmas Eve: “We always left out a mince pie for Santa and bread for the reindeers.”
And at dawn on Christmas Day, he was a hurricane of a boy: “The day would unfold with us waking at 4.30am, legging it downstairs, ripping stuff up. Christmas paper, off! Mum and Dad would then come down and we’d have a traditional Jamaican Christmas breakfast with ackee – a very fleshy yellow fruit that looks and tastes like a vegetable. You cook it in a pan with salted cod – the national dish of Jamaica. Then we’d be gorging on chocolates, and various uncles and cousins would come round for Christmas dinner.”
He is mindful that for many this will be the first Christmas since 2020 unfettered by Covid. During the pandemic, he reported from the Royal London hospital and described it as worse than any frontline. He also had to break the news when Boris Johnson tightened the Christmas restrictions at the 11th hour and remembers receiving an email from an irate 72-year-old accusing him of enjoying making the announcement. This stung. He emailed the man back to say: “I will not be able to see my family either – I hope you have a happy Christmas.” He got a second email – an apology.
Myrie’s reporting most recently took him to Ukraine, where his shedding a tear on camera became news in itself (he subsequently blamed wind on the rooftop). But I want to know what he made of Volodymyr Zelenskiy when he met the Ukrainian president on 14 April? “I thought he was an incredible man to sacrifice his life for this cause. And I thought he looked completely exhausted; for a brief second, I put myself in his position and felt guilty he should have to deal with an interview from me but he knew getting the message out directly – not filtered – was very important.”
Would Myrie agree we need Christmas more than ever this year? He has observed people putting up trees earlier than usual, he says, some in mid-November. “We need solace wherever we can get it,” he remarks and then stops himself to remember how hard Christmas is for many – the military, the homeless, the lonely. When I ask about the best Christmas present he ever received, he replies unhesitatingly: “This is going to sound really cheesy but it’s being with your loved ones, isn’t it?” The last two Christmases he was working. “This year I will be spending it with my wife, Catherine,” – an upholsterer and furniture restorer – he says, adding: “We don’t have children.” He can’t wait, and he has started so he’ll finish: “I am really looking forward to it.”
Mastermind is on BBC Two, Mondays, 7.30pm
