Ep 110: Matthew Thomason, Dane Watkins (May 24, 2016; originally aired December 31, 2010)

Rounds: Here.


Matthew Thomason gets a taste of the champion's seat, and it seems to be to his liking.  Tonight we find out that Matthew once shared a stage with Dame Joan Sutherland.  It was his professional stage debut, and he was working as a supernumerary (essentially, an extra), which he describes as "the lowest of the low [...] we stand around and keep very still, and try not to bump into people".  The production was an opera called Adriana Lecouvreur.  Matthew jokingly claims that at the first rehearsal he pulled Dame Joan aside, they had a chat, and agreed that she should do the singing and he should do the standing around, and that worked very well.

Tonights challenger is high school student Dane Watkins, who wants to study physiotherapy and eventually run his own clinic.  Over the last couple of years Dane has gotten into subjects such as physical education, which he says is about the theory and biomechanics of how the body works, how to heal it and prevent ourselves from damaging it any further.  (I must say, that's a far cry from what P.E. was when I was at school.)  He has found that he loves it, and he would like to grow up and learn how to apply that to help people involved in sports such as the ones he competes in himself.

At the start of round six there's another snippet revealed: Chris Scholten-Smith, the show's very first champion from episode 1, was Dane's English teacher in year 7.  Dane watched all his episodes, and apparently Chris had a big fan base back at school.


It's one of those soul-crushing games for Dane tonight -- Matthew just kept finding options that were marginally better.  It took until round six before Dane managed to get on the board at all, and I'm sure it was a relief!  Matthew scored points in every round, including a quick conundrum solution, and unsurprisingly finished greatly ahead, 64 to 15.

My game was mostly good, but once again it would have been so much better with an extra few seconds on the clock.  Three times I found better words just after the expiration of time, and one of those even eluded David's eagle eye, so that's a very rare chance to outdo him lost.  Lily stumbled in the last numbers round so that I ended up tying her and David on the solo score, but that just emphasises how much I needed to find those better words faster and so outdo them.  Maybe next time...