This is The Guardian. Hi there. This might not be what you're expecting. This is a bonus episode of a new podcast from The Guardian called Weekend. It's being released every Saturday. This is the last time it will be on this feed, so if you like it, make sure to subscribe. Just search for Weekend wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Weekend, a podcast that helps you switch off from your busy day to day.
and find entertainment and inspiration in the best Guardian and Observer writing from the week. You can either listen to this as one podcast or play each article as individual listens. Just scroll down the description on the podcast page for the timings of what we are featuring. Coming up, Guardian columnist Marina Hyde.
wonders whether Boris Johnson's attempts to reset his team at number 10 are like trying to reboot the reactor at Chernobyl. Hadley Freeman interviews Arrested Development's Will Arnett on a life-playing idiotic egomaniacs. Journalist Shireen Kale searches for glory on Mastermind. And finally, what if our worrying about stress is more damaging than stress itself? Nearly half of us Brits have side hustles, but they're not always easy to sustain when we have day jobs.
Adobe Express helps you to work smarter and take your business to the next level with professionally designed templates, stock imagery and AI features. You can produce great content with speed and ease. The Guardian Labs has partnered with Adobe Express so you can make a success of your side hustle. To learn more, visit theguardian.com forward slash standout by design. This message was paid for by Adobe.
Before we jump in, a quick warning. There's a bit of bad language in this episode. First up, in a week that started with Labour's Keir Starmer facing an angry mob outside Westminster, Columnist Marina Hyde examines the newest members of Boris Johnson's Clowning Street Team. This piece is read by Amber Rose Reba.
Having been instrumental in forcing the last two prime ministers out of office, Boris Johnson is on a hat-trick. Can he do it? Can Big Dog play his cards in such a way that a third prime ministerial scalp will be his? His in more ways than one? The answer feels like a hard yes, but this never-ending Greek tragedy is certainly taking its time. How's your stamina? Like me,
You maybe feel the Boristeia is dragging on a bit. Seemingly, three plays in, Shagamemnon is still with us. Anyway, we go again. One calendar week after Johnson tried to wriggle off the party gate hook by shouting something grim about Keir Starmer and Jimmy Savile, Keir Starmer was beset in the street by a mob shouting something grim about him and Jimmy Savile.
It's important to be clear that they were shouting a load of other grim stuff too, but I'm afraid that isn't the get-out Downing Street seems to think it is. In fact, it just underlines why no Prime Minister ever should be feeding dangerous conspiracy theories, which run the gamut from anti-vax all the way to anti-Semitism, via a selection of paedophile-based nonsense and much else besides.
If recent rallies and demos have taught us anything, it's that there is, increasingly, plenty of overlap. These days, all sorts of persuasions are fellow travelers. You need to be against all this stuff, elementally, not just the bits that can't get you out of a hole in the House of Commons. It's the same with mobs. The mob that targeted Jacob Rees-Mock and his son a while back.
was just as bad as the mob that surrounded Starmer and David Lammy on Monday, as was the mob that repeatedly abused Dominic Cummings in his own street. They're all a pox and a signpost of worse to come. and no politician who truly cares about their country should pander to them. Moving on to number 10 Clowning Street. It's been a lively few days of long nights.
not all of which have been wielded by the Prime Minister. I imagine Johnson has always had to spread out Valentine's Day. You can't be in that many places at once. So perhaps it's fitting that his St. Valentine's Day massacre... started in early February and is still going. Some aides have been sacked, some more significant ones have sacked themselves, and there's some kind of mini reshuffle underway. Yes.
As loyalists keep explaining, the PM is rebooting his Downing Street operation. I love the idea that this full-scale meltdown can somehow be rebooted. Like... standing in the ruins of the reactor building at Chernobyl and going, have you tried switching it off and on again? Or, as one number 10 aide explained of the personnel moves,
What this weekend was about is bringing in capable grown-up people who will make sure the machine works better. What we're doing is creating a structure which attracts professional grown-ups. Oh dear. I tend to shudder when people in politics decide to tell you they're the grown-ups. There was a Labour conference a few years ago where most of Jeremy Corbyn's frontbench repeatedly boasted they were the grown-ups.
with Starmer going for the full principal skinner by styling labourers the grown-ups in the room. Yes and no, maid. Yes and no. At present... Johnson's greatest advantage is the quality of his brutuses. Brutai? Reading another non-story about Liz Truss on Tuesday morning. She had a birthday party for Therese Coffee a few weekends ago, apparently.
leaves me more awestruck than ever at the 1D chess being played by Team Sunak. Unless Rishi's grandmasters get it together, he's going to have an uphill struggle to emerge as the Fortin Brass in all this. As for the new grown-ups in Downing Street, it is impossible to have an opinion, one way or the other, about multi-hyphenate Steve Barclay, which is presumably the point. Until Monday.
