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Once More Up The Hill

I’ve had a nightmare.

I put up last week’s review a week late because I forgot to actually hit post, and now this week’s post has been mysteriously deleted from my drafts. It was all done and ready to go but I was going to read back over and post it’s morning, but its gone. This is the kind of computer-crash document-loss nonsense that I thought we’d relegated to the era before auto-save.

Earlier in the series, I started writing my drafts locally, rather than directly on my CMS, to avoid the potential for issues like this, but for some reason I typed this one out directly on the website. Which is normally fine, because it automatically saves a draft as soon as you type a single word. But on this occasion, its all gone. I don’t know where and I don’t know why, but this is what’s happened, so I’m going to have to do it all again.

It wasn’t so perfect a post that I’m going to try and recreate it from memory, but I will start with the same thing, which is an extract from the 2022 quarter-finals because this has been my theme for the past five weeks.

Its a story about my friend’s dog being offered a biscuit in a pub.

Another biscuit was proffered, and rejected, and again it was announced that the biscuit profferer was a veterinary professional, at which point my friend said rather loudly, with the intention of its being a joke (though it wasn’t taken as such), ‘I was hoping we wouldn’t need any medical intervention this evening’, which resulted in said veterinary professional slinking off with her tail between her legs. I don’t know about you, but I don’t think a ‘puppy playing perfectly pleasantly in a pub’ is a particularly pertinent use of a degree in veterinary medicine. Sure, if you see a horse in distress, and know, due to your degree in veterinary medicine that the horse is having a heart attack, then by all means, feel free to rush over and say ‘step aside, I’m a veterinary professional. That horse is having a heart attack and I know exactly what to do’… (presumably a big upside down defibrillator, but then again, I’m no veterinary professional).

I want to get quickly onto the episode since this is the second time I’m writing this, but I will start by saying that another of the 2022 posts has a formula which aims to predict the winners of the quarter-final episodes.

(1-TeamScore/(TeamScore+OpponentScore)) * TotalScore

I don’t even need to put the numbers into the equation to tell you that Imperial enter this match as heavy favourites over Queen’s, Belfast. They’ve scored 815 points to Belfast’s 515, an average of 100 per match more.

Here’s your first starter for ten

The opening question mentions the Spratly Islands, and this is enough of a clue for Spry (who shares his first three letters with the archipelago) to buzz in with South China Sea. They take a hat-trick of bonuses on the Polish philosopher Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek before Rankin gets Queen’s going with a quick buzz of Jordan Peele.

The Queen’s skipper took a second starter in a row with 10th century, before both sides dropped the picture starter, on the Masai Mara.

Salamanca Camacho won the bonuses for Imperial with a tough science question, then McKillen tied the game with barbershops. It remained tied after Queen’s missed all three bonuses on scientific symbols.

Spry took the lead back for Imperial with Queen of Sheba, proving that he doesn’t need name-based clues in the questions. Another starter for Rankin closes the gap, but Queen’s, for the second set in a row, take none of the bonuses.

Carlisle takes the music starter for Queen’s with The Waterboys, and they manage two bonuses on Phoebe Bridgers and Mac DeMarco (whose full name is Macbriare, a fact I learned the first time I wrote this review).

Stokes stokes the Imperial fire with sesame, based on the mention of tahini, one of the greatest foodstuffs known to man. A few weeks ago I visited ten Asian supermarkets in Glasgow looking for a specific brand of it, which I didn’t actually find.

A fifth for Rankin puts Queen’s 45 points clear, their largest lead of the match. Spry knows he needs to keep Imperial within touching distance, and duly obliges with Probably, Approximately Correct on the next starter. Rajan is delighted by this. He’d been hoping someone would get that starter so that he could crack out his pre-prepared joke of ‘well that’s absolutely correct’.

Salamanca Camacho comes close to tying the game, but gives Transvaal instead of Vaal when asked for a river. No matter, because Elkouby takes the replacement starter with pizzicato. Spry then gives Imperial the lead with Sally Gunnell, and Stokes extends it with RNA sequencing.

Only a few minutes to go and Imperial lead by 35 now. Have Queen’s missed their chance?

Maybe not. Hearing only ‘Meaning those who face death’, McKillen comes in with an outstanding buzz of Kurdistan to keep the Belfast quartet in it. They take a single bonus, then an excellent guess of lullaby from Thompson brings them within 5 points. but their bonus troubles return on a brutal set about photography.

A panicked guess of glass panes from Salamanco Camacho lost Imperial their 5-point lead, and Carlisle snuck in with tracery to take it back for the Northern Irish. Two bonuses put them 20 clear with less than a minute remaining.

It would take an anomalous effort from Imperial to steal this back, but Elkouby takes the next starter to give them a chance.

They lose composure and bottle the first bonus on The God Delusion, but pull back their focus to take the remaining two on other Richard Dawkins books, tying the game with 2 seconds left.

Wow.

Imperial 170–170 Queen’s

We have a tiebreak on our hands.

Which British monarch was born in the same decade as Scarlatti, Handel and Bach?

Pause.

Buzz.

Queen’s, Rankin — George II.

Rajan has a little pause of his own before slapping his hands against the table and announcing them the winners.

Imperial 170–180* Queen’s

What an episode that was. If I am doomed to review this episode every day like Sisyphus then I am glad that it was a great one. Though I’ll probably get bored eventually. I wonder how many times through it would be before I could answer all the questions before they’d even been asked.

Now, I’ve done this review twice so surely you’re going to subscribe? See you next week for Darwin vs Bristol.

#university challenge #bbc2

Pandemic Postcards

Open vs Bristol

If you’ve been following my reviews of the quarter-finals, you’ll know that I’ve been mining my archives for funny Paxman quips about the ‘labyrinthine’ nature of the double-elimination double-qualification format. You’ll also know that I haven’t found as many as I thought I was going to. Memory plays tricks on us, which is also the theme of my replacement intro because the series I was looking back over was from 2019/20.

The first QF was on 3rd Feb 2020, and was entirely in the style of the novel Ducks, Newburyport.

The second QF was on 10th Feb 2020 and featured reigning Only Connect 3rd placer Ian Wang.

The third QF was on 17th Feb 2020 and there was still nothing strange going on.

And then something happened that meant I didn’t write a review for a month… and then I returned with a 5-part special episode from the early days of the Covid pandemic.

What better thing to do, when forced to stay at home during the outbreak of a global virus that threatens not only millions of peoples lives but the very fabric of society as we know it, than catch up on watching and writing about the quiz show whose previous four episodes you had missed for various reasons, all of which seem frivolous following the outbreak of a global virus that threatens not only millions of peoples lives but the very fabric of society as we know it.

Also, I kept seeing that Twitter meme about Shakespeare having written King Lear during the plague quarantine and fancied getting involved.

When the next post was out we were in lockdown for the first time.

What is going on? When I wrote the last blog it was pretty clear that we were in a dire situation, but the inaction of the Government left it feeling like we were in some kind of limbo state, just waiting for the disaster to hit us. But then action was taken. Lockdown.

We now know exactly what we have to do (was going to list the ‘Stay Home’ instructions here, but if you’re getting your lockdown lowdown from a University Challenge blog then frankly there’s no hope for you anyway), but it still feels really surreal.

And the week after that, I was learning what the word furlough meant and how to pronounce it.

Furlough is one of those words that makes you understand how infuriating it must be to learn English as a foriegn language. Its a fairly rare word, so many native speakers won’t have known which of the ‘ough’ sounds should follow the ‘furl’ (as in rough, cough, through, plough and though etc). Is it fur-loh, fur-low, fur-luff, fur-loff or fur-loo? For me it seemed right that furlough should be fur-low, to rhyme with cow, but then furloughed to rhyme with though.

Reading these back, the strangest thing is that they are from five years ago. It doesn’t feel possible that so much time can have passed, but it must have.

It’s also clear that the pre-recorded episodes of University Challenge were a great source of comfort to me at that time, punctuating the week in a way that nothing else was. It still does this for me, though with fewer global-virus-related implications.

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Warner kicks things off for Bristol with harpies, and they took a full set of bonuses on words featuring the sequence O-C-H. They started their previous match with a string of ten starters, ending with a pretty monstrous 290–35 win over Exeter.

This match wouldn’t be entirely in their favour like that one, with Westermann opening Open’s account with Judith Butler on the second starter.

Another for Warner keeps Bristol ahead, but no one recognises Anna Karenina’s family tree on the first picture starter. Warner’s third wins the picture bonuses and they take two, missing The Golovylov Family by Mikhail Soltykov-Shchedrin, which is so much harder than all the other family tree questions.

To give an idea of the scale of this increase in difficulty, see below the number of Goodreads reviews for the four books to which the questions referred.

The Golovylov Family by Mikhail Soltykov-Shchedrin (3,066 ratings)

Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (95,521 ratings)

The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (357,311 ratings)

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (888,332 ratings)

Now, this obviously isn’t a perfect representation of how well-known a book is, but I think it gives a pretty good idea, and you’d have to be pretty well-versed in Russian literature to get the Golvylov question.

Anna Karenina has nearly 300 times as many ratings.

Did any of you get the Golovylov question? Let me know in the comments.

Back-to-back starters for Westermann keep Open within ten points, but they’d be in the lead if they could manage more than a single bonus every time.

No one gets the music starter, so Warner wins Bristol the bonuses with a replacement on the Sea of Azoz. A rapid buzz of 2014 from Payne gives Open another opportunity to close the gap and Westermann’s fourth ties the game at 75-each. One more for Warner nudged Bristol in front, but a pair of picture bonuses swung things back towards Open who took the lead for the first time in the match

Unfortunately for them and for viewers hoping for a close finish, Bristol pulled away at this point, ending the match with a 50–0 run to put one foot in the semi-finals.

