#University challenge

[theabigailthorn]

UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE BAYBEEE

I'm gonna be on University Flippin' Challenge!

Tune into BBC2 at 20:30 on New Year's Eve to catch me representing my alma mater St Andrews in the Celebrity Christmas Special!

It'll be available on iPlayer afterwards too!

-------------- TRANSLATION FOR BAFFLED AMERICANS ------------------

University Challenge is a quiz show on the BBC, it's been going since 1962 and it's a British institution. Viewing figures are usually measured in the millions and it's a huge honour to be invited on. It's famously super difficult. There's no prize money and after I'd paid my makeup artist and manager I was actually down fifty quid lmao; you do it purely for the love of the game

[hamletthedane]

watching University Challenge is like Hi my name is Frederick and I’m from Waddle-to-Town in Blackberryshire and I’m reading for a D-Phil in classics.

…and then they proceed to demolish a dozen questions in a row about the biochemistry of elm tree bark

[purpleandgreen13]

Good lord

Harvey on University Challenge while he's in med school needs to be added to my prequel fic! :D

[abiiors]

NEW SEASON OF UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE LETS FUCKING 👹GOOOOOOOO👹

[theuniversitychