In a recent meeting where we were examining the buying patterns of our clients, one of my colleagues asked me, ‘Why would someone come to a Taster Day or to Module One of NLP Practitioner training and then not complete the journey?’ Interesting question…

It’s not a barrage of hate, because I don’t think overall this country is like that. But you’ve got certain individuals who can spout off because of the anonymity of platforms and the online world – and they can get away with it.” That programme was to become inextricably linked to his name and the phrase: "I've started, so I'll finish."whenever the bleeper sounded for the end of the round while a question was still in the process of being asked. In his early routines Bill Bailey would often parody the Mastermind music, finding it very sinister. He would then play the music on keyboard with an over-the-top hellish sounding climax. In the last episode of " Is It Bill Bailey?" he followed on from this performance with a sketch where he was a contestant on Mastermind, and it was implied that his specialist subject was the microwave cooking instructions on supermarket ready meals. As the camera panned out it became evident that the chair itself was on a platter, slowly turning in a giant microwave oven. Tom Hanks is reportedly a fan of Mastermind. He first watched it when filming ‘Saving Private Ryan’ and called it ‘The discovery of my time in the UK’. And, for the show’s final, Gary admits he tried to select pop band Girls Aloud as his specialist subject – so that he could meet one of the girl group’s sexy singers. When bosses at the show rejected his request, he opted for ‘whales, dolphins and porpoises’ as his chosen topic – taking the title by five points.

The self-explanatory phrase I’ve started, so I’ll finish gained currency in British and Irish English from its frequent use by Magnus Magnusson 1 on the BBC-Television quiz programme Mastermind, which he presented from its creation in 1972 until 1997.This defiant response to the peremptory demands of the urgent mechanical noise gave a measure of the humanity he allowed in what appeared to the viewer to be a peculiarly terrifying process.