Spectator Books: why runners up are more interesting than those who come first
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2018
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this week’s books podcast Sam Leith talks to the great trivia expert Mark Mason about his new The Book of Seconds: The Incredible Stories of the Ones Who Didn’t (Quite) Win. Here’s the Christmas present for all the Tory frontbenchers in your life. Who remembers the Christmas number two in the pop charts? Who got silver at the Olympics? Who was the second man to walk on the moon? Mark — my second choice of guest for this week’s podcast — masterfully pulls together the psychological and social implications of not quite cutting the mustard.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Spectator Radio and you're listening to The Books Podcast with Sam Leith. |
| 0:11.0 | Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Books podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator. |
| 0:16.6 | And this week I'm joined by Mark Mason, a spectator,, and Master of Trivia, whose new book is, well, even more brilliantly trivial than many of his previous ones. |
| 0:27.1 | It's called The Book of Seconds. |
| 0:29.2 | And Mark was our second choice for this podcast, so it's absolutely appropriate. |
| 0:34.0 | We should have them. |
| 0:35.8 | And it's a book about all the different people and things that |
| 0:40.3 | come second is that right what on earth would make you want to do that my editor really i was sitting |
| 0:45.0 | there having lunch with my editor one day and we were talking about roger banister this was a couple of years |
| 0:49.4 | ago before banister died and i found myself saying well he was the second man to run a four minute mile. |
| 0:56.3 | And don't you feel sorry for the guy? Because no one's ever heard of him. And then Alan had said he |
| 1:00.2 | sort of had that idea for a book before. So we ended up doing it. And it's all those people. |
| 1:03.5 | The answer to that one, by the way, is John Landy, who was an Australian guy, fantastic athlete. And as with a lot of the ones in the book, it's really luck, you know, |
| 1:13.7 | Bannister and he were both knocking right up against four minutes and it was whichever one |
| 1:17.9 | happened to be on a track first and do it. And Bannister only beat him by three weeks. |
| 1:22.2 | And Bannister only knocked a point four of a second off. He did 359.6. Landy came along and |
| 1:27.4 | did 357 point something. You know, you absolutely took a of a second off. He did 359.6. Landy came along and did 3.57 point something. You know, |
| 1:29.4 | you absolutely took a couple of seconds off it. And that was the world record for three years, |
| 1:33.8 | never mind three weeks. And it's a fascinating bloke. And yeah, and did, I mean, I'll say in some |
| 1:38.5 | sense one thinks it's this book a sort of act of redress, all these poor people who vanished into history. Yeah. |
| 1:53.5 | I mean, did a lot of the seconds that you describe in your book and, you know, sporting seconds and musical seconds and so forth, I mean, were these people who spent the rest of their lives being sort of embittered? |
| 1:55.5 | Because a lot of the nature of it is these are records. |
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