I would have said the same about the new spin doctor, Gito Harry. For years, Harry has been one of those people in public life who make you think you can get away with never finding out who they are. Like Topher Grace or the Duchess of Kent. It's a kind of give-a-toss triage, where the mind registers the name but reflexively declines to investigate. Do imagine my distress, then, to realise yesterday that as far as Gito Harry is concerned...
This state of blissful indifference can't continue. Here he comes, gurning up Downing Street with a bag from Tesco and considerable baggage from his time lobbying for Huawei. First impressions of the new number 10 comms chief? Harry looks a bit like what might happen if you put Charles Moore through an Instagram filter. Competence-wise, unfortunately.
He looks to be firing at the same level as an unfiltered Charles Moore, with his first day in the job unfolding with the same tactical skill and foresight as the latter's plan to save Owen Paterson. The only person excited about Guito Harry's appointment is tracky-bombed anti-hero Dominic Cummings, who, and I'm going to shock you, takes a dim view of it.
That said, Cummings will never allow anything to divert him for long from his nuclear attacks on Carrie Johnson, which now seem diurnal. Clearly, Mrs Johnson has made a number of mistakes. But it does feel way past time for acting like the buck stops with her. Why then, we have to ask, has that message yet to be got by Cummings?
He increasingly comes off as someone using Carrie to sublimate the peculiar nature of his anger towards his former precious Boris. The way Dom sees it, Johnson's problem was basically the... He got a wrong impregnant. How revealing of Cummings that he should alight on that styling, with its hideous old-fashioned echoes of a time where men were described as being caught by the women they impregnated.
as though their wonderful promise had been sapped out of them by some two-bit succubus. What crap! You really don't hear this kind of talk very much these days from people with half a brain, and no matter how often Dominic Cummings remembers he needs to mention this or that brilliant woman on his blog, I am not the only one to notice... What a sad little relic this self-styled futurist so often resembles. As we move into act 25 of the shit show then, it's worth course correcting to remember that
The only person responsible for messing up Boris Johnson's life and dream job is Boris Johnson. The rest are just bit parts. Whatever they'd like to think. That was a reboot at number 10. You might as well try to reboot the reactor at Chernobyl by Marina High. Read by Amber Rose Reva. After years of playing insecure brackets,
The Hollywood actor Will Arnett is taking on a new challenge, a star of the improvised celebrity cop show Murderville. He talks to writer Hadley Freeman about his weird period, his split with Amy Poehler. and having a baby in his 50s. Read by Christopher Ragland. And I mean that as the highest of compliments. From his malevolent ice skating champion in Blades of Glory to the nefarious TV executive Devin Banks in 30 Rock.
To most famously the biblically pronounced Joe Bluth, the inept oldest son on Arrested Development, Arnett has cornered the market on fools who brag about themselves to compensate. for how little they have to brag about. Like the guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for the guy who doesn't make that in three months. Come on! Job shouts at his employees. So...
It is extremely pleasing that when we connect by video chat, and Arnett appears on my screen from his home in Los Angeles, that he is sitting in front of a clutch of awards. Like the actor with a shelf of awards is going to talk to the journalist with nothing. Come on. Oh, man. I just figured out that I probably shouldn't be sitting here.
Arnett says when I ask him about the metalware behind him. It's embarrassing because it's like, hey man, we can all curate what we have in our background, and you choose to have that. I've gotten a lot of shit from friends on Zoom calls about it, but honestly, I didn't put them there. I just moved house. As well as moving house, Arnett, 52, had a baby over lockdown. Alexander, known as Denny, with his girlfriend Alessandra Braun. He also has two older sons with his ex-wife, Amy Poehler.
