About Mastermind and Kafka

I’ve taken part in several TV quiz shows over the years, but the one that inevitably prompts admiring (I think) oohs and aahs is Mastermind, on which I appeared twice, once with hair and once not. Maybe not my very proudest achievement, but something that might get mentioned at my funeral.But on Monday my former sort-of boss Jerry Thackray aka Everett True became not a Mastermind contestant but a Mastermind question. I think I’ll just slink back into my cave.That said, I do think I should retire from the fray anyway, as my memory is playing tricks on me with increasing frequency. I was watching Orson Welles’s 1962 version of The Trial, which always feels like a minimalist dry run for Brazil, when I started to wonder why David Lynch’s take on Kafka always gets forgotten in the discussion of his work. And then I couldn’t remember whether Kyle McLachlan plays K in it, with Jeremy Irons as one of his anonymous persecutors, or the other way round. So I went to IMDb and realised that the…