A pub quiz team’s TV glory was tainted with sadness after the death of one of their group.
‘The Shipmates’ featured tonight on the popular BBC2 quiz show, The Eggheads - and toasted victory!
But since the show was filmed at the BBC in Glasgow last March, sadly team member John Gibson has died.
The Shipmates are formed from a group of friends who are regulars at the Tuesday night general knowledge quiz at the The Ship in Marske.
The rest of the team who competed on Eggheads, the captain Sam Blain, Peter Wilson, Neil ‘Woody’ Wood and Karen Charlton, gathered in the Ship tonight to watch their victory on TV.
Said Sam: “We will be raising a toast to John tonight.
“Watching the show was something we were looking forward to but with a bit of dread.
“It would have been the cherry on the cake if John could have been with us.”
John, a retired Barclaycard manager from Marske, died suddenly in May last year aged 67.
Sam said The Shipmates had invited his widow Susan to join them to watch the show but were “unable to persuade her”.
“It’s going to be terribly emotional for everybody,” he said.
Sam, 54, an electrical engineer for Tata Steel, also from Marske, came up with the idea for the team to compete on The Eggheads and applied for the show.
The programme pits a team of five “Eggheads” (made up from eight highly regarded quiz and game show champions, rotating each episode) against a series of teams of five “challengers”, who in each episode attempt to beat the Eggheads through a series of rounds.
Sam and Karen got knocked out in the first round, but Peter, John and Woody went through to the final and won it - scooping the team £4,000 in prize money.
Sam said he contacted the BBC after John died and the show’s producers said his death would be acknowledged in some way.
Of the other team members, Peter lives in Middlesbrough and Woody lives in Redcar, while Karen also hails from Marske. A sixth member, Judith Ord, also from Middlesbrough, travelled with the team to Glasgow as a substitute.
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