How has having his third baby in his 50s compared with having his first in his 30s? Well, when you already have kids, you know how long the road is. Like, this morning, just getting my two older boys out of the house and to school took a couple hours, and by the time I'm home, it's 8.30, and I'm three hours into the day already, and I'm like, oh my god, I'm in this for a while.
He says, rubbing his eyes. Arnett looks far better than anyone with a 20-month-old baby has any right to, but his handsome appearance always did undercut his loser persona. Or maybe that should be the other way around. So, he's not planning the fourth and fifth babies? He fixes his face into an exaggerated grin with wide-open, terrified eyes. No. I am absolutely not doing that. The awards are for his work on the superlative animated Netflix series Bojack Horseman, which ran from 2014 to 2020.
Because as well as being the go-to guy for malevolent doofuses, Arnett is the man to call if you're making an animated film or TV show and you need a deep and scratchy voice that audiences adore. Name a blockbuster animated film of the past 20 years, and Arnett was probably involved. Ratatouille, Despicable Me, The Lego Films, in which he played a hilariously arrogant Batman.
I think the first thing I did was, I want to say Ice Age 2, maybe? But don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those actors who are like, actually, I've done so many, I can't remember which one it is. It's purely bad memory, he adds quickly. Liza Minnelli famously swooned his baritone on Arrested Development, and I asked when he realized he had such a great voice.
and whether he does anything to take care of it, he laughs at the very thought. Never and no. It wasn't until I moved to New York that people mentioned my voice to me. Maybe in Canada, people don't really compliment each other. Actually, a member of my extended family said to me, people pay you for that voice? Unlike his characters, Arnett... who grew up in Toronto, is cursed with a very Canadian sense of self-awareness and self-mockery. I hope I'm not being too earnest, he frets at one point.
I just get so worried when I talk about my life. And yet Arnett has been famous now for decades. He didn't break through until he was almost 33. when Mitch Hurwitz, the creator of Arrested Development, cast him as Job after years of false starts. From the moment I met Mitch, my life changed. I learned so much about the world from him, and I'm a better person because of my friendship with him. You're not going to get me crying, he says, tears suddenly welling in his eyes.
Arnett was one of the breakout stars of Arrested Development, going from a complete unknown to now being cast in movie comedies such as Blades of Glory, Hot Rod, and Semipro. playing characters not a million miles from Job. I like characters who are really cocky and really dumb. That always seems to be a really great cocktail for me, he says.
And yet, over the past decade, he seemed to have enough of that cocktail. Bojack Horseman and Flaked, the Netflix series he created, wrote, and starred in 2016-2017, about a man struggling to maintain his sobriety, were melancholic rather than farce. It's a new face, he told interviewers at the time. Arnett was always a good actor. having studied at the Lee Strasberg Institute, rather than taking the usual route to comedy through sketch shows. The dramatic background helped his comedy.
His idiots are endearing because he balances the silliness with epiphanic moments of bleak self-awareness, most obviously with Job. As a result, we arrested fans, laughed at Job, but we also wanted things to work out for him. Arnett was especially excellent on BoJack Horseman. as the destructive has-been actor who knows how awful he is. Yet, he had always been so winning at playing losers, it was hard not to feel that, in jettisoning his signature character,
Something had been lost. So, it's a joy to see him in his latest Netflix series, Murderville, a US take on BBC3's Murder and Successville. in which he plays a cop named Terry Seattle. And no, I've never been there, Seattle growls. In each episode, Seattle has to solve a murder with a different celebrity trainee, Sharon Stone. Conan O'Brien, Annie Murphy, Kin Jong, and Kumail Nanjiani all taking turns in the role, and the celebrity has no script.
Yes, it's the improv celebrity cop show you didn't know you needed in your life. I was a little skeptical when I first heard about the concept, and I have seen Arnett in too many short-lived shows. But... I ended up binging it down, and at times, especially with Nanjiani's episode, I genuinely cried with laughter. It's shamelessly silly, and watching Arnett try to control the storyline...
while also bouncing off the bemused celebrity guest and still maintaining his persona as the moronic cop, feels like a glimpse of sunshine after a long winter. You can't help but grin. But why isn't Arnett's arrested co-star and off-screen best friend Jason Bateman in the show? He was supposed to be, but because of the scheduling of his other Netflix show, Ozark, he couldn't.
