‘Mastermind Australia’ Grand Champion Miles Glaspole!

Hello and welcome to the latest instalment of my interview with Mastermind Australia Grand Champion Miles Glaspole. Before we moved on to discussing his extremely successful run on the show, I wanted to address a little controversy that occurred while he was still compiling the TikTok10…

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SH: A couple of years ago, there was some drama when you discovered that The Herald Sun had been stealing some of your questions and using them in their quiz! You were even interviewed about it on The Project. How did that all end up, and have there been any similar incidents since then?

MG: I received a lovely apology note from the Herald Sun‘s puzzle editor. Those questions were written by an employee phoning it in, in their last week on the job. Turns out their verifiers were all of a certain age – they wouldn’t know to check TikTok!

SH: Ah, I see. Miles, what do you like about writing quiz questions?

MG: As above – I love creating questions that make people smile and feel like their interests are valid. And because I’m annoying, the troll ones are fun too.

SH: Ha! What do you not like about writing quiz questions?

MG: Easy questions are a finite resource – only so many elements on the periodic table people know the symbols for, only so many capitals people are usually familiar with. And given media audiences are becoming more and more fragmented, the amount of pop culture that’s considered universal is dwindling by the month. Once you’ve written enough of them for a show, you can reach “peak easy”, just like “peak oil”. Scratching around for what’s left can be a slog.

SH: What common mistakes do you see contestants making when answering quiz questions on TV?

MG: Every single person who you’ve interviewed has said it, Stephen: READ. THE. QUESTION. (Or listen to it properly if it’s being yelled at you by Todd Woodbridge) There’s more reward in comprehension than speed. Take a beat to digest all the words in the question in the order that they’re written. Little words could be the Jenga brick upon which the question rests. One I did on TikTok: “What is the lowest odd prime number?” A lot of people said “two.” I very clearly said odd…

SH: (I think I already know the answer to this, but) did writing all those quiz questions every day for the TikTok10 help you on Mastermind Australia?

MG: In my experience the people who do better at quizzes are better at guessing, and that’s something that does take practice, or repeated exposure in my case. That makes it sound like radiation (and it’s had a similar effect on my life). There are a few twists of phrase that usually only mean one answer – the “Spanish surrealists” category. “Spanish surrealist” usually always means Salvador Dali, Kylie is our pop princess, Drake is the only Canadian rapper. The other handy thing to know is your etymology – Latin and Greek root words for things come up more often than you would think. I don’t know about mushrooms, but being asked about a mushroom “whose name means “beautiful woman” in Italian” was gettable. All the “tri-”, “bi-” and “quad-” openings. That sort of thing. (Belladonna, for those of you playing at home)

SH: In your various episodes of Mastermind Australia, you chose a wide range of special subjects: the bands Sparks and Tears For Fears, the TV series Dark… and AFL Grand Finals! What made you want to learn as much as possible about those particular subjects?

MG: If you only have a passing interest in your subject and feel like you’ll need to augment your knowledge with study – maybe avoid that subject unless you can absolutely dedicate your time to that study. Existing knowledge brings answers to mind readily and quickly and in a time-based show like Mastermind, that makes the difference.
I’m a born and raised Melburnian so AFL’s kind of inescapable. Luckily, I’m quite interested in it and have been to six of the last seven grand finals. Tears for Fears was a large chunk of my pop music diet in third year uni, and Sparks was the same in 2022 after the Edgar Wright doco came out. TV shows are more studyable (is that a word?) than anything else – there’s a finite number of episodes and actors. Dark was Netflix’s first original German commission and a supremely twisty time travel drama, so I’d already dedicated a lot of time in trying to understand it, just so I knew what was happening on the screen!

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And that’s where we’ll leave it for today. Next week, as our chat concludes, I ask Miles for his Top Tips for Mastermind success, we discover what he’s done with the show’s trophy, and what he’ll be up to next… So I’ll see you back here for all of that, almost exactly half a fortnight from now!