Been watching Masterchef and . .

Been watching Masterchef for a while now and I notice than Gordon always says:

Your sixty minutes starts . . . now!

I notice it often because it sounds wrong to my ear. I was just watching it and now Joe's at it too. Shouldn't it be:

Your sixty minutes start . . . now!

Or is sixty minutes up there somehow equivalent to:

Your time starts . . . now!

Solution 1:

Your sixty minutes does not represent a collection of separate minutes, each of which is starting at the same time. Rather sixty minutes is a single logical unit of time.

As such, the verb starts is the proper singular form, agreeing with the logical singular time period. Start, the plural form, would be appropriate only if each and every one of those minutes started simultaneously when Gordon spoke. In which case, ironically, you would only have a single minute to win it.

Solution 2:

There are twenty four hours a day. Do we ever say there is 24 hours a day? No, we don't, or we shouldn't. The hours are sequential, they follow one after the other. The hours of the day do not and will never start simultaneously.

Did you see what I did there? I used the verb start in its plural form, not in the singular.

One hour consists of sixty minutes. (Here the verb, consists, is in the singular because the subject, one hour, is singular.)

The sixty minutes start now.

Regardless which possessive adjective precedes the noun, we ought to use the plural verb form and therefore:

My/your/his/her/our/their sixty minutes start now.