Open 95–135 Bristol

On Pointless, some Pointless answers are more Pointless than others. As in, there are some which wouldn’t be Pointless if 101 people were asked rather than 100, and some which would still be Pointless is 1000 people were asked. That Golovylov question feels like it would fall into the second of these categories — would any of the teams on this year’s University Challenge have got it right?

Doesn’t matter for Bristol, who will now face one of Warwick, Darwin and Christ’s for direct passage into the last four.

Open, meanwhile, have another chance against Imperial, UCL or Queen’s, Belfast. See you next week. Subscribe if you’re not already.

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Conversations with Myself

UCL vs Darwin, Cambridge

I thought I had it sorted.

I was going to have all of my intros for the quarter-finals written ahead of time by using the reviews of old quarter-finals from the past eight years.

Paxman used to describe the format of this stage in very silly over-the-top ways and I was going to go through my old reviews and reference his melodramatic metaphors (Kafka-esque, Byzantine complexity etc…).

However, in my reviews from the 2018/19 series, I didn’t write anything about Paxman’s comments, which scuppers my plan somewhat.

There weren’t any from the 2017/18 series either, but last week I managed to bodge something together from my old intros. I’m going to have to do the same thing this week, and hope that there is more Paxman content to mine from the 2019/20 series for next week.

This intro, below, is from Episodes 33&34 (a double feature) of the 2018/19 series and is yet more evidence that I’ve been posting the exact same content the entire time.

I was going to start this by saying it had been a while since I’d last had to do a multi-episode post, but I just scrolled back and it was apparently only a few months ago, so I guess I can’t. I was also going to open with a bit about how, if I wanted to use this blog as an example of my writing prowess to any prospective employers, it would be like putting down as a reference your boss from that bar job where you’d fallen asleep midway through pouring a pint and caused a mini lager-flood.

Pretty sure I did have a link to this blog on my CV when I was applying for jobs. Maybe I even discussed it at the interview for the job I did get.

But I said that last time as well, so in addition to showing up my inconsistent posting schedule I’d also be outing myself as an uninspired self-plagiarist.

I love talking about how I’m plagiarising myself.

It is obvious, both intuitively and from the brief period when I actually did manage to upload a few hours after episodes were dropping, that the only way to grow my engagement and readership is to get my blogs online in that short window immediately after the show when people are in that sweet, sweet UC headspace.

This might have worked in the olden days, but if I post a link on X these days then my post gets nerfed, so what can a blogger do?

Thats how the internet works, you move too slow and you get left behind. So why is it that I’ve allowed myself to postpone my self-imposed deadline by a week, so that I write the previous week’s blog just before the current one should be due?

Still, it would probably be better to post the link on the day of the episode, which I haven’t done for a while. Maybe I’ll try that with this post (I didn’t)

Why is it easier to distract myself from the same focus-scattering effects of Twitter and YouTube that I should be trying to counteract by getting the work done right away after a seven-day interval has passed?

Not sure what I’m trying to say here, a typically difficult-to-parse UC Review sentence, but six years later and I still lose lots of time to Twitter and YouTube.

I can’t answer those questions, but I’m trying to get the point where I can by sleeping with my phone in the other room and reading my 12 issues for £12 Economist when I wake up instead (all the podcasts were right, its like a collection of really long tweets, but without the hashtag wars).

When we moved to Scotland, I read four weeks of the Economist back to back on Press Reader and never felt like I remembered anything. It was almost as much of an addiction as Twitter, albeit one which was far easier to kick, I haven’t read a single article since.

One advantage of the fact that no one reads these anymore is that I feel less obligation to not go off on solipsistic tangents before I’ve even started (not that the obligation ever stopped me before).

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You’re never going to stop me from going on solipsistic tangents, here’s your first starter for ten.

Darwin’s Whitaker has nineteen starters to his name from their opening two matches, but he negs the first question to put his team on minus five. UCL can’t capitalise and his teammate Willis kicks things off with Koch on the following starter. They take two bonuses on calculating devices, which add another ten points to their score.

Another for Mandel, and a hat-trick on the picture bonuses, ties the game at 35-each. Whitaker’s second of the night puts Darwin back in front, and a bonus set on film (he is doing a PhD in film) sees them take a hat-trick of their own. He takes a third, then Stewart gets in on the act with fourth floor and Darwin are flying.

No one identifies Miles Davis on the music starter, and indeed neither team even guesses a trumpet player, tricked perhaps by the fact he is playing with a mute.

UCL trail by more than a hundred points and will really need to get going if they are going to stage a comeback, but Whitaker won’t let them build any momentum, buzzing in with yet another brilliant answer of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.

Willis takes her second starter by correctly adding the number of cranial nerves to the number of pairs of ribs (in humans), twelve plus twelve.

The second picture round is on film which plays right into Whitaker’s hands, and he duly takes the starter with Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth.

UCL 120–225 Darwin

A huge win for Darwin, who I thought might struggle with their over-reliance on Whitaker, he having taken 19 of their 20 starters over the first two rounds. He remained very impressive, but his teammates chipped in with three starters this time which were very useful.

If they can perform like that again they’ll be very tough to beat.

UCL will have to dust themselves off and go again — comprehensively outbuzzed in the middle portion of the match.

If you want more UC content, I’ll have another Patreon review from the 2012/13 series out later this week.

Subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

#university challenge #bbc2 #cambridge #ucl #quizzy mondays

Time is a Flat Circle

Warwick vs Queen’s, Belfast

For last week’s introduction, I used excerpts of my University Challenge blogs from the 2016/17 series. For my other blog, a newsletter about hiking and toasters and (this week) colours, I used a report I wrote in 2013.

This might seem as though it is lazy, but as I am addressing the fact that this is what I am doing it transforms the endeavour into quite a transgressive piece of art. It becomes a meta-analysis on the nature of creativity itself, a treatise on the notion of standing on the shoulders of giants, only in this case, I am my own giant.

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The stuff I nicked (sorry, reappropriated) from my UC blogs of eight years ago related to the way Paxman used to describe the quarter-final format in ever more complicated metaphors, because he found it to be overly clandestine in nature. I was planning on doing this for each of the quarter-final matches of this series, taking some of Paxman’s analogies from different old series each week.

But when I went back to the first quarter-final from 2018/18, I saw that I had batched the ten quarter-finals in three tranches of 4, 2 and 4 episodes, meaning that there was only a single allusion to Paxman’s poetry.

“The quarter-final stage is routinely described by Jeremy Paxman as something akin to an Iron Man triathlon of the mind. A seemingly never-ending intellectual wasteland”.

So there weren’t going to be enough quotes with which to flesh out the intro, but I got to reading my intro from that post, and it feels relevant, so I am going to include it in full below.

Often, when I think about possible futures I could have, I get caught up in thoughts of how even the most exciting thing would become mundane if it were repeated day after day. Being a musician and playing shows every night would surely lose its lustre after a while.

Anything, if you did it enough times, would take on an irremovable air of monotony. I tell myself this is the reason I never learned to sing or play guitar or formed a relatable yet simultaneously alienating indie pop four-piece.

It is also the reason that when I’ve thought about writing film reviews or think-pieces about rock albums, I never have. So pervasive was the idea that at some point in the future, I would run out of things to say and begin repeating the same tired phrases that it has always been a barrier. Anticipating the problems I would experience in a life that I do not yet have, and am in fact very far from having.

And yet, here I am, 62 posts into a blog about a quiz show. The episodes are pretty much the same every week, and the list of things I can say about them is fairly limited, and I know I must have said the same things over and over again. I reckon I’ve even had a similar ramble about how repetitive I’ve become before. Of all the creative endeavours I could have chosen to pursue, why did I choose this one? And now, finally, I have reached the barrier.

Unmotivated to catch up on the past few weeks’ episodes because I felt like I’d simply be belching out standard lines about ‘buzzing early for the first starter’, I wondered if the time had come to shelve this whole thing. Why keep going if there’s going to be nothing new each week, apart from maybe one decent pun?

Seven years later and I am back at the same point, only now I have written more than 300 of these. When, I wonder, did I get over the fact that I would be spending a significant portion of each week repeating myself? When, I wonder, did I get over the fact that I would be spending a significant portion of each week repeating myself?

The point I made about running out of things to say in things like film or album reviews did hold me back for a long time. If I had all of these good ideas for essays but wrote them all before I had built an audience then what would I write for that audience after I had built it? Some of the essays I’ve written for iambic kilometres have given me the same feeling — shouldn’t I be saving this gold for later?

Both Warwick and Queen’s had impressive wins in round one, but Queen’s took their foot off the gas in the second round whereas Warwick kept up their momentum. Still, that’s proof of nothing — Queen’s had it relatively easy against Cardiff despite the low scores so perhaps they were saving themselves for the last eight.

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Hart and Siddle look like they’re having a race on the first starter, and in the end Hart beats his captain with the 12th century. They take two bonuses, before a neg from Queen’s skipper Rankin allows Watson in to extend their lead.

Rankin makes up for his mistake with Teller on the next starter, pushing Queen’s up into positive figures and another starter by the same man wins them a very tough bonus set on Ye-ye music and the 1965 Eurovision song contest.

The picture starter is a map of the Motherwell postcode region, but its dropped by both sides. Watson wins the bonuses for Warwick and they manage one, on Taunton. One of the towns they miss is Llandrindod, which would surely only be gettable for someone who lives in Wales. There are nine postcode areas in Wales, and this is the toughest to guess by far.

CF — Cardiff

CH — Chester

GL — Gloucester

HR — Hereford

LD — Llandrindod Wells

LL — Llandudno

NP — Newport

SA — Swansea

SY — Shrewsbury

I’d be very interested in what percentage of viewers got that question right because the LD postcode area is the second smallest in the UK (behind KW — Wick in the North of Scotland, which is probably more guessable).

Rankin takes a third starter with hydrogen, but they draw a blank on the bonuses, then Hart takes two on the bounce to stretch out Warwick’s lead. Watson recognises on the music starter and they are into triple figures, but miss all of the bonuses.

