Annotations

 If you've watched Mind Games: The Experiment and are wondering about the little details you see, here's a FAQ*

*At the time of writing, I have had very few questions asked me even once, let alone frequently. Most of these are totally made up.

00:00:30 Nice outfit, shame about the shoes

That's my first training session - brand new sports gear, hadn't got my Asics trainers yet. I exclusively wore those velcro-fastening slip-on shoes until I got used to the trainers. Now I can't wear anything but the professional Asics footwear! Also, bending your leg like Geoff's doing is beyond my capabilities.

What's with all the branding? 

ASICS is the brand. It stands for Anima Sana In Corpore Sano. Which is almost but not quite what Juvenal said, but MSICS would just sound silly. They gave me lots of shoes and other clothing.

00:00:54 What's that at the left of the screen?

That's a shelf of video tapes belonging to my brother. Can't quite make out which ones,unfortunately.

What's on your shirt? I can't make it out!

The black one with the red circle says "I'M HUGE IN JAPAN"; the blue one with black writing says "I AM FROM SPACE"

00:01:20 Are you playing chess underwater?

Yes. It's part of the Mind Sports Olympiad, I was persuaded to go along and give it a go, but I think I need more practice (without a camera crew present) before I become a serious player. Also, I need some kind of prescription goggles to allow me to see the board underwater. I played one game and dropped out, it was all a bit of a disaster, which is probably why there's only one brief clip in the whole documentary.

00:01:41 Bandana?

Yes, red bandana. It was very sunny, I have a bald head, my trademark hat is very hot in the sun and also not prone to staying on my head when I'm exercising.

00:01:55 What are all your books?

I can't really list them all here. There's a lot of classics, a lot of comics. See how many you can recognise from the spines! The one they really show a lot, sticking out from the bookcase, is Wonder Woman newspaper comics.

Are those Mega Drive and Master System games? And an old-fashioned television? And VCR?

Yes. I live in the past. I've got a more up-to-date telly, and a Nintendo Switch, off-screen.

Wish you could afford a table for the floor lamp.

Two lamps normally live on the floor in that corner of my living room. This isn't a case of TV people moving things around and putting them in strange places - in fact, they picked one of them up and put it somewhere more sensible, to make the lighting work!

Do you have to wear shorts all the time?

Yes. My hairy legs and knobbly knees need the fresh air.

00:02:03 When was this?

It's old footage, isn't it? It's the world memory championship 2007, as recorded for The Mentalists. That would be the moment Ed described as me, "ludicrously stupidly", attempting to memorise 36 packs of cards in an hour and not succeeding. 

00:02:59 Where's that athletics track?

Halesowen. There's one a short walk away from my house, but apparently it was cheaper for us to go to the one at Halesowen. One time when they wanted to film, someone started playing music on the speakers, and when the TV people asked them to stop, the people in the gym laughed and turned it up louder. Then when they realised it was TV people and not some random nerds complaining about the noise, a hugely muscular man came out and apologised, turned the music off and chatted about the whole project. We really did go there at the crack of dawn. I was working during normal daytime hours.

00:03:04 Everyone else on this documentary is so good-looking and you're the only one who takes his shirt off?

The public wants to see this kind of thing, I promise you. If you don't, you're just weird.

00:03:53 You can only do three push-ups?

I did five, thank you very much. But yes, that was awful. There was a time in my younger days when I could do twenty at a time, and I was confident ten would be simple enough to start with. Now, though, I can do thirty!

00:07:02 Twenty-two moves?

Now, if I'd done the three-disc version and then the four-disc version, and added the scores together, that would have made 22. But I'm certain I (and by extension probably everyone else) only did three discs. These numbers may have come from some other test, but I'm not sure which one it might have been.

00:10:37 Is that where you live?

No. It's a beautiful establishing shot of beautiful England. Then we cut to inside my real house, which is much shabbier. We're watching The Mentalists on my old-fashioned video tape.

00:10:52 The Broons?

And Oor Wullie. Much-loved, long-running newspaper comic strips. Those are my collection of collected editions.

00:10:53 The Guinness Book of Records?

Yes, the 2014 edition, because that's the one that had a picture of me in it. I'm not in the book any more. I don't normally sit there looking at it, while a video of my past glories plays in the background. That makes me look rather sad and nostalgic...

00:11:13 Booyeah!

That's me breaking the 30-second barrier for memorising a pack of cards, in 2007! A great moment! And James Ponder in the background, just like he was in that clip of the world championship! He should get royalties. For that matter, so should I!

00:11:20 Nice photo.

That's the original hat, too. November 2003. This again is footage from The Mentalists. As is the cards scene afterwards, and the "legendary" bit - which I normally only say with some kind of prefatory comment that makes it clear I'm not serious.

00:11:42 An eighteen year absence.

