Fordyce Maxwell: 'I still wake thinking about that time I answered "gander" for a male duck'

I SAW Sally Magnusson on television recently and blushed. That, an assurance I'm sure you wish me to give, had nothing to do with the slim and youthful-looking Sally and everything to do with a memory of her late father Magnus.

What gave the memory added impetus was that she was presenting the Mastermind award to the latest winner of a contest I haven't watched since Magnus stopped presenting.

I should, but won't, 'Pass' on the fact that the glimpse also reminded me of when I filled in the questionnaire for potential Mastermind contestants only to chicken out before posting.

My specialist knowledge on some subjects – at that time FA Cup winners, bank interest rates for farmers 1977 to 1980 and Europe's common agricultural policy – was reasonable, ditto general knowledge. But I feared that at some point my mind would go blank.

I knew that could happen from watching a friend, a lifelong Liberal, going well until foundering on a question about Lloyd George and a teacher from Berwick say 'Pass' when asked for the Scottish county bordering Northumberland – Berwickshire, a mile from where she lived.

Many others fell in the same way to questions they would answer automatically in pub or classroom, but not while in the infamous black chair.

I never smiled at their discomfort. Someone who once answered "Gander" to the question "What is a male duck called?" at a young farmers' club quiz night might, reasonably, never smile again.

That was the most animated quiz I was ever at. The audience had hysterics, the scorer snapped her pencil, the quiz master had tears rolling down his cheeks. The boy who thought he should have been in the team instead of me in the first place roared until he fell off his chair.

Occasionally I still wake thinking about it. As I do of listening to Magnus speak at a farmers' union dinner where he started well before suffering that fate known, at some time, to every speaker of losing his audience.

He had been on safe ground telling farmers they were the salt of the earth, but what he obviously thought was constructive criticism about their attitude to the environment and conservation – this was 1990, before enlightenment set in – went down badly. Magnus left to muted applause and muttering.

Anxious not to miss the chance to cause further trouble in the next day's paper I followed him out to ask a few follow-up questions. It was as I came alongside his brisk walk towards his coat that I said: "You thought, 'I've started so I'll finish' didn't you?"

I would like to record that he laughed as he heard that for the 1,000th time. He didn't. He was polite but distant. He preferred not to add anything to his speech and wished me good night.

Years later I watched the episode of Father Ted in which Ted approaches Richard One Foot In The Grave Wilson and says: "Ai do not BELIEVE it!" In the sketch, Richard Wilson starts beating Ted about the head with his hat. I can only be grateful that Magnus was not wearing a hat, or carrying anything heavy. No jury would have convicted him.