What happened was a bummer because... Well, wait, he says, correcting himself. Here's the good news. I actually ended up making the show with a bunch of people I didn't know, which was amazing. Because I'm lazy, I love doing stuff with my friends, but everyone was working. But actually, we ended up getting so many amazing people.
It works to the show's advantage to have Arnett trying to manage people he clearly isn't best buddies with, as it makes proceedings feel less chummy. Stone is an obvious example. She's so confident and smart, I felt like her assistant, he says. And this comes across very satisfyingly on screen. But the real joy of Murderville is that...
After the existential angst of Bojack, it's nice to see Arnett enjoying himself again. You know, the last couple years have been so weird for me, and this was just about having fun, he says. The weird years began in 2012 when Arnett and Poehler announced, after nine years of marriage, that they were separating and they divorced in 2016. They had often worked together.
And Mindy Kaling, in her best-selling memoir, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, cites their relationship as the ideal, a sentiment echoed by fans. So their split sparked an enormous amount of online commentary. What's it like going through a divorce when the outside world is so invested in you as a couple?
People talk about you like they know you, and they talk about your relationship as if they know what's going on. So, imagine how weird that is. It's brutal with any relationship, and we have kids. And without getting into specifics, you then see stuff online like, this one journalist wrote, I'm Team Amy. I'm like, you're a grown person. What are you talking about? This is a breakup.
This is a family. This isn't some game. I tell him that my favorite part of Poehler's 2014 memoir, Yes Please, is her chapter in which she imagines hypothetical books to help people through a divorce. One is called, I Want a Divorce, See You Tomorrow, to help divorced parents with young children have a knock-down, drag-out fight and still attend a kid's birthday party together on the same day.
He makes a small smile. Yeah, you get on with it. It's been almost ten years, and my kids are so lucky that Amy is their mother, and I'm so lucky that we're such a huge part of each other's lives. Even more so than we were five years ago, he says. At the time of the separation, Arnett was making season four of Arrested Development. when Netflix revived the show in 2013 after Fox abruptly ended it in 2006. He was thrilled to be back with the cast, but the shoot was, he says, almost excruciating.
Just brutal, brutal, brutal. I was driving to the set one day and I pulled over to the side of the road and cried for an hour. At least he was working with Hurwitz at the time, who, he says, helped him to turn his pain into something hilarious and cathartic on the show. That pain directly fed into Bojack Horseman and flaked.
His self-loathing, narcissistic character on the latter was, he says, an amalgamation of characteristics that I didn't like about other people and other stuff about me that I didn't like. What a weird thing to do. But it was kind of the only thing I knew how to do. It was a painful couple of years, but I had to go through it, I guess. At the time of making Flaked...
Arnett, who had been sober for well over a decade, said he was struggling with alcohol again. He winces when I bring that up. I don't know. I think we all go through things in our lives, and when we're in it, we talk very honestly about it. I don't regret saying it, but that was six or seven years ago. You know what I mean?
Arnett then went back to Arrested to make the fifth series. It is by now largely agreed among the fans that the fourth and fifth seasons aren't a patch on the original three. Did it feel different making them? You know, I think there were a lot of things in those seasons that did not work. We weren't all together for a start, he says.
referring to the scheduling difficulties that made it impossible to get the actors all together at the same time. But there were moments when we were together, and I was crying with laughter, and it was worth it for that. Maybe it was like a very expensive reunion for all of us. Another problem was that Jeffrey Tambor, who plays twins George and Oscar Bluth, had recently been fired from another TV show, Transparent.
after allegations, which he denied, of sexual misconduct. It then emerged that while filming Arrested, he had previously yelled at Jessica Walter, who played his on-screen wife Lucille, and who died last year. An awkward interview with the cast in the New York Times in 2018 about all this did little to help. especially against the background of the hashtag me too movement. Tambor has been little seen since. Is Arnett in touch with him?
Yeah, no comment. It's just a bummer all round, he says carefully. Other shows of our Nets have also come in for criticism, including BoJack, for having a white actor voice an Asian character, and 30 Rock, for featuring multiple occurrences of blackface. The show's creator and star, Tina Fey, has apologized and removed those episodes from streaming platforms. Is it harder to make comedy these days now that people are more socially aware? I don't know.
