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)?
