Ep 412: Donald Piggott-McKellar, Margaret Zimmer (March 27, 2012)

It took a day and a half, but they finally allowed access to this episode from the website.  Hopefully there will not be a repetition of these difficulties for a while.

Since Ann successfully retired last game, we have two new contestants tonight.  Taking the champion's seat is Donald Piggott-McKellar, a civil engineer.  That's a pretty familiar surname, and indeed it turns out that Donald is the brother of Christopher Piggott-McKellar, who was on the show late last series and only just missed out on making the finals.  Viewers with decent memories may recall that Christopher expressed a loathing of skinny black ties; it should come as little surprise that Donald has chosen to wear one on the show.  (Donald admits that he does not like them much either, but circumstances warranted wearing one.)

Taking the challenger's seat is primary school teacher Margaret Zimmer.  She has been teaching really young children for the past nine years; Richard asks what it is she likes about that.  Margaret responds that she likes how they come in knowing nothing, and then when she looks at what they know at the end of the year she can say that she taught them all of that.  That she has made a significant impact and set them up for the rest of their education.


It's fairly close tonight; Margaret gets an early lead in the second letters round, but invalid words in the next two let Donald overtake her.  He then has an invalid word of his own in the last letters round to drop behind again, but takes the lead once more in the numbers round.  It all comes down to the conundrum, and Margaret solves it first to take the win, 38 to 34.

I had a good game this time; maybe the delay helped somehow.  Only two rounds offered improvements, and I'd not heard of the word for one of those.  The other round I was floundering and perhaps fortunate, as there is a tempting but invalid longer word which I did not even see.  I had a rare quick solve of the conundrum for a nice change, and finished just two points behind David and Lily.