Sure, I guess. There are more ways for people to voice their displeasure these days. But then, when we made Murderville, we had a lot of laughs. He shrugs. We go back to talking about the weird years and where he is now. No longer a lost, divorced man, but a happy new father with joyful new comedy. It is crazy to me how much my whole life has shifted in five years in such a dramatic way. Isn't that wild? He says happily. We arrested fans never confused Arnett with Job, but...
As with Job, we did always want things to work out for him. That was... I cried for an hour. Arrested Development's Will Arnett on Divorce, Fatherhood and Friendship by Hadley Freeman. Read by Christopher Ragland. We'll be back after this short break. Nearly half of us Brits have side hustles, but they're not always easy to sustain when we have day jobs.
Adobe Express helps you to work smarter and take your business to the next level. With professionally designed templates, stock imagery and AI features, you can produce great content with speed and ease. The Guardian Labs has partnered with Adobe Express so you can make a success of your side hustle. To learn more, visit theguardian.com forward slash standout by design. This message was paid for by Adobe.
Welcome back to Weekend. In a bid to take her quiz credentials to the next level, Guardian journalist Shireen Kale decided to apply for the long-running British television show, Mastermind. But as she found herself sitting in the famous black chair, she began to wonder if she'd made a terrible mistake. In all honesty...
I have no idea why I decided to go on Mastermind. I love pub quizzes, sure, and I'm good at them. Pre-COVID, I was part of a crack team called Quizlamic State, who regularly took home first prize in our local one. As team coordinator, I developed a reputation for ruthlessness, brutally ejecting friends and, on one occasion, my boyfriend, if I thought they were underperforming.
At university, I was picked for our college's university challenge team, though we didn't get on the show. Too boring, apparently. The producers picked a team of historical re-enactors and archers from a different college. All of this stuff is what I say when people ask why I went on the show. But, if I'm being honest, I don't know why I did it. I don't know why I do most things.
I'm an incredibly impulsive person. Always have been. To paraphrase Kim Kardashian West's reply when asked why she filmed the sex tape that made her famous. Because I was bored. And I felt like it. I guess if I'm honest, I thought it would be a win-win situation. Nail Mastermind, in which case I have lifelong bragging rights, or don't, in which case I'll have a funny story I can write about.
Here's the funny story. Another confession. When I apply for Mastermind, I haven't watched it for years. How hard can it be? I think, with the breezy optimism of a rookie journalist thumbing a lift into a war zone. In late May, I fill out an online form and, to my surprise, get a call the following day.
The first round is a Zoom interview and a quiz with a friendly Northern Irish casting researcher. Mastermind is produced for the BBC by Hat Trick Productions, which has offices in Belfast. You did great! He says when I correctly name Virginia Woolf's artist sister, Vanessa Bell, I feel a childish jolt of self-satisfaction. The email comes through the following day.
Well done on being shortlisted for this series of Mastermind. I'm told that hardly anyone gets picked for the show, which inflates my confidence. Your score in the trial was very impressive, says a producer in a congratulatory phone call. I later wonder if the producers zeroed in on me because I'm a woman of colour, not because I was particularly good.
Historically, Mastermind has been an overwhelmingly white male show. Next, to pick my specialist subject. The answer comes quickly. The Kardashians. I know everything about that Richard family. Their plastic surgeon, Raj Kanodia. The high school they went to, Marymount High. The designer of Kim's house, Axel Vervort. The opportunity to scrape some utility from this knowledge.
like penicillin from mould, is too good to pass up. But alas, I'm not allowed to. We can't accommodate the Kardashians this series, says a cryptic email from the producers. Nor am I allowed my second choice. Spice Girls. Or my third. The novels of Jane Austen. There are only six major novels, so I figure revision will be easy, as both subjects have been featured too recently. I'm floundering. There's nothing else I want to do.
I consider the novels of Hilary Mantle, but they're so long and I've only read them once. At this point, I go dark on the producers, but they keep calling me from unknown numbers, asking if I've got another specialist subject. Flailing, I cast out the TV show I've been binge-watching during lockdown. ER. Yes, they say. That could work. ER it is.