Govindarajan takes a starter with Low Wood, and Warwick are cruising. Hart is the star of the show, and ends on nine starters, some of which you sense he gets due to his sky-high confidence, buzzing earlier than he might have if he weren’t already crushing it, like a footballer scoring with a speculative effort when they’re on a hat-trick.

Rankin makes a go of it for Queen’s, ending on seven starters, but no one else on his team manages any, and they floundered on the bonuses, taking a mere 7 of 21.

One of the bonuses they did manage was on the second picture round, on female actors playing male roles in Shakespeare. They recognised King Lear as played Kathyrn Hunter, who I saw in an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead which was one of the most transcendental pieces of media I have ever seen.

The match ends with three-in-a-row from Hart followed by three-in-a-row from Rankin, but it had been over as a contest long before then.

Queen’s 95–215 Warwick

The over-reliance of Queen’s on skipper Rankin finally came home to roost, while Warwick, and Hart in particular, looked supremely confident.

Next week see UCL take on Darwin, another team who have relied heavily on a single player for starter questions.

#university challenge #bbc2

The Minibus of Despair

Imperial vs Christ's, Cam

Most knockout tournaments are simple ‘lose and go home’ affairs, but in 2010 University Challenge decided that this was too simple and did not befit a program of such intellectual stature. Instead, we have the DEDQ system, whereby you must win twice to progress and lose twice to go home.

It’s quite elegant and means that we get to watch the best eight teams a few more times than we would under a regular knockout format.

Paxman always seemed convinced that the format of the quarter-finals was too complicated for most PhD students to grasp, despite the fact it is simple enough to be understood by people who can’t spell PhD, but you had to let him have his fun, didn’t you?

As I alluded to earlier, I’m going to mine my archives for mentions of Paxman’s old descriptions of the DEDQ format, which he badmouthed every series. This week, see below some extracts from the 2016/17 series…

From Warwick vs Emmanuel, Cam

I don’t want to have to do this every week, but if the venerable Pax keeps describing the quarter-final stage as something vaguely on par with a meteor strike in terms of its desolation, I’m going to have to continue to rebuff his exaggerations.

From Imperial vs Nuffield, Ox

This week the adjective he opted for was Kafkaesque, despite the distinct lack of monstrous beetles contesting the show.

From Emmanuel, Cam vs Corpus Christi, Ox

Another week, and another Paxman comparison of the ten-match quarter-finals to the works of a writer particularly associated with the bleak and lugubrious.

Tonight it was the turn of Edgar Allan Poe, as Jeremy continued his one-man crusade against the so-called “remorselessness” of this format. I’m starting to think he has real feelings of hatred towards this stage, as if the six extra shows he has to film on top of the regular four of other quarter-finals trap him each year in some form of tortured purgatory.

From Balliol, Ox vs Birmingham

Paxman says the losers this week will ride ‘off into the sunset’, rather than the ‘minibus of despair’, which Bristol took a few weeks ago. His hard-line attitude to what he sees as an apocalyptic quarter-final stage is clearly softening as it begins to draw to a close.

Onto the episode itself, which promises to be a cracker. Imperial are the defending champions and are seeking a fourth title in six years. They started the series on a heater, with consecutive 300-point victories, extending the unbeaten run of their institution to fourteen matches.

Christ’s, meanwhile, have posted two scores in the 200s, though they have faced tougher matches.

You can watch the episode here before reading my review.

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Here’s your first starter for ten.

Bethlehem buzzes first for Christ’s with novella, on which he uses a jaunty Italian accent. They take a hat-trick on theatre before Firman extended their lead with obelisk.

Spry countered with leprosy and a second in a row for the Imperial captain brought them back within five points. They took the lead with an early buzz from Elkouby, but Despard quickly tied the game with Wuthering Heights. Already, Imperial are being pushed harder than they were in either of their opening two matches.

Spry continues his strong start with mass spectrometry, an answer for which Rajan rewards him with three ‘well done’s.

Well done,

well done,

Their bonuses are on French potato cooking techniques, and they take deux.

Salamanca Camacho, Imperial’s MVP in the earlier rounds, takes his first starter of the match, and the London quartet have their healthiest lead of the episode — 40 points.

Christ’s took the music starter, but two more from Spry put Imperial in a very solid position going into the final third.

The Cambridge side refused to sit down though, and Luu swung back with curvature to keep them in the game. An improvised guess of vibraphone from Bethlehem closed the gap further, and already they had scored more than Imperial’s two previous defeated opponents combined.

Salamanca Camacho won the second picture starter with Durer, and backed this up on the next 10-pointer with Apollonius.

They were 50-points clear with less than five minutes to go but Christ’s weren’t done yet, and a superb buzz of synchrotron from Despard set up a grandstand finish. Bethlehem followed this up with a pair of clutch buzzes, and the match was tied at 160 apiece.

Imperial are on a three-and-a-half-minute drought, and this gets larger when Despard buzzes with gastrulation. Christ’s have the lead!

Will Imperial have the chance to fight back?

No. No, they won’t.

Christ’s answer the bonuses as quickly as possible, no hint of stalling for time here, but the gong still sounds with the scores at 180–160 in their favour.

Phew, what a game.

Imperial 160–180 Christ’s

The best game of the series so far, given the number of lead changes and that epic comeback. Two awesome teams who may well both make the semi-finals. And just like that, a 4-year, 14-game unbeaten run is snapped.

Subscribe if you enjoyed the review — I will be leaving X soon so if that is your only way of finding these posts you’ll need to join the mailing list. Thanks x (that’s a kiss, not a lowercase X for Twitter)

#university challenge #bbc2

Zen and the Art of Tumblr Scrolling

Lying on my back in Shavasana at yoga on Monday, I tried to work out whether I had entered a flow state at any point during the practice. Was I in flow right now? The fact that I was thinking about it indicated that I probably wasn’t, but you never know.

Since watching The Alpinist at the weekend, I have been thinking about flow a lot. The film is a documentary about Marc-Andre LeClerc, a Canadian climber who performed record-breaking feats in the world of Alpine climbing, mostly by himself with no one else even knowing he was there.

Having another person or a camera filming him reduced the sense of flow he got from the climbing. The removal of all potential safety nets added to his sense of serenity, to the deepness of the flow state that he could achieve while climbing.

Other professional sportspeople often talk about entering the zone, a mental state where they are nothing but pure focus, acting on the instinct of infinite practice sessions, not consciously thinking about anything whatsoever, only doing.

You can reach it by writing too. I do so sometimes, most often if I am writing by hand or if I turn off the WiFi. Perhaps the most famous method is meditation. Which seeks to reach the state of empty-brainedness using nothing but thought, or rather, the absence of thought. This feels a lot harder than reaching it by writing, but a lot easier than reaching it by ice-climbing a frozen waterfall.

We have seen plenty of examples of people in a flow state on University Challenge, acting without thinking, accessing their knowledge from a place they aren’t really aware of in the moment. Thinking consciously is too slow, and they need to be fast, to be able to enter a zen-like state and trust the muscle memory of the automatic thought patterns they have been practising.

Another common feature of the flow state is an unawareness of time passing.

This brought me to another question:

Do we enter a flow state while scrolling Instagram?

Now hear me out — you are on Instagram, or Twitter, or TikTok, YouTube, whatever. The medium is irrelevant because they all operate in the same way. They hijack our attention and keep us focused on whatever they are showing us. We aren’t thinking, we are just flowing from post to post, video to video, reel to reel, and then when we look up we find that half an hour has passed.

Intuitively it feels like this can’t be a flow state, because everyone agrees that it is not a good thing. We leave the experience dissatisfied, drained of dopamine because we’ve been getting all of these minor hits, crashing our supply.

So, that must be the difference. I was going to write something about fugue states, but I’ve turned the WiFi off so that I don’t accidentally enter a Google-based flow state, so I’m not able to check what a fugue state actually is. From my understanding, they are different to a flow state because you don’t have any recollection whatsoever of what you were doing when you were in the state, whereas with a flow state, you have a constant, detached awareness of what’s going on.

I wrote last year about dopamine, and about how dopamine is built by effort. It doesn’t take any effort or focus to reach the state of scrolling Instagram. The effect may be the same but there hasn’t been any effort to reach it, making it hollow. Maybe that’s it.

If anyone else has some genuine physiological expertise I would welcome a second opinion on the matter. Even if you’ve got no expertise, to be honest, I mean, I have none and I’ve just written an essay on the subject.

I’m going to try and maintain my proper sense of flow here, even though I have to turn the internet on to watch the episode again. The odds of me being distracted by a YouTube video about the Luka Doncic trade are about 1/2 I’d say. Now, Luka Doncic — there’s someone else who can reach a potent flow state. Step back to the left, three-point game-winner. That sort of stuff can only come from a powerful state of meditative focus.

Tonight’s University Challenge match was for the last quarter-final place and saw Warwick facing Oriel, Ox.

I’ve already watched one video about Luka, but come on, it’s the craziest trade in the history of American sports. A man is allowed to revel.

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Rajan says that Oriel were one of only two teams to come from behind to win their first-round matches, and that can’t possibly be true, can it? Unless the definition of coming from behind is that they were losing at the halfway stage or something? I’m going to check this out after I’ve seen the episode but I don’t believe that stat for a second.

A neg from Sharkey puts Oriel on minus five, and Hart capitalises on the mistake with his second consecutive starter. Watson keeps the streak going for Warwick with palliative, and Rajan lets them off with distance instead of displacement, which is pretty generous, given that the question mentioned velocity rather than speed.

Armstrong gets Oriel going with croissant (pronounced immaculately) on the picture starter, but they can’t keep up the momentum, and Warwick hit back immediately through Siddle and Hart. It is 100–5 now, so Oriel will have to rely on that comeback spirit once again.

Taseen gets them going, and Armstrong recognises All Shook Up on the music starter within a few notes. But Warwick aren’t interested in making a game of it, with Hart and Watson stretching the lead back out to more than a hundred points.