So, yes, I was absent from memory competitions when I won the world championship in 2008 and 2009. That's how good I used to be! But see the previous blog entry - it's a mistake, but not as inaccurate as I was thinking at first.

00:11:45 Books

The Wonder Woman book mentioned earlier is blurry in the foreground. You can see Mickey Mouse newspaper comics and a Magic Eye book more clearly.

00:12:04 Are you the man being questioned?

It's an unrelated article. That's me with the cool moustache, though.

00:12:15 Very sceptical.

Amusingly, this bit was filmed right at the end, because they didn't have useable footage of me saying that (though I said it all the time, apparently off-camera, when we were starting up), so it's a tiny bit fake. But never mind!

00:21:25 Ahhh, England.

Pretty, isn't it? The camera crew travelled around the local area to find nice bits to film.

00:21:57 What's on that shirt?

"I am the man who arranges the blocks"

00:22:17 Lost a memory competition to a monkey?

A chimpanzee, actually. And I demand a rematch. Search for Ayumu.

00:22:41 Where are we now?

Oxford Street, London - the big Asics shop! Definitely unfamiliar territory for me.

00:23:58 An IQ of 159!

See, that sounds very boastful. This sentence was prefaced by saying that I took a Mensa IQ test at the age of 17 or 18, and for a short while went around telling everyone my score, and having to explain that it was a good score to get.

00:25:00 The Ben System

Yes, the first two cards there are indeed a shark, but the next two are a bar, and I guess me saying that must have been edited out.

00:25:45 The hat!

Yes, this documentary is sadly lacking in hat footage! It just doesn't seem to go with the athletic gear, somehow...

00:26:13 That's a lot of comics.

And that's only a small corner of my comic collection. It's very poorly organised - I drag piles of comics out to the front when I'm in the mood to read them. What we can see here are complete runs of Alpha Flight, Tom Strong, Metamorpho, Avengers Forever, House of X/Powers of X, New Warriors and Maison Ikkoku, and not-quite-complete runs of Micronauts and Defenders. I recommend reading all of them! Ooh, and then it pans down a bit to Runaways. Read that one, too!

00:26:17 What are those?

If you don't recognise He-Man figures then there's really no hope for you, I'm afraid.

00:26:36 Fish, chips and mushy peas

Yes, see the previous post. I didn't actually eat this; it's stage-dressing. I'd just had lunch, and then we ordered another meal so I could say the things I'd been discussing off-camera again. And so I immediately veered into an entirely different subject. I'm terrible to work with.

00:34:15 Forever Redditch!

A sneaky bit of advertising for the town I did most of my walking in!

00:35:24 What's the app?

It's called Runkeeper, and I really do recommend it!

00:47:00 The mid-study assessment

Yes, I really did get a lot better at it! I surprised myself - towards the end of the twelve minutes I said I wasn't likely to reach those flags, and I actually got well past them. My walking speed has outpaced my wildest expectations! As I recall, I did 18 push-ups in that session, and the dialogue saying 20 was from another filming session. I did 22 at the final assessment, in the pouring rain, which didn't make it into the final film.

00:51:00 The Mind Sports Olympiad!

It isn't really the biggest day in the memory sports calendar, but it is still very cool! That's the shirt designed by Phill Ash for the world championship 2014. And yes, Donatello is the coolest turtle. That's Daniel Evans, Susanne Hippauf, Nick Papadopulos, Klaus Jerrold, Ewelina Preś, and I think we get at least a glimpse of Daniele Vergine. I don't know who told me his name and I couldn't understand it. It might have been Dan Evans. I'm very bad with names, even of people I've known for decades.

00:54:30 What was your time?

I don't remember. It was very slow. That's me making sure Nick knows what to say and do - he does, of course, know perfectly, but I get very possessive about this competition even when I'm not arbiting.

00:56:25 What's on that shirt?

That's the lucky shirt - Pocket Dragons! This one has been drawn on and signed on the sleeve by Real Musgrave, creator of Pocket Dragons.

00:56:33 Who won the gold and silver?

I think it's shocking not to show it. Or for that matter the other medal-winners! One of these days, I'll manage to get another proper documentary made about memory competitions, not just about me doing exercises! Suffice to say Ewelina, Susanne, Daniele and everyone else were much better than me all round.

01:10:09 The results are staggering

I don't really know how any of those things are measured. You'd have to ask Brendon and his gang. But I'm sure there was a lot of science behind it.

01:12:30 A 5k race??

Yes indeed. Well, a parkrun. I walked, but I did 5K in around 45 minutes. Which is a fast walk, and probably wasn't quite completely the slowest time on the day! I'll probably do it again, when the weather's nice!

Did you meet the other mental athletes?

Not until after filming. Kassa and Ryoei at a publicity shoot a while before the competition, Sherry not until last week.

Are you all going to be world champions?

Probably, some day soon. Except me, maybe.