This, I later realise, is why some people tank their specialist subjects on Mastermind. It seems the producers can refuse many of a contestant's choices, leaving them to tackle subjects they don't feel comfortable with. The contestants then don't have as much time to swat up as they would like, so they bomb. Three contestants have scored just one point on their specialist subject to date, and my heart goes out to all of them. To my credit...
I realise my insane folly a week later, when it becomes clear that I've got to re-watch all 331 hour-long episodes of VR in under six weeks before the show is filmed in early July. I send a panicked email. Please, I beg yet again. Can I just do the Kardashians? They are unmoving, but after some horse trading, the producers and I settle on an inspired compromise.
I will focus only on the character of Dr. Doug Ross in ER, who handily exits the show as a recurring character in Season 5, and even more handily, is played by George Clooney in a career-defining role. For the next six weeks... I eat, sleep and breathe Clooney, which, in all honesty, makes for the most fulfilling and erotic revision experience of my life. I listen to Setting the Tone, an ER podcast.
when I'm brushing my teeth in the morning and getting ready for bed at night. I cancel my plans and instead stay in and watch ER every evening, watching Clooney save a boy from drowning in a storm drain while wearing a tuxedo. punch child abusers, and do that classic Clooney shtick of tilting his head down, then looking up with those hangdog puppy eyes. It is rough going. Euro 2020 derails my revision, but as July rolls around...
I'm feeling good. I know Dr Ross's job title, paediatric fellow, and the names of his parents, Ray and Sarah, and how many children he has. A trick question. Most people think it's two. but he also has a son he mentions briefly in the first series. In the park a month before filming, a friend tests me on my general knowledge. I get two questions right out of twenty. I think the questions are easier than that.
I say breezily. He looks doubtful. That's the official mastermind quiz, he says. I touch down in Belfast for filming, carrying a selection of wardrobe options at the producer's request. and three pages of revision notes. Wear a fancy top, says a producer brightly in a wardrobe briefing phone call. The hotel is full of mastermind contestants, which makes for a surreal dinner, each of us sitting alone.
all of us side-eyeing each other, assessing who has the most bountiful general knowledge of them all. I nod at the man on the table next to me, without acknowledging that I know why he is there. A middle-aged woman returns from filming and begins talking about it on the phone. Like being at school, she shudders. I choke on my burger. By the following morning...
A small animal is doing yoga in my stomach. We shuffle into a conference room for the obligatory pre-filming briefing and are given paperwork to sign. To my right, two contestants are whispering about a woman in the second row. Wasn't she on Eggheads? I overhear one mutter to another. I return to my room for last-minute revision and begin to unravel.
Part of the problem is that I've seen the other contestants' revision folders, which are the Gutenberg Bible to my Spark notes. But there's nothing to be done. And, before I know it, a researcher is walking me and three other contestants to the studio for our heat. The contestants chat among themselves about other quiz shows they've been on. Virtually all of them, it seems, are old-timers.
They've been working up to Mastermind for a few years. My mouth is suddenly very dry. A lovely makeup artist does her best to calm my nerves. Really, she is so kind. And more importantly, my makeup looks great. And then, it's time to face the chair. The chair. How best to describe the mastermind chair? It is spoiled, well-worn, imposing.
Its leather has been burnished by the arses of minds far greater than mine. Minds capable of retaining all manner of trivia, while staying cool under pressure and not panic-sweating profusely via their bum cheeks onto the seat. Cellulite-free grey matter, crammed full of general knowledge like a suitcase you have to sit on to close. My mind, by comparison, is a duffel bag containing a single pair of socks.
Because of COVID protocols, there is no studio audience, which is a blessing because it gives the whole game an oddly low-stakes feel. A floor manager instructs us to stare into a camera while the mastermind music thunders. Da, da, da, da, da, da. The floor lights are raised. Da, da. What am I doing here? Clive Myrie, the host, nods me into the chair.
I'm first. He asks me my name and specialist subject. Then we're away. I get a couple wrong, a couple right. At the end of my specialist subject round, I've scored eight points. which is a respectable, though not particularly impressive, score. I definitely would have done better if I had more time to revise, as many of the questions were on minor plot points for episodes I'd only watched once, but lots of them I'd predicted, and did get right.
In all honesty, it was fun. I enjoyed it. Although I did bolt out of the chair when my round was done and had to be reminded by producers to sit back down so Myri could tell me how I did. Apparently, this happens often. After everyone else had had their turn, I'm in joint third place for the specialist subject. Which is fine, I didn't seriously expect to win.
i sigh in relief and observe the other contestants one won't stop slouching in their chair producers stop filming and ask them to sit up straight but they refuse and slump back down again within minutes I aspired to their level of song foie. When Myrie beckons me to the chair again, I realise that, for all my cramming about dishy Dr Ross, I've completely omitted to even think about the general knowledge round.
All my energy and focus has been on not tanking my specialist subject. Walking back to the chair, I think, should I have prepared for this? Could I have prepared for this? I fumble the first question. which is maddeningly easy. A question about tennis that I know, but wasn't listening to properly. And just like that, it all falls apart. I can't seem to hear the questions properly, like I'm an aeroplane and my ears won't pop.
The only sensation I can compare it to is the time I jumped off a waterfall in South America and, while free-falling through the air, realised I had badly misjudged the angle and was about to land on a rock. Uh-oh, I think. as Myrie pummels me with question after question I have no answer for. This is gonna hurt. I emerge, dazed and metaphorically bloody, with a paltry four points, leaving me with an overall score of twelve.
To my eternal shame, I spend the next five minutes actively wishing for all the other contestants to do worse than me. Annoyingly, they do not. The final scores are 17, 16, 16. And twelve. Reader, I came last. Dazed, I collect myself enough to congratulate the winner and watch, amused, as the slumpers scowls all the way back to their dressing room. I'd have killed for their score.
but they're clearly devastated. They probably think I'm an amoeba. Back at the hotel, I call my boyfriend and deliver the news. After a pause, he says, Probably not worth it in retrospect. All that effort and you came last. I consider never telling anyone about this ever. But I'd stupidly posted on social media about applying for the show and my editor saw it and asked me to write this piece and it felt worm-like to weasel out.
even though writing this has, at times, felt like acupuncture with a drill bit, or watching every embarrassing thing I've ever done on an iMac screen. Besides, I tell myself, as I lie awake at 2am, It's not like I got the lowest ever score on the show. That honour goes to athlete Kadina Cox, who scored just three points on her specialist subject of Arsenal on the Celebrity Edition and none on General Knowledge.
I wonder how she's doing. What lessons can I learn from my tale of televised quizzing mediocrity? That Mastermind is harder, I would go as far as to say considerably harder, than a pub quiz. The next time I feel like doing something dumb and impulsive, I should get another piercing. That the best way to transcend shame is to lean all the way into it, make it a funny story and come out the other side.
Because the only thing worse than a person who flubbed mastermind is a person who can't laugh at themselves. Oddly enough, I actually don't regret it that much. I still love quizzes. I definitely didn't do well, but I did go for the grandfather of all quiz shows as a complete newbie with barely any revision, like scaling K2 without supplemental oxygen, in winter, on my first attempt at climbing.
Next time, I'll try a gentle walk up Ben Nevis first. Something straightforward, like the weakest link, or pointless. Until that day. I'll return to the comfortable camaraderie of my Quizlamic State teammates. Some games are better played in the pub after all. That was... I've started, so I'll... panic. Finally, many of us live lives that can feel overwhelmingly stressful, and there is an entire industry dedicated to helping us navigate those feelings.
Author David Robson wonders whether worrying about stress is doing more damage than the feelings themselves. Read by Christopher Ragland In the late 19th century America, a somewhat bizarre form of abstinence emerged. The vice was not alcohol, but anxiety. Citizens of New York began to attend regular... don't worry clubs, in which they encouraged each other to look on the bright side of life. Their founder, Theodore Seward, argued that Americans were slaves to the worrying habit, which was the
enemy which destroys happiness. It needed to be attacked with resolute and persevering effort. By the early 20th century, the psychologist William James described how people had developed a kind of religion of healthy-mindedness. with the aim of turning the mind away from all negative thoughts and feelings. Today, we seem to be living in a global don't-worry club. Books, magazines, podcasts, and TV shows frequently outline the dangers of stress.