Sharkey takes the second picture starter with Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and spins his hands as if to say ‘let’s go!’, but they’re going to have to go on quite the run to haul Warwick back. Still, through Taseen and Sharkey, they make a little go of it, but they’re coming from too far back, and Warwick don’t want to take any risks, cutting the comeback off before it can grow any legs.

Warwick 215–110 Oriel

From the halfway stage, the two sides were evenly matched, but Warwick’s superior start sees them become the eight side to reach the quarter-finals. It also means there are no Oxford sides left, though there are two from Cambridge.

Open beat UCL from 0–20 down

Oriel beat Durham from 70–130 down

Cardiff beat St Andrews from 0–40 down

LSE beat Leicester from 45–55 down

St Edmund Hall beat SOAS from 75–90 down

So, I am presuming they’re only counting the Teddy Hall and Oriel wins, but if you’ll permit by pedantry, Open, UCL and LSE also won having been behind at one stage.

It is still remarkable that all of the other teams were leading right from the first question, but I don’t think it is true to say that Oriel were one of two teams to come from behind.

#university challenge #bbc2

Nailbiter

This week I opened a can of butterbeans with my bare hands.

That is, without using a knife to flip the ring pull up for me.

This may seem like an everyday occurrence for most of you, but it is something I have never been able to do in living memory. Nor is it likely that I was doing this before living memory, given that I would have been under four years old, give or take. What four-year-old is opening cans of butterbeans?

So it would be more accurate to say that I have never been able to do it.

Let’s take a trip into the land of living memory…

You are eleven years old, painting my nails with a foul-tasting substance to try and stop me from biting them. It tastes horrible, to be sure, but you can get around this by picking at your nails with your other hand. That way you can still ensure, for whatever reason, that you can beat them back to the nail bed. You don’t know why you are biting your nails, but you always have done.

You try covering all of your nails with plasters, physically removing the ability to get at them, but when the plasters fall off there is nothing forcing you to put another one on, so you leap at the opportunity which has presented itself and gnaw them right back off.

A decade later you paint your nails black, and this works for a while, but when you get a job at a pub you have to remove the nail polish and you’re back to square one. A few years after that you paint them green, yellow, orange, and there is no one at a pub telling you to remove it, but after a few weeks it flakes off, and again, there is nothing which forces you to put another layer on.

Sometimes you go a few weeks without biting them and marvel at the tiny flashes of growth. But then you’ll get a bit drunk, or have a stressful day at work and all of the hard work will be gone. Because once the floodgates have opened there is no stopping it.

At this point you think that you will be biting your nails for the rest of your life. You’ve tried to stop so many times that you may as well have tattooed the New Year’s resolution onto your fingers.

Then you listen to a podcast about mindfulness, about noticing the things you are doing and choosing how you react to them rather than reacting without choosing. The podcast host is talking about not letting anger take hold and acting out of a sense of rage, but you think that maybe you could apply this to nailbiting.

Miraculously, it works.

And it works fast.

For probably less than a week, you focus intensely and notice every time you raise your fingers to your mouth, asking yourself whether you actually want to start biting. The answer is always no. You’ve never wanted to, but you’ve always done it anyway.

The habit of a lifetime is broken in seven days.

It happened so quickly that you can’t even fully remember how you did it. Can it really have been as simple as thinking about it? Why did you never do this before? It doesn’t matter, because now you can open a can of beans like every other person in the world.

Mindfulness is a hell of a drug.

Watching University Challenge tonight, I think about how the buzzer would feel different on my fingers now that there are these strange, keratinous claws on the end of them. An odd thought, one I could never have conceived of having before this year.

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Queen’s beat Liverpool in the first round, which means that if they beat Cardiff they will have defeated both of the finalists from the 2012 League Cup, a rare distinction in University Challenge.

That match went to penalties, which I listened to on the radio in the car after swimming training. If I had less football knowledge on tap like this I might be better at questions on a wider variety of subjects, but I don’t know how to get rid of it. Maybe I can use my newfound control over my mind, somehow?

Rankin takes another starter, on David Lynch. An appropriate question, given his passing last week.

The picture starter is on the inverse square law, but no one gets it so Rankin wins the bonuses with Rimbaud on the replacement. They guess Hooke on one of these, but the answer is Boyle. When Cardiff finally get a starter right they also start guessing Hooke, but they are never right either.

McKillen remembers forget-me-not on the next starter, which wins them a bonus set on Dickens. I just finished reading Great Expectations, so was delighted at the question on the Finches of the Grove, one of Dickens’ many comedic flourishes.

It is 90–0 to Queen’s, and Rankin makes this 100 with another ten-pointer.

Cardiff’s Gilbert hears ‘Edinburgh of the Seven Seas’, and buzzes in immediately with St Helena, but he is wrong. This is unfortunate because the question later mentions St Helena, and the correct answer, Tristan de Cunha, was formerly one-third of a territory called ‘St Helena and Dependencies’ before the three thirds were split in 2009.

Rankin recognises Puccini very quickly on the music starter, and the gap is now 145 points.

It looks like we might be on for another historic battering, but a slip-up by Thompson allows Boyling in to take Cardiff back above zero, and they spend the rest of the match muddling their way up to a respectable score, despite several incorrect guesses of Hooke.

McKillen is harshly punished for a very late interruption, but it doesn’t matter, and he makes up for it on the very next question.

At this point Queen’s know they have won, and cruise to the finish line.

Queen’s 180–70 Cardiff

Well done to Cardiff for not giving up and working their way to a respectable score. Not well done for repeatedly guessing Hooke, even on starter questions.

Queen’s will need to stay focused for the entire match if they are to progress beyond the quarters but look like a very solid team.

Next week sees Warwick take on Oriel for the last place in the quarter-finals. See you then.

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#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Sliding Doors

Harbouring dreams of redesigning it into a chic office space/yoga studio, we smashed to pieces the spare bedroom’s built-in wardrobe. Lacking the correct tools, and in a sort of destructive cannibalism, we used the pieces which we had managed to prise off without tools as substitute tools to break apart the remainder.

Random bits of metal from the drawers became bendy crowbars. Chunks of wood became mallets (not very useful when you hit them into the sharp end of a nail). Several days of levering and thwacking later and (the bits of the frame which are still stuck into the wall notwithstanding, because they are in fact still standing) the wardrobe was but several piles of semi-organised slabs of wood and bags of nails.

These are booked in for reconstitution as bookshelves, but lacking the interior design knowledge to perform said reconstitution, they have for the moment remained as these piles.

But I made a bingo sheet of goals for 2025 and ‘make a bookshelf’ is on the list along with doing a half marathon, learning to play one song on the guitar and baking 160 baguettes (one loaf of bread is equivalent to 4 baguettes under my highly accurate system. I’m on 16 so far).

So I am hopeful that the boxes of books which have for the past eight months been haunting various cupboards in our flat (including for a time before phase one of the destruction of the built-in wardrobes, in the built-in wardrobe) will finally have a place to call their own, to spread their pages and breathe in some air which hasn’t been evaporating and condensing repeatedly in the microclimate of their not-so-temporary cardboard home.

The bookshelves will also perform a second function as a mask behind which we can hide our shoddy paintwork (as referenced in this blog).

Where was I going with this? Ah yes. Another thing that has been bothering us for the past eight months. The sliding doors on the built-in wardrobe in the primary bedroom. Prone to sporadic immobility and with a propensity to occasionally come apart with a screeching noise so grating as to attract all of the mice within a 100-mile radius. The kind of daily annoyance that we for some reason live with despite the likely simplicity of its fixing.

As I found out today.

Examining the screeching doors, I found the culprit fairly quickly. They are connected to the rail at the top with a plastic clicker and at the bottom they have a wheel which guides them along a track. Or that’s what they are supposed to have. One of the doors was lacking both an upper clicker and a lower wheel. Such an obvious cause of our inconvenience, and yet it had remained uninvestigated for more than half a year. Why?

Why do we allow such trivial problems to plague us for so long? Why does the door handle stay wobbly for so long, why does the lid of the recycling bin not work properly? What do you mean ‘not work properly’… — you know what I mean.

You try and put in an empty jar of olives, a carton of oat milk. It should open how it used to. It should open so that you can slide your trash in without causing any issues. But it doesn’t. It used to. You remember when it used to. It doesn’t now. It hasn’t done it like you remember for maybe a year now. Every time you try and open it, the lid catches a bit and it takes an extra moment or so to stop yourself so that the jar doesn’t fall to the floor. Sometimes the jar does still fall to the floor. It hasn’t smashed yet. The broken lid hasn’t caused a smashed jar yet, but you know it will do at some point, so why haven’t you fixed the lid?

Today we fixed the lid.

Using one of the doors from the built-in wardrobe which we had lovingly dismantled by force, we replaced the faulty one. This new one had both the plastic clicker and the wheel in the right place. It doesn’t make the screeching noise. And it moves when you push it. What’s that sound you can hear instead? It’s the combined sighs of relief from all of the times it would have remained stuck over the next six months.

Ahhhhhhhhh.

Perhaps this could have been avoided. Perhaps there was a moment last summer when one decision could have been made differently. When one flap of a butterfly’s wings could have set us on a different path. The difference between making it through one set of doors and not making it.

This is the second University Challenge article about sliding doors during the current series. Jack McB wrote a great one which was actually about the show, on the UEA-Warwick first-round match-up.

You might be wishing you made it through the sliding door to the world where this intro didn’t exist, so I’ll get on with things and start talking about the second coming of Christ(‘s College, Cambridge), who are blessed with the incredibly appropriately named Brendan Bethlehem.

They won their first-round match against Exeter, Ox, and face an Oxford college for the second time running. St Edmund Hall beat SOAS in round one, with a similar score to Christ’s, so this promised to be a good match.

