I've Started So I'll Finish

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I’ve started so I’ll finish" – is the catchphrase that became synonymous with Mastermind, right from the first series, and made it into the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Popular Phrase: ‘In BBC TV’s quiz Mastermind, the chairman Magnus Magnusson would say this if one of his questions was interrupted when the time ran out. It became a figure of speech – sometimes also given a double meaning.’ If you want to understand who we are as a nation and a people, come to BBC News’ ... reporting from College Green in Westminster in 2016. Photograph: PJR News/Alamy I didn’t describe him as anything. I said some people might feel a certain way, which is why I’m still in a job, Sam …”

‘His learning was worn lightly and smilingly’: Mark Lawson

From the newsroom, the way to fight that battle is with the sword of truth. “It’s about maintaining trust, making it as clear as possible to those audiences that the stuff they hear and see is, to the best of our ability, going to be truthful, it’s going to be factual, it’s going to be, at the same time, a reflection of who we are. If you want to understand who we are as a nation and a people, and you want to understand what is going on in the world, come to BBC News.” The earliest occurrences of the phrase that I have found explicitly refer to BBC’s Mastermind and to Magnus Magnusson. The first of these occurrences is from the humoristic column Keith Waterhouse 2 on Thursday, published in the Daily Mirror (London, England) of Thursday 12 th January 1978: In West Yorkshire, with twenty-six teams, the usual form of greeting in many pubs is no longer “What are you having?” but “Where were the 1908 Olympic Games held?”Aberdeen-born Gary, who was has lived in Greater Manchester for 13 years, began his job at Woodbank surgery in Brandesholme last November, just three days after filming the show’s final. Producers had sworn contestants to secrecy, meaning he couldn’t tell colleagues or patients about his victory for six months. Mastermind Champions – BBC One London – 3 May 1982". BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 7 November 2014. Gascoigne was also intensely telegenic, if in a slightly eccentric way. His repertoire of encouraging or consolatory smiles or grimaces, nods and head anglings were relished by Griff Rhys Jones – who played ‘Bambi’ Gascoigne in a 1984 episode of The Young Ones – and Mark Gatiss, whose portrayal in the 2006 college comedy movie Starter For Ten introduced Bamber to generations for whom the surname was most associated with the footballer, Paul. The presenter’s unassuming charisma was a good fit for a quiz show that was visual in multiple ways, with its trompe-l’œil (a word which was more than once a starter round answer) effect of the teams sitting on top of each other (in reality, they were side by side on the studio floor). The appearances of the competitors allowed younger viewers (at least white and middle-class ones) to see people on TV who unusually looked like them – while parents and grandparents could jeer about the need to visit a barber or clothes shop. This permits the government to make further, secondary, legislation to deal with all the details that are too complex and unwieldy to be included in the Act itself. The government is now consulting on that secondary legislation in two parts.

Magnus Magnusson - Wikipedia

The latest pub craze is the general knowledge quiz, inspired, I shouldn’t wonder, by television’s Mastermind. On their 2005 Christmas Special, comedy duo French & Saunders parodied the show with Jennifer Saunders playing Abigail Wilson, a pensioner whose special subject is ceramic teapots. She passes on all but one question, which she answers incorrectly.The anonymous author of Magnus Magnusson’s obituary, published in The Telegraph (London, England) of Monday 8 th January 2007, explained that the presenter of Mastermind said I’ve started, so I’ll finish