Back in April I posted three pieces, each of which listed a week’s worth of questions from Pop Master, the mid-morning quiz hosted by Ken Bruce on weekdays on BBC Radio 2. The most recent of the pieces, for week ending 17 April 2020, is here, and contains links to its predecessors.

Before April I had spent three years keeping track of my scores on Pop Master and have posted a few pieces about this (most recently here, “One Thousand Rounds of Pop Master”). The extra time and effort spent transcribing every question over the course of three successive weeks has affected my ability to enjoy the quiz and treat it for what it is, a bit of fun. Not only have I stopped making detailed notes about it, I have hardly been listening to it. I even missed the end of one of the episodes in April. I only realized this when it was no longer available on the BBC Sounds App. This means that this list of “3 in 10” questions for 2020 will be incomplete, but it’s a long way from being up-to-date. I haven’t amended it since mid-April.

I have downloaded all the Pop Master Podcasts for the days I have missed and am still over four weeks behind. The business of catching up feels more daunting by the day.  This has been compounded by the sheer amount of questions posed on Bank Holiday Monday at the end of May, as part of “All Day Pop Master”. The Podcasts for the day total around three hours. I have discovered that transcribing, finalizing and posting the questions and answers takes at least double the time it takes to listen to them. If I couldn’t touch-type, and didn’t know how to use AutoText, it would take a whole lot longer.

Even so, I am not going to devote six hours to creating a record of all the questions posed on Bank Holiday Monday. I probably won’t even listen to them. I might not even listen to the 20+ episodes that have been downloaded (average time around 18 minutes each) and which are waiting for my attention. It’s just a bit of fun after all.