If you enjoy the intros but don’t care much for the match report, you can subscribe to my Substack newsletter, which is pretty much like these intros.

iambic kilometres | J. Kilvington | Substack writer based in the Scottish Highlands, essays about going on really long walks, and trying to build an unobtrusive…iambickilometres.substack.com

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Luu takes the opening points for Christ’s with Louisa May Alcott, who wrote Little Women. Our book club read Little Women over Christmas, and there is an incredible scene with pickled limes which the 2019 film mentions but doesn’t go into as much detail on. I would say that the book is worth reading for that scene alone, but it’s a very long book, so I’ll just say that it’s worth reading that scene.

They take a single bonus before Liu makes this a Liu vs Luu game with a starter for Teddy Hall. A brilliant early buzz of myoglobin by Despard gives Christ’s the lead again, and this time they don’t relinquish it so easily, with Bethlehem and Luu grabbing starters to give them a 60-point cushion.

Elkington hits back for Teddy Hall, winning them a bonus set on video games which they struggle on. Bethlehem knows that Lyon is the capital of French gastronomy, and Despard recognises several scientific uses of the letter P, putting them nearly a hundred points clear.

Another early buzz from Despard could have set Christ’s on their way to an easy win, but he is wrong with Henry IV, losing five points and allowing Teddy Hall captain Bursey to collect ten with Henry V.

No one knows the music starter so Elkington wins the bonuses on a replacement, and when he takes a second consecutive ten-pointer Teddy Hall find themselves a mere twenty points behind. It looked like we were heading to another dominant win, but that is no longer the case.

Still, Bethlehem doesn’t like how close things have become and takes another starter for himself. A rapid starter from Firman eases the pressure on Christ’s, but the second picture starter goes to Liu so they can’t relax for too long.

They decide at this point that enough is enough, and don’t allow Teddy Hall another point for the remainder of the contest, ending with a commanding lead that doesn’t tell half the story.

Christ’s 215–100 Teddy Hall

Looking at the final score you would say that Christ’s cruised it, but things were in the balance until the final few minutes after they fell asleep in the middle. I suspect they will need to up their game if they are to beat UCL, Imperial or Bristol in the QFs.

For Teddy Hall, a solid performance in defeat, but never quite enough to win.

Next week Cardiff play Queen’s, Belfast. Subscribe to the mailing list before Twitter disappears into a puff of smoke.

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Imperious Imperial

Wadham vs Imperial, University Challenge S54E21

Just before Christmas I released a book which compiles my reviews of all the University Challenge Grand Finals since 2015. If you fancy a trip down memory lane you can buy it here…

University Challenge Time Machine

Imperial haven’t lost a University Challenge match since 2021.

They won the title in 2022 and 2024, and were absent in 2023, so we are coming up on 4 years since their last UC defeat.

In 2021, the last series which they appeared in and did not win the title, they made it to the semi-finals but actually lost three times, as though they were getting all of their losses out at once.

Their triumphs in 2022 and 2024 were achieved without losing a match, meaning that they have a current winning streak of thirteen matches.

Magdalen went back to back in the 90s, but those series only required five wins, so their streak of 11 was ended in round two of 1999 by the Open University. That match was extremely close (210–200) and Open went on to claim that series title, so perhaps Magdalen were a mere fifteen points away from a three-peat.

Manchester were repeat champions too, in 2012 and 2013, but they didn’t manage those titles unbeaten.

So by my estimate, Imperial are currently on the longest win streak in University Challenge history (certainly of the BBC era, the format was different on ITV).

There are teams like Birkbeck, who won in 2003 and didn’t appear again until 2020, who can claim longer periods without being beaten, but that doesn’t really count.

Can Wadham slay the giant and snap the streak? Read on to find out; here’s your first starter for ten.

This is going to be one of those reviews where I throw out any pretence of keeping things exciting and answer the above question immediately.

No. No they can’t.

When they score the first points of the match, it looks as though Wadham might be up for making a game of it, but over the next twenty minutes, the scores are so lopsided they make the Leaning Tower of Pisa look as though it’s leaning the other way.

Oof, what happened there?

A 305 point turnaround, which is surely the longest streak of unanswered points in UC history (the record-breaking continues for Imperial, if my speculation is to be believed).

If a picture says a thousand words, do these two pictures say two thousand words, or should they, for the purposes of the story they are telling, be taken as a single image, and so remain as a thousand words?

Either way, you get the picture (or in this case, you get the thousand words).

Having dropped the first starter, Imperial embarked upon a mercilessly dominant performance, and they will probably be slightly annoyed that they let Wadham relieve themselves of the ignominy of a zero pointer towards the end.

Wadham 25–345 Imperial

Wadham must be commended for their attitude, and their celebrations at stopping the rot were a highlight of the episode, but this is all about Imperial.

Backing up a 310-point performance in round one, they look fairly unstoppable, with starters coming from all directions (at least two for each player).

With 16 starters in total (led by six from Salamanca Camacho), and a 79% bonus rate, it will take a gargantuan effort to stop the now 14-game winning streak.

Join me next week for an Oxbridge derby as Christ’s, Cam take on Teddy Hall, Ox

#university challenge #bbc2 #oxford #quizzy mondays

New Year, New Le(niency)

Before we start I’m going to plug my latest eBook — a collection of Grand Final reviews from the past decade. You can buy it here, or you could help me out by leaving a (glowing) review on Amazon…

We haven’t had a regular series episode of University Challenge for three weeks, which means that I’ve been able to distract myself by writing terrible poetry about the sky.

People going into Tesco When the sky is like this Into Sainsbury’s When the sky is like this

It also means that we have had our now-traditional Christmas interlude, with teams of well-to-do graduates from ten institutions having a crack at our favourite quiz.

This year there were three Cambridge colleges and one Oxford College, a ratio of 40% compared to the 29% we had in the regular series. Surely there are enough famous people who went to less salubrious establishments, but then again, maybe I’m wrong.

Spoilers ahead, be warned…

Durham were the only team who turned up for the first round, with Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer determined to take this very seriously, which I admired. They were the only team to score more than 200 points, which was 90 more than Queen’s, Cam who ranked second.

They were less dominant in the semis, beating Worcester, Ox by 35 points. Queen’s beat fellow Cambridge side Churchhill on a tiebreak to join them in the final.

This is where things get interesting.

The two sides traded early starters, with Denyer being perhaps controversially allowed the answer zirconium despite the fact she hadn’t actually buzzed. Queen’s had already buzzed incorrectly, but her teammate James buzzed at pretty much the same time Denyer started speaking.

However, watching back with frame-by-frame accuracy like a video assistant referee, it is clear that Denyer does start speaking before James buzzes. I paused the footage at the precise moment James buzzes and at that point Denyer has already said at the very least ‘zirc’.

I came on here with the intention of writing something about how the show was getting more lenient (hence the title), but the transgression isn’t as serious as I had originally thought. Denyer should still buzz of course, but crucially she starts answering before the buzz from James, which is why she was given a reprieve.

That’s enough fun (for now), let’s get on with tonight’s episode. If you want to watch it before reading the review you can do so here.

Here’s your first starter for ten.

Darwin, Cam face Edinburgh for the fourth quarter-final spot, with both sides comfortable winners in round one. In 2019, Darwin were 25 points away from facing Edinburgh in the Grand Final, losing 165–140 to St Edmund Hall, Ox in the semis.

Darwin’s Whitaker took eleven starters (the entirety of his team’s haul) in their first-round match, and he kicked things off in the same style with Paris. They took two bonuses on paintings of enslaved people before Whitaker took a second consecutive starter with the Argonauts.

This was slightly similar to the Denyer answer from the Christmas special, in that he answered after buzzing but before his name had been announced, and it looks as though he gave the answer in concert with his teammate Willis, who had buzzed a fraction later than he. Rajan lets them off but warns them against doing the same in the future.

Aiton loses five points for a guess of treason, but Whitaker can’t make it a hat-trick and the question drops. Mellor gets Edinburgh off the mark with Oxford English Dictionary next time out, and then Willis takes Darwin’s first non-Whitaker starter of the series with the Krebs Cycle on the picture starter.

A starter from Myles keeps Edinburgh in touch, but Whitaker reasserts his dominance with Mali on the following question, buzzing as soon as he heard the name of the capital city Bamako. A man who has done his revision, clearly. He takes his fourth with Ari Aster, and Edinburgh are going to need to start challenging him on the buzzer if they are to stand a chance.

The music starter, on Mussorgsky, goes to Aiton, and he corrects Saint-Saens to Satie at the last second to save five points on the bonuses. His streak continues with arc, then Edinburgh are cruelly denied the points for saying Dorothy Hodgkins rather than Hodgkin, which feels like needless pedantry.

Scourge, courtesy of Self, helps Edinburgh to close within ten points, but, perhaps predictably, Whitaker views this state of affairs as undesirable, and buzzes in with Grendel at the very next opportunity.

Aiton keeps Edinburgh in the game, but whenever things get a bit uncomfortable for Darwin, Whitaker is there to take the heat off. This time, on the second picture starter, with Elizabeth Siddal.

He ends the match with eight starters to his name, which is a slight drop-off from his first-round efforts, but remains by far the best in the match, and it is more than enough to earn his side a place in the quarter-finals.

Darwin 155–125 Edinburgh

Edinburgh can count themselves unlucky to have faced such a buzzer star in Whitaker at this stage, and performed decently in losing. Darwin look strong, but if Whiatker has an off day then they are very vulnerable.

Next week sees Wadham facing defending champions Imperial — join me for another recap. Goodbye.

#university challenge #bbc2 #cambridge #edinburgh #quizzy #quizzy mondays

University Challenge Time Machine

Exeter vs Bristol

In 2015 I watched the movie Spy when it came out in the cinema. I remember laughing my head off, particularly at Jason Statham’s character, who spends the whole film reciting an increasingly bizarre and over-the-top series of unlikely things he has done, such as having an arm torn completely off and then reattaching said arm with his other, still attached, arm.

