Ep 80: Christopher Weldon, Jasper Johnson (October 26, 2012; originally aired November 19, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Christopher Weldon gets his turn in the champion's seat after his good come-from-behind victory over Peter Smith last night.  Richard mentions that Christopher is an acting graduate as well as a writer, and that he has melded those two facets together as he has written at least one script.  Christopher says that he would like to do more scriptwriting; he has written one play already.  He admits that it might sound impressive but the play only went for ten minutes, so he can call himself a playwright with very little effort.  He'd like to write more things, and jokingly adds that he particularly wants to write anything that he can put himself in and be funny and then have people love him...

Tonight's challenger is Jasper Johnson, a year twelve student and the show's youngest competitor so far.  Jasper's grandmother is from Germany; she lives in Australia, but Jasper has always wanted to visit Germany.  Early last year (2009) he got the opportunity to do so as an exchange student; his school has a sister school in Hamburg, which is in the north of Germany.  He was there for three months, made many new friends and generally had an exciting experience.


Jasper got the early lead in the first round, and a couple of shared rounds followed.  There was an exchange of points in the middle letters rounds, and then more matched results all the way up to conundrum.  For the second time Christopher was seven points behind going into the conundrum, and once again he solved it quickly to take the win, 54 to 51.

I had a reasonable game, missing several tough maxima in the middle section but otherwise doing well enough.  Christopher was too fast for me on the conundrum again, but this time there was only a second in it.  Fortunately I'd managed to do enough in the rest of the rounds to finish comfortably ahead.