Powdered and perfumed - I should have said 'Pass'

It is easy enough to say "Pass" at once when I know that I don't know and have never known the answer to a question, but not when I know that I used to know it and, given time, may know it again - but of time there is never enough.

It is infuriating, disconcerting and timewasting to recover the answer to the third question just when the seventh has been asked.

The first draft of everything I write is peppered with blanks because I know that the more I struggle to recover the precise word I need, the more elusive it becomes - but halfway through the development of another thought, and by then absurdly irrelevant, there it suddenly is, in the forefront of my mind.

My mind was quite alert when I reached Television Centre, but the usual interminable preparations for a programme soon put paid to that - the meeting and greeting by sweet young things, the infinity of passages and stairs by which they lead one to the Green Room, the "have a sandwich, have a drink ..." and then, before one can, one is commanded to the make-up room. More scurrying, more concentration on the bums of sweet young things whose pace I cannot match. In make-up important people introduce themselves, producers, directors, executive panjandrums, and ask me how I am. "Creaking and groaning," I reply, still recovering my breath and worryingly mindful of the arthritis in my hip. They laugh, thinking it a joke. It isn't.

Powdered, perfumed and wired with a microphone, I am returned to the Green Room, a noisy, restless place set aside for several programmes, adding confusion to confusion. A television set is blaring, the coffee pot is empty and the sandwiches seem to have been ravished by a fox. The Mastermind candidates are gathered for instruction by a girl, but I cannot hear a word (nor can she hear mine).

At last we are conducted to the studio, but there, seated in three banks, the audience is being entertained by an idiot warm-up comic. The exhaustion induced by my comings and goings is far outweighed by numbing exposure to this dunderhead: he is too loud, he shrieks into his microphone; he bounces from one phalanx of the audience to another and urges each of them to join him in song - Moo-moo, Quack-quack, Grunt-grunt, each must sing in turn. Insulting, I thought, to an audience that the BBC should have assumed to be intelligent. And not until deafened and dumbed by the birdbrained prattle of this addle-pated goon were the wretched celebrities put through their paces.

Is this what happens at every performance of Mastermind, Celebrity or not? If so, then we who pay the licence fee on which the BBC depends can point to an obvious economy.