BBC’s Mastermind is one of the longest-running and best-known quiz shows on television, pitting the country’s cleverest people against each other. Somehow, Tom Scotney found himself on it

So, let’s call up our next contestant, Tom Scotney, a journalist from Birmingham.

As I approach the famous black chair, I’m starting to regret some of my decisions, mainly the ones that led me to even consider going on this show in the first place.

On Mastermind, question master John Humphrys is like a Gok Wan for the brain. Every sagging lobe, wrinkle in the thalamus or visible cortex line put on display and poked and prodded while an audience laughs along at home.

A viewing population of a few million people smirking at your mental muffin top. The potential for national embarrassment is spectacular.

Being a regional journalist, it’s normally just the good people of Birmingham and the West Midlands that get exposed to my failings. This time I’m going country-wide.

I look at Humphrys, hoping to see a flicker of mercy – a bit of journalist-to-journalist bonhomie perhaps. But no. I’m here, on my own, about to launch into two minutes of questions on my specialist subject.

It’s nerve-wracking stuff – or at least it ought to be. Luckily for me, I had a couple pre-quiz sharpeners after a bout of nerves earlier in the day. Then a few more waiting for the show to start.

By the time it gets to walking up to the chair I’m concentrating harder on making sure I’m walking in a straight line than tripping up on the questions I’ve been revising so hard for.

But anyway, on to my specialist subject, the music of heavy metal band Iron Maiden.

I’ve been told before that I don’t look like an Iron Maiden fan. I think this is supposed to be a compliment of sorts.

But they’ve always been a band that have attracted me. If you are looking for pretension, artifice, subtlety, sensitivity, levity or maturity, there is none. Iron Maiden don’t mess around.

One of their best songs, in my humble opinion, is a twisting, musically complex rocker entitled Alexander the Great. In the hands of a band with less creative gumption than Maiden, this title might be some kind of metaphor. A muse on the human effects of ambition perhaps, on the insatiable nature of desire.

Not so with the East End’s finest. It’s a point-by-point, battle-by-battle, eight-and-a-half-minute retelling of the career and conquests of the Macedonian king, livened up with some killer guitar solos and the vocal input of Bruce “Air Raid Siren” Dickinson, of course.

And if “Alexander” doesn’t really rhyme with “Macedonia”, well that’s just the way things are.

I’ve been boning up on my Iron Maiden for some weeks before it comes to the show, and when the questions come, they’re gone in a blur.

It’s only two minutes for the questions, and two minutes is not a long time. Iron Maiden have guitar solos longer than that.

The general knowledge round zips by almost as quickly – 150 seconds of quick fire questions that are in one ear and out the other. I’d love to tell you what some of the questions were, but I can’t remember a single one.

I was hoping to rely on my pub quizzing experience, considering myself a bit of a dab hand at a boozy quiz-up. But the trick to a good performance in a pub quiz – getting in early with the easy answers and saying them in a tone of voice that lets you deny the answers later on – are no use here.

What I’d planned as a performance of cool, calm collection turns into a blurting shoutfest where I belt out the first thing that comes into my mind, and curse every time I have to say “pass”.

Things are remarkably calm in the green room afterwards – more than can be said for the room next door, where the sound of small children crying and the occasional shout indicates they’re getting ready to start filming The Jeremy Kyle Show.

Even though we’ve been competing against each other, there’s a good bit of camaraderie with the other contestants. It’s some of that blitz spirit, survivors all bonding. Having been through that bombardment together, the pressure has brought us all together.

But of course, one of us has to do it all over again – the semi-finals are coming up in a few more weeks.