Many assume that anxious feelings are inherently and inevitably bad for us in the short and long term, and that they must be eliminated. Surprisingly enough, however, A growing body of research suggests that it is our beliefs about our feelings, as much as the feelings themselves, that determine their effects on the brain and body.
Negative views of stress and anxiety often exacerbate our problems. And by learning to view these uncomfortable feelings more positively, we may even be able to use some forms of stress to our advantage. To understand how this may be so let's consider a concrete example. Imagine that you are facing a difficult exam or an interview that is going to determine your future career path. If you are like most people, your pulse will speed up and your rate of breathing might increase too.
and you may well assume that this stress response will damage your performance. How are you meant to concentrate after all if it feels as if your heart is about to break through your ribcage? Now consider an alternative possibility. The physiological arousal that you are experiencing is an evolved response that helps you to deal with new challenges. Heavier breathing, for example,
fills your lungs with oxygen, and the racing pulse ensures that your blood can carry fuel to the brain, changes that should sharpen your thinking. Rather than attempting to suppress your feelings, you can go with the flow, knowing that they could give your performance a boost. Studies have now shown that simply presenting these facts to anxious people can help to shift their attitudes.
so they no longer interpret these sensations as a sign of impending failure, and that, in turn, improves their performance on difficult challenges, such as maths tests. sometimes by a considerable margin. Apart from these cognitive changes, our attitudes to stress can also alter the way we perceive our environment and what we learn from it.
When faced with a potentially unpleasant task, such as public speaking for example, people who see stress as enhancing are more likely to focus on positive aspects of the scene before them. such as the smiling faces in a crowded room, rather than dwelling on potential signs of threat or hostility. deliberately seeking feedback and searching for constructive ways to cope rather than trying to hide from the problem at hand, and their thinking becomes more flexible and creative as a result.
Our beliefs may even change our physiological responses to stressful situations. When people are taught that stress can enhance their performance and contribute to personal growth, they tend to show more muted fluctuations in the so-called stress hormone cortisol, just enough to keep them more alert without putting them in a long-lasting state of panic. They also experience a sharper spike in beneficial anabolic hormones, such as DHEAS and testosterone, which can help repair the body's tissues.
For people who see stress as dangerous or debilitating, there is barely any increase. Overall, it seems that negative beliefs about anxiety and stress create a kind of vicious cycle that pushes us into ever more catastrophic ways of thinking. The result? is that the body and brain start to react more and more as if they are in real physical danger and the only option is fight or flight.
If we begin to see those feelings as a potential source of energy and motivation, however, we can break that cycle. There is even evidence that the way we feel about stress can influence our overall longevity. One US study tracked the health of more than 28,000 people over eight years. with questionnaires that measured people's stress levels as well as their beliefs about the effects of that stress. Among people with high levels,
Those with the negative views were considerably more likely to die than those who believed that stress was harmless. Importantly, this was true even when the scientists controlled for a host of other lifestyle factors.
such as income, education, physical activity, and smoking. It's important to be careful when interpreting correlational findings like this, but Given the experimental work showing that worrying about stress results in a worse physiological response in the moment, it's plausible that the effects could add up over time to influence long-term health.
It's not necessarily easy to pull off this shift in attitude, of course. Western culture generally teaches us to get stressed about stress, and the habit can become deeply ingrained. This is not about toughing it out, which, if you're struggling to cope, can be a recipe for disaster. Nor is it about learning to simply put up with unacceptable workloads or damaging relationships.
But as you encounter some of life's smaller challenges, consider whether you might begin to view your anxiety a little more kindly as a potential source of energy and resilience. To misquote Shakespeare's Hamlet, stress may be neither good nor bad, but thinking makes it so. That was Time to Stop Worrying About Stress by David Robson, read by Christopher Ragland. That's all from us. This has been Weekend, a Guardian podcast.
If you're enjoying it, please make sure to like and subscribe. Just search for Weekend wherever you get your podcasts. The articles were read by Amber Rose Rever and Christopher Ragland and presented by me. Savannah Ayode-Greaves. This episode was produced by Rachel Porter. Music and sound design by Axel Cocoutier. The executive producers are Danielle Stephens and Nicole Jackson. Join us again next Saturday. Thanks for listening.
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