Ep 18: Andrew Fisher, Andrew Patterson (August 1, 2012; originally aired August 25, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Disclaimer: While I have not seen this episode before, I did play through the blue book (episodes 1 to 50) around ten months ago when I was scheduled to be a contestant on the show.  Additionally, I did a quick flick through it a few months back to collect words for my posts about word validity.


Tonight we find out that Andrew Fisher sings in a Melbourne choir called Gloriana, which he states has a huge repertoire ranging from the 1400's through to composers who are still alive today.  Richard investigates which end of that range Andrew prefers, and is told that he likes the "way-out contempory stuff".

Tonight's challenger is Andrew Patterson, who has worked as an I.T. analyst for twenty years.  He spends his spare time composing and solving crosswords, specifically for a medical publication.  That involves a large number of medical words and clues, as one might expect.  His wife is a GP, which allows him to run ideas past her to check on them being sensible.


Having two contestants named Andrew poses the usual issues, so for the rest of this post they will be referred to as Andrew F and Andrew P.

Andrew F found a full monty early on and Andrew P was never quite able to recover from that.  Andrew P risked an invalid word in the fourth round, only for Andrew F to return the favour in the next.  The following numbers round saw both contestants miss a simple chance to gain points over the other, and then Andrew P managed the rare feat of finding a longer word than Andrew F in the last letters round.  He needed unanswered points in the last numbers round to have a chance, but it was Andrew F who did well to solve it and seal the win; he notched up yet another quick conundrum solution to round out a 67 to 35 victory.

I had decent performance tonight, although I suspect that the only reason I knew the full monty was because of this episode so there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation there.  I picked up just enough on the remaining rounds to take the win regardless, although if Andrew F had risked some of the longer words he no-doubt saw then this would likely not have been the case.  My conundrum solution was very slow -- possibly not within time, although I am assuming that it was -- but the rest of it was enough to see me home.