MAYBE ONE FOR THE EGGHEADS

Look, I don’t want to go on about this, but in an episode of Mastermind once, Clive Myrie, the presenter, said that, “Out there in the light [outside the studio], two minutes is a span of time in which you can boil an egg...”

I looked it up. The higher the altitude, the longer it takes to boil an egg. That’s because of air pressure - where the air is really thin, there’s less energy in the atmosphere, so you have to provide more heat for longer to get the water to boiling point.

The lower you are, the more air is stacked up over your head, meaning you can boil an egg much faster. Given that the Dead Sea is pretty much the lowest point below sea level, you’d have to assume that that’s the fastest place to boil an egg. That’s what I looked up. Guess what? 198 seconds.

Three minutes and eighteen seconds on the shore at En Gedi. My friend Paul and I went there once - we didn’t once consider taking a camping stove and a stopwatch. Seems like a missed opportunity now, doesn’t it? Oh well.

Still, not two minutes though, is it, Clive Myrie? Or is the Mastermind studio buried so far underground that you can assume ‘out there’ maybe in the green room, deep below Salford or Glasgow or wherever it is, it’s possible to boil an egg in two minutes? I still doubt anyone’s tried it.

If it were Catchphrase or Tipping Point, I might be more inclined to chalk it up as host patter, with a cheeky wink at accuracy. Those shows are after all games. Not Mastermind though - the nation’s most revered and longest running television quiz show. That needs gravitas and precision - otherwise how can we believe the question setters aren’t just scrolling Wikipedia, or double-checking with a Year 2 class, or just guessing?

I know. There must be other things you can do in two minutes: throw laundry in the machine, eat a banana, or, download a podcast.

I like a soft-boiled egg. I’m not sure I like it when it drips out of a watery shell in a lukewarm gloop of albumen and slimy yellow yoke though. I think if you’ve started, you should finish… and that means at least three minutes, eighteen seconds.

And no passes.