Arfor Wyn Hughes

There were many cases of contestants coming to grief on Mastermind by taking 'vocational' subjects, but probably no case is better documented than that of 1990 contestant Arfor Wyn Hughes. The Welsh-born Arfor was Head of Art and Design at a school near Stockport, and 'Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Painting 1830-1914' seemed to be a logical choice of subject. However, once in the black chair, he went to pieces. He fell at the first hurdle, being unable to remember the name of the critic who coined the term 'Impressionsm'. From then on, he went into a 'pass spiral' and at the end of the first round had scored just 5 points on his subject. Despite a sympathetic burst of applause from the audience, he could only manage a further 7 on general knowledge to finish on 12.

Arfor took his failure in good humour. Two years later he appeared in a television documentary called TV Hell, in which various TV horror stories were related. In his own slot, titled 'Disastermind', Arfor claimed to be the 'lowest living Mastermind scorer'. Subsequent successes at quizzes such as Fifteen-to-One and Today's the Day (in which he was beaten in the final by Trevor Montague) seem to indicate that Arfor's poor performance on Mastermind was down to nerves.

The ironic thing is that Arfor is not Mastermind's lowest scorer and never was. Later in the same series, Anthony Alder would score just 11 points, but the lowest ever overall score was 9, amassed by both Armando Margiotta and Sally Copeland. The lowest specialised subject score, achieved on a number of occasions, was 3.