Monty Panesar was on Celebrity Mastermind and it did not go well

We love Monty Panesar – absolutely love him – but his Celebrity Mastermind appearance was not a triumph.

The pressure clearly got to him during the general knowledge round and he appeared to lose the ability to comprehend English sentences.

What followed was a sort of word association exercise where Monty blurted out whatever happened to be passing through his brain each time John Humphrys stopped talking.

Monty gave some very fine wrong answers. It’s actually quite hard to say which wrong answer was the finest. We’d probably narrow it down to these two.

Number one

Monty was asked which season of the year was described by the poet Keats as “a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”.

After a string of terrible answers and passes, this question presented him with an opportunity because it pretty much boils down to ‘name a season’.

Presented with a one-in-four chance of getting an answer right, Monty went with “Oliver Twist.”

Number two

Monty was asked the title of the first volume of CS Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.

We dearly hope that among all the other rejected names for the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis briefly and inexplicably considered “CJ Lewis.”

You can see Monty’s whole capitulation via the iPlayer or the bulk of the general knowledge round on this Twitter video.