Is it just a sign that my tastes have changed over the past eight years. That I have changed as a person. This is probably more likely than the humour of the movie itself somehow degrading over time, although that does happen in some cases.

People change, but we usually change so slowly that we don’t really notice. Instead, we only realise when we do something like watch a film we last watched eight years ago and find that it doesn’t make us laugh as much as it used to.

Sometimes, though, we have a record of how we have changed. People keep journals, documenting every day of their lives, and they can go back and read about their past selves, seeing how different they have become, how different they used to be.

A Sales Pitch

I don’t have such a comprehensive record of my life, but I do have eight years’ worth of University Challenge reviews. And for the first time, I have combined the full history of this blog into one single eBook.

Enter the University Challenge Time Machine, a compilation of all the Grand Finals I have reviewed since starting this blog — including two which were previously available only on Patreon (ooh, how exciting!).

As a bonus, there is also my review of the Monkman vs Seagull episode which was the first semi-final in 2016/17.

This book covers an interesting period in the history of University Challenge, as the show became ever more popular on Social Media, and as the quizzing sub-culture grew in the real world. Quizzy Mondays, with UC as the headliner following Mastermind and Only Connect, has snowballed into a bonafide cultural phenomenon.

University Challenge Time Machine: Grand Finals, 2014-2024 eBook : Kilvington, Jez: Amazon.co.uk… University Challenge Time Machine: Grand Finals, 2014-2024 eBook : Kilvington, Jez: Amazon.co.uk: Booksamzn.eu

In 2014, Paxman was at the peak of his powers, and the first chapter of this book details one of the greatest University Challenge finals ever, starring Ted Loveday. The decade continues, with plenty more interesting characters like the aforementioned Eric Monkman and Bobby Seagull.

We see the rise of a dynasty and the first series featuring a new host, as Amol Rajan took over from Paxman in 2023. There are also a few more bonus episodes from my Patreon — a Tabloids vs Broadsheets special from 1999 which features former Prime Minister Boris Johnson. And an episode from 1987 hosted by Bamber Gascoigne.

Plus, there are also some tasty statistics at the end, for those of you who relish numbers!

You can buy it here! It makes the perfect gift for the quiz lover in your life, and you can take a trip down memory lane over the Christmas period.

If you enjoy it please leave a review as that will help me out greatly. Thanks!

Bristol romped to victory with the highest score of the first round, 325 in a thrashing of Gonville and Caius (who feature in the first chapter of Time Machine, if I’m permitted to continue plugging).

Exeter also racked up an impressive 240 in their opening win, and Rajan singles out Mouelhi, whose four consecutive starters to kick things off set them on their way that evening.

Steamrolling

He is unable to replicate that success on this occasion, as Bristol skipper Flanagan takes the first starter with fauvism. They eased to a hat trick on medical terms, then Flanagan takes another with a guess of harlequin, for a species of duck.

Carr buzzes early for Exeter with Slovenia but loses five points, and Warner is able to steal with Slovakia. Unfortunate, and a sign of things to come for Exeter. Perhaps if they’d got this one right things may have been different.

Warner laughs his head off at a question about laminas, but he gets it right and gets the other two bonuses as well. He also picks up the picture starter in a similar manner to his Slovakia/Slovenia answer a moment earlier. Moorcroft buzzes with Jing, recognising Beijing on a map, but Warner takes the points with Bei. Another sliding doors moment. Their last for a while, though.

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Mouelhi drops another five points on a shipping forecast starter with Dogger Bank, and Flanagan picks up ten with Viking. The scores are now 110 to minus 10, and things only get worse for Exeter as Watts takes her first starter with Diels-Alder.

Warner wins a bonus set on places beginning with D-U-R, and acts as though he doesn’t know the second of these is , saying ‘is that a place, I looked at a map the other day’. He doesn’t want to come across as a know-it-all, but he should be more confident of himself, because there are a few occasions in the episode where his lack of self-assurance nearly puts Flanagan off from taking his answers.

No one recognises Janelle Monae on the music starter. Flanagan wins the bonuses with Quasar on the replacement, and Bristol reach 200 points with a hat trick.

Finally, Exeter manage to take a starter, with Newman’s mezzo-soprano bringing them back to zero points. Dendrite puts them on positive five points for the first time in the match.

One of their other bonuses was on transcendental numbers, and the following starter is on the same subject. This goes to Moorcroft, giving Exeter two in a row, and some real momentum as they try and avoid the ignominy of an all-time low score.

Warner and Flanagan trade starters, bringing Bristol close to 300 before Carr gets in on the act for Exeter with Balthazar, raising them to 35 points and knocking them off the podium of the lowest scores in the BBC era.

Exeter 35–290 Bristol

A ruthless performance from Bristol, who look like the team to beat heading into the quarter-finals. Had Exeter got a starter at the beginning of the match they may have been able to get nearer to a hundred points, but Warner and Flanagan were on such excellent buzzer form that they would likely have lost by a significant margin anyway.

That’s all from me until the New Year, as I won’t be reviewing the episodes of the Christmas series. So if you’re craving UC Review content over the holiday period you know what to do… (I’ll tell you anyway — buy my book)

You can also buy compilations of several of the earlier series I have reviewed. All here.

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Loofah in the Lamplight

Durham vs Open

There has been a loofah in our lamp for the past six months.

For six months we slept mere inches from the bedside lamp, completely unaware that there was a loofah inside it.

We packed it up when moving house, and at no point in the intervening six months did either of us notice that the light was being, quite significantly, blocked by the presence of a (still-packaged and unused) loofah.

There’s a song called Sweet Leaf of the North by Leeds band Mik Artistic’s Ego Trip. It’s about a leaf that was caught on the windscreen of their van as they were driving down to London for a gig, and which stayed on the windscreen not only for the whole of the journey down south, but the entirety of the journey back north as well.

At a swimming competition in Inverness sometime around 2010, a crisp packet floated up on the thermal current of an air vent and remained hovering like a kestrel, half stuck on a ledge, for hours and hours. It may even have stayed there overnight, but that might be my memory embellishing things.

My friends and I thought this was the best thing ever.

Spotting ordinary things trapped in extraordinary circumstances can be a provider of great joy, or of great sadness. Powerful emotions either way.

The Twitter account lost footballs shares photos of footballs which have been lost, abandoned, or otherwise become tangled in the net of modernity in a way for which they were not designed.

Earlier today my basketball became caught in the basketball net and I had to use a pool cue to knock it down. These Burger King footballs were not so lucky.

In the case of our lamp loofah, the beauty comes not from the noticing but from the not noticing. Or the delayed noticing. How did we manage to go half a year without spotting the loofah that was in our lamp?

How does any loofah in any location go unnoticed for so long, let alone one which was literally being lit up on a daily basis.

But finally spotting the loofah brought with it much amusement. At ourselves, at the obscured light we’d been living with for so long. At the general absurdity of a loofah being in a lamp.

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Observations

So my request for you, dear reader, is to look around. See whether you can spot any similarly strange combinations of objects and resting places. It is unlikely that there will be a loofah in your lamp, but there may well be something else equally intriguing.

Let me know what you find, but for now, let’s move on to another endeavour driven by the insatiable curiosity of the human spirit.

Here’s your first starter for ten…

Nash gets Durham off the mark with Harare, an answer which also popped up in the missing vowels round of Only Connect, in combination with DLWR in the category ‘places that don’t rhyme’. Their bonuses are on glass, and they smash two of them, dropping the third.

Matrix gives Ancell another ten points for Durham, and they took a single bonus on pirates. Maving hit back for Open with Picaresque, but they couldn’t manage any bonuses on electric circuits.

With her trademark blue hair and clasped hands under the chin, Open captain Westermann gets in on the action with first-round, but again they blanked on all of the bonuses. They did very well on the five-pointers in their first-round match but are struggling here.

Another for Nash wins Durham a bonus set on classical music. Ancell says ‘Rite of Spring. 100%’ for the first of these, which would have been embarrassing had he been wrong, but he was not. Phew.

The Northern side led at this stage by 75–20.

Open Season

Picking up a starter on Czech new wave cinema, Payne wins Open a set on geography. They miss the first two, and it looks like they’re on for an ignominious 0/9 run, but after some deliberation, they opt for the correct stan on the third (Kyrgyz).

Open took over now, closing the door on Durham. Six starters in a row, including three from Maving, put them in a commanding position. And they put their earlier woes on the bonuses behind them, getting extremely lucky with a random guess of a monarch.

By the time Ancell finally broke the rot with the Qing Empire, Open had been on a 125–0 streak, and the gap between the sides was now 70 in Open’s favour.

A streak of their own, with three starters in a row, brought Durham right back into it, but Westermann came in clutch with Hail Mary to seal the victory for Open.

Durham 115–180 Open

Another good match there. Durham looked to have fallen asleep but made things interesting in the last few minutes. Open have a chance of making the semis, but will need to come out the blocks quicker than they did on this occasion.

Next week sees Exeter vs Bristol — if you enjoyed this please subscribe for more reviews, even if the loofah is no longer in the lamp.

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#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Box Office Quizzing

UCL vs LSE

Sometimes there are University Challenge matches that sound like football matches — for example, Leeds vs Liverpool, or Birmingham vs Cardiff.

Rarer than this are matches which sound like American Football matches, specifically collegiate games. There are no University Challenge teams who sound like teams in the NFL unless there is a college I’ve never heard of called something like the Oxford Otters, or the Manchester Bees.

But there are a few which sound like American colleges.

For example last week UCLA played USC.

This week’s University Challenge match is just about as close as you can get to something like that. UCL vs LSE.

I don’t know if there is any rivalry between these two universities, but for the purpose of this paragraph, I’m going to say it would be a grudge match of untold rage.

UCLA played USC at a stadium with a capacity of almost 90,000. This is the next step for University Challenge, I think. There is an audience in the studio for the live recordings, sure, but it’s not quite as large as that. Perhaps we need to start with slightly lower ambitions, but what would you say to this?

Have the semi-finals and final as a live broadcast in, say, a theatre. 5,000 capacity.

Or maybe just the final, but on the same day and at the same location as the Only Connect and Mastermind finals.

If that goes well we can up the capacity. I wouldn’t want a pay-per-view on something like Sky Sports, because that takes away from the purity of it. But the BBC would have to start bidding more for the rights, like they do for Wimbledon.

Think about it @BBC.

For now, the first of the second round matches, between UCL and LSE.

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Here’s your first starter for ten.

Nyang comes in early but his guess of Jane is wrong, and Holtermann Entwistle capitalises on the mistake. UCL take a hat-trick on composers and Jack continues their good start with My Neighbour Totoro. This good start continues a while longer, with two more starters from Jack and one from Prabhakar.

We had an incredible comeback last week, so could this be the beginning of one from LSE? No, it could not.

They took two bonuses to close the gap to 90, but Mandel stopped them in their tracks with 1314 on the next starter. 1314 being of course the year of the battle of Bannockburn, which is one of those facts I think I’ve known since I was about ten.

This wins them a bonus set on the song The Elements, which Daniel Radcliffe famously sung on the Graham Norton Show. The song was written in 1959, which astonished me because it feels like such a meme. Then again, they were really into goofy shit like this back in the day, weren’t they? The kind of thing that would pop up at Variety Shows.

/media/7342bfeeda8cf9ed86830d24f099c990

Perhaps I thought it was more recent because Radcliffe’s other party piece is Alphabet Aerobics by Blackalicious, which is a more recent song.

Nyang takes another starter for LSE, but they can’t maintain momentum into the music round.

Mandel takes his second of the night with magenta, and this opens the floodgates — the second half of the match belongs to him. It’s like he’d been hibernating and was awoken by the mention of Bannockburn because he took four more of the remaining starters. The rest of his team were similarly ruthless, allowing LSE only one more starter in what turned out to be a thrashing.

UCL 255–55 LSE

Tough on LSE there, who are a better team than the scoreline suggests, but UCL destroyed them on the buzzer and they couldn’t get a foothold in the match.

UCL look very strong going into the quarter-finals, though they may have to speed up their conferring if they are in closer matches. They took quite a while to come up with their answers on some of the bonuses, which won’t be tolerated in the later rounds.

Next week we have Durham vs Open (neither an American football nor a regular football match). The week after we have Exeter vs Bristol (which could just about be a game in League 1 or 2).

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays #ucl #lse

Not So Smart Meter

On Friday our smart meter told us we had been charged £9 for heating, which spurred me into fiscal action. Well, I say it spurred me into action; I haven’t actually done anything, but it did alarm me. More so for some reason than any of the other do of money I have spent over the past 6 months. £100 at Asda, £37 on the bus to Glasgow. All fine, apparently. But £9 for a day of heating! That’s one step too far.

It turns out that this is because we had put the thermometer display thing in our bedroom, which had the radiators off (it gets too hot at night) so the system was desperately trying to heat up a room over which it had no power. This realisation calmed me down a bit (it was only £4 yesterday), but I’m still going to post my Patreon here for the first time in a while.

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I write reviews of old episodes over there, and they tend to be a bit more in-depth (read — even longer and more self-indulgent) than the ones here. The latest one is due out tomorrow and is on the quarter-final between Bangor and Imperial from 2012/13. Subscribe for as little as £1/month (that’s 11% of one day of heating if you forget you’ve turned the radiators off in the bedroom.)

Turn the internet off.

I’ve been doing Local Month of Writing a Novel this month (as explained in a previous edition of this blog), and most days it has taken me upwards of 2 hours to get the 1667 words down.

Today, I turned the wifi off and blasted through 2000 words in one hour. This could just be due to the fact that I struck a rich vein of inspiration, but it’s also definitely at least partly due to the fact I wasn’t periodically on the Fantasy Football Reddit, or Twitter, or Bluesky, or Instagram, or YouTube, or…

Its incredibly simple, but if you cut off access to these timesinks then you cannot access them. Meaning that you get through your work a lot quicker, leaving you plenty of time to write tips on how to get through your work a lot quicker.

Anyway, onto this week’s episode, the second repechage match, between SOAS and Durham.

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Here’s your first starter for ten.

Unfortunately at this point I’m going to have to turn the internet back on because I need to rewatch the episode. Here’s hoping I can avoid clicking on the Youtube shorts tab. Wish me luck.

Brookfield-Pertusini introduces herself by saying she is ‘quite literally reading English literature’, which I personally find to be a bit cringe, but perhaps I am just becoming an old man.

Nash hits back for Durham with pheromones, but he talks himself out of five points on the bonuses because he doesn’t believe that the football team Villarreal could possibly be from a town called Villarreal.

Provinces gives Hasler his first points of the night, then both sides miss the picture starter, on the word turnip in different languages. Roberts hears the word Ra and buzzes with Egypt, winning Durham the picture bonuses, of which they take one.

Rajan calls, and Nash is first to pick up with telephone on the next starter. They are thirty points clear, but Lambert sneaks in with Trojan horse to keep SOAS close.

Another for Hasler gives SOAS the lead going into the music round, but Brookfield-Pertusini is quickest to recognise the Peep Show theme song and steals it back.

Brookfield-Pertusini, who, as we remember, is studying English literature, takes the picture starter by recognising a wordless version of the cover of The Bell Jar. She is good on the bonuses too, but mistakes Normal People for Conversations with Friends. A mistake I made too, because I thought Normal People was red, which it often is, but not in the original printing.

Makaton gives Dorn her third starter, and further ten-pointers from Lambert and Hasler give SOAS a fifty-five-point lead with two minutes to go.

It would have been a sixty-point lead had Dorn been allowed her answer ‘af Klimt’ when the correct answer was ‘af Klint’. I think this demonstrates sufficient knowledge, and presume that it was disallowed because of the artist Gustav Klimt. But she said the ‘af’ so it is clear she knows who she is talking about. Very harsh, in my opinion.

And very important.

Nash keeps Durham in the game with ER, and they do a very good job of answering the bonuses very quickly, passing quickly too when they don’t know. Roberts takes another with Richard II, and a hat-trick put them ten points adrift.

Ten points which disappeared with scattering from the skipper. A single bonus would win them the game, but the gong beats them to it.

Tiebreak.

A question with the answer slipstream was dropped by both teams.

A second question was also dropped by both teams but cut from the show — thanks to Bluesky user trainingmontage for pointing me in the direction of the YouTube comment by one of the SOAS team.

A third question with the answer llama is buzzed on by SOAS’s Lambert, but unfortunately he says alpaca.

A fine guess. I don’t know how much more obvious the rest of the question would have made it that the answer was llama not alpaca, but it was a good tactic to be first on the buzzer here. It’s just a shame that he was wrong. And a shame that ‘af Klimt’ was disallowed.

SOAS 145–150 Durham

Incredible comeback from Durham. As Youtube commenter Ramboost007 says, they remind us that in UC 55 points is just a 3-possession lead.

Tough to take for SOAS, but a very entertaining show for the viewer.

See you next week for the first of the second-round matches.

For now, I’m off to check my smart meter.

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Voyage to Upton Snodsbury

There are six different rounds in a series of University Challenge.

Round 1

Repechage

Round 2

Quarter-finals

Semi-finals

Grand Final

In order, I would rank them:

Quarter-finals

Repechage

Round 1

Semi-finals

Final

Round 2

Let me know in the comments what order you would rank them in.

This week saw the first of the two repechage matches, AKA the high-scoring loser play-offs, my second favourite round after the quarter-finals which have such a fun format.

Four teams qualify for the second chance of the repechage, which has been in place since 1999, when Balliol and Victoria, Manchester made it through.

In 2010, the Emmanuel, Cambridge team led by Alex Guttenplan famously won the series title after coming through the repechage.

Wondering whether it was an advantage to enter the play-offs as the team with the highest round 1 score, I crunched the numbers. This is what I got.

There have been 26 years with play-off rounds.

The No. 1 ranked team won 15 (57.1%)

The No. 2 ranked team won 12 (46.1%)

The No. 3 ranked team won 13 (50%)

The No. 4 ranked team won 12 (46.1%)

So, potentially a slight advantage for the first seed, but not much difference among the rest.

These days the 1 and 4 ranked teams often play each other but hasn’t always been the case. Sometimes No. 1 would play No. 2.

UCL came into this year's repechage as the No. 1 ranked side, with St Andrews the 4th, but as you can see from the data, that didn't rule them out.

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Upton Snodsbury

St Andrews' George Capell says he's from Broughton Hackett near Upton Snodsbury. Normally I am against such granularity in the 'this is where I'm from' section', but Capell justifies his level of detail here.

Both of these places sound like they have been made up by a bored train conductor who is testing to see if anyone is listening to them.

There is also a meme along the lines of 'why is every village in England called something like Mildew Cobblington or Grunkle?' and Upton Snodsbury fits wonderfully into this.

I wondered whether Capell might have been bending reality a little bit to get a mention of Upton Snodsbury in there. Surely there is a more recognisable place a little bit closer than Upton Snodsbury?

But to be fair to him, it is 1.3 miles (a 28 minute walk) from Broughton Hackett to Upton Snodsbury, which is also the larger conurbation, with a population of 392 according to the 2021 census while Broughton Hackett has a mere 175.

Here's your first starter for ten.

Mandel takes the opening points with pastoral, and UCL manage one bonus on cities ending in the letters 'abad'.

An incredibly quick buzz from Buffet-Mogel gets St Andrews off the mark, and they took a hat-trick on flywheels to grab the lead.

Vitamins keeps UCL healthy, but Mr Upton Snodsbury himself hits back for St Andrews with voyage on the picture starter. Prabhakar picks up a Buffet-Mogel mistake, winning UCL the first of several bonus sets this episode which feature a very long-winded explanation as to the type of answer which is to be expected.

The Fens continues Mandel's excellent start to the episode, and Buffet-Mogel keeps St Andrews in it with her second, art deco.

This wins them a bonus set on a mathematician, so Skerrett looks at his teammate Rosas, who is studying physics. Rajan says 'Don't look at him!' as if scolding a misbehaving schoolboy glancing at a partner in crime for reassurance. But this is exactly the situation he should be looking at Rosas, who clearly has more expertise in the subject than he, himself a historian.

A super-quick buzz of Holst on the music starter by Mandel, followed by an equally impressive one of mole by Skerrett on the next starter, keeps the game tight, but it doesn't remain that way for long.

Five starters in a row for UCL, three for Mandel and two for skipper Holtermann Entwistle, end the game as a contest.

An unfortunate neg of panthers instead of panthera compounds St Andrews' misery, but a couple of late starters brought them into triple digits, a very respectable score to bow out on.UCL 215 - 105 St Andrews

Congratulations to UCL, who become the 15th team to enter round 2. Join me next week to find out who of Durham and SOAS will become the 16th.

In the meantime, subscribe so you never miss an episode, and join me on Blue Sky, where there is a party starting.

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays #quiz

Intermezzo

SOAS vs Teddy Hall

Leaving tomorrow for a hike to a hostel through the mountains. Need therefore to write this review rather than the day after on the day of. For some reason in the style of Sally Rooney’s latest he’s decided to do this. In an order so strange as to be unintelligible these sentences, like hers, sometimes.

Watched Cloud Atlas at the weekend. Struggled to see the point of the structure, the connections other than the superficial between them. Remembered years ago the book, reading and thinking the same thing. Easier to see these connections in the film. Actors playing multiple characters. Souls transmuted across the stars.

What then, is the point of this inverted sentence structure, this stream-of-consciousness that Rooney writes. Suppose it is to reflect the mental state of the characters. The cluttered minds, overlapping thoughts, perhaps. In that sense, then, it works. Why, though, should I be writing this in that style, too?

Several attempts, in the past, to do similar things. Blogs in the style of Tenet, or Ducks, Newburyport. But the format without any inherent meaning, other than bland parody. Lacking something, meaning, maybe.

Retaining that thought, then…

Here is your first starter for ten.

Returning for a sixth appearance six years after their last, SOAS went as far as the semi finals in 2015. Going one better, St Edmund Hall reached the final in 2019, losing to Edinburgh. Robbie Campbell Hewson’s famous last minute buzz of 54. A question, on the number which is made from the first three letters of the word Liverpool in Roman numerals, which would have been a lot easier after the advent of LIV golf.

Helmet the first answer, goes to Liu of Teddy Hall. Bonuses on the Bantu language family, two out of three. Cupid the second starter, to SOAS this time, and Dorn. Recognised a K-Pop song in the clue. Their bonuses on dance and choreography, more difficult, only one taken.

Another for Liu, Cantor, then the picture starter, flag of Latvia, won by SOAS skipper Hasler. Answer of St Kittis and Nevis ludicrously ruled out by Rajan. So close to St Kitts. Demonstration of knowledge well above the required bar, but no luck for SOAS.

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Continuing an excellent performance, a third starter for Liu. They too harshly punished, giving reise rather than reisen. On this occasion at least the question asked for six letter words. Bursey with Brasilia keeps Teddy Hall rolling, their lead forty points.

Combining for three in a row, Hasler and Dorn eliminate this lead and take it for their own, but last long this doesn’t, and Liu it is who for Teddy Hall hits back. Helping out, Elkington for the Oxonians takes another and the lead once more is theirs.

On the starters back and forth the teams go. Lambert, Elkington, Hasler. Tight the game, high the tensions, running out the time. Second picture round, Liu again, above the minimum points to be high scoring losers Teddy Hall. Regardless of the result returning. With Sinn Fein, over the threshold SOAS too. Both back, no matter the victor.

Going early, guessing nectar not pollen, Hasler. What is carried on a bees legs? Pollen. Kicks himself, no doubt, but what’s done is done. Sealed their fate with that answer, Hasler. Still, back again for the repechage, SOAS.

Score unreflective of the closeness of the match, gong sounds.

SOAS 155–195 Teddy Hall

Not sure, still, about the effectiveness of the stylistic conceit, a damp squib he fears. At best a damp squib. Still, the review has been written, and some fun has been had, by the writer at least.

Tomorrow sees the first of the play-offs, between UCL and St Andrews.

SOAS take on Durham a week later.

I’ll try and come up with a better premise for those reviews.

Also — I’m on Bluesky @quizposting.com if you want to join. I have 6 followers

I review University Challenge. Yes, you heard me right. Every week. That's all you need to know about this account #Monkman

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays

Local Month of Writing A Novel

For possibly the fourth time in the nine years I’ve been doing this blog I have decided to add to my writing workload by participating in NaNoWriMo. Except this year I’m not calling it NaNoWriMo because the official NaNoWriMo organisation has been involved in a number of recent controversies including one whereby it reckons you’d have written a novel if you asked an AI to spit out 50,000 words for you with little to no human input.

Instead, I’m calling it LoMoWriNo.

Local Month of Writing a Novel.

LoMoWriNo works in much the same way as NaNoWriMo, with the aim being to complete a 50,000-word draft of a novel in November. This means you have to write 1667 words a day, which is pretty easy when you’re waffling on in University Challenge Review intros, but pretty difficult when you have to hang more than one thing together in a coherent narrative.

Not that I’ve ever really got the knack of the whole coherent narrative business. I’m trying though, and that’s all that matters. And I’m going to try and avoid doing what I did when I was seventeen which was to fill entire pages with the word ‘really’ if I ran out of ideas or was too tired to get my words out. A tactic which is still more noble than getting AI to write it for you.

If I were a clever blogger, I would have prepared some intros like a Blue Peter host, here’s some I made earlier and all that jazz. But I am not a clever blogger — if I were I’d have a few more subscribers, I’m sure.

The good thing about my hopes of completing LoMoWriNo this month is that, unlike my previous attempts, I don’t have the pesky spectre of a job or a university degree to distract me. So I might just get it done.

However, there is also a chance I might launch another newsletter this month, about moving to Scotland and going for walks, so I have artificially increased my level of busyness by a considerable level.

Anyway, this year’s novel is about a big mine — if you subscribe to this blog I’ll probably chuck you a few snippets if I get it done on time.

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For now, though, I’m going to get on with the episode, because unlike previous years I’m not going to count this introduction as part of my word requirement. It would have been useful, a quick 400 to get me started, but there is no need to cheat like that this year.

Tonight’s match was between Leicester and LSE.

LSE finished second in the second series of the BBC era, losing a tight final to Imperial in 1996.

Leicester finished first in the first series of the ITV era, winning the first ever Grand Final trophy against Balliol in 1963.

At Christmas in 1998 there was a special episode which saw the Leicester 1963 team face off against the 1998 winners Magdalen, Ox.

I won’t spoil who won because this would be a good match to review in my Patreon series of old shows, which features a match which was broadcast a week after this Champion of Champions contest (link below).

Special Episode, 1999 - Tabloids vs Broadsheets

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Here’s your first starter for ten.

First to recognise King as the surname which links a list of people is LSE’s Dalton, and they took a triple (A) from a bonus set on batteries. Commonwealth gives Dalton a second consecutive starter, and they took another hat-trick on economics (nothing more than to be expected, given the university they represent, and the fact that three of them are studying economics in one way or another).

They took one bonus before Lister won them the picture bonuses by recognising an close up of the flag of Malta. Two bonuses closed the gap to ten points before Gowland tied the game with Futurama.

Dalton is the only member of LSE with a starter so far, and he makes it three with Oman. Bramley gets in on the act with Vivien Westwood, and LSE begin to pull away thanks to an excellent buzz of ceteris paribus by Nyang. Another economics question though. If one were minded to create conspiracy theories one would have a good place to start. But of course, I’m not minded to do that.

Get On With It!

Nyang is on a roll now and adds another with Triassic, but the music starter goes to Leicester’s Lister, keeping them in it. Gowland takes his second of the evening with Marriage of Figaro, and they dawdle on the bonuses, prompting Rajan to tell them to hurry up and give themselves a chance at a high score.

At this point they are only 35 points behind with more than ten minutes left, so I think Rajan is getting ahead of himself.

Either that or he knew what was going to happen next because LSE ended the match with a 125–25 run, blowing Leicester away and stranding them 25 points below the high-scoring loser spots.

Pole Position

On the rare occasion that they managed to get a starter, Leicester struggled with the bonuses. A set of flags in Formula 1 sees them leave with nothing. Two are relatively easy (yellow and blue) for people who have a passing understanding of F1, and they don’t have a clue about those.

But they almost managed the hardest one, giving ‘black flag with an orange square’ rather than ‘black flag with an orange circle’. I have no idea how they guessed their way so close to the correct answer on that one. I’ve been watching F1 for 25 years and I don’t remember ever having seen that flag.

Beeden brings Leicester into triple figures with four, as in the regnal number shared by the consecutive monarchs George IV and William IV. Before the show was broadcast he told the BBC:

“It’s always something I have wanted to do. It’s quite surreal actually because I got the chance to see how it all worked behind-the-scenes” “I have a very rare form of dwarfism, and you do not see people with visible disabilities on the show,” “It really inspires people who do not fit the stereotypical mould to really try and achieve these things. That’s really inspirational.”

With the match sewn up, LSE are commanding on the buzzer, racking up an impressive score that will mark them a dangerous side going into Round 2.

LSE 235–100 Leicester

With only one game left in the first round, St Andrews and UCL are confirmed in the high-scoring loser play-offs. At least one, possibly 2, of Liverpool, UEA and Leeds will be joining them.

SOAS or St Edmund Hall will make it in even if they lose so long as they score 130 or more. See you next week for that match.

#university challenge #bbc2 #quizzy mondays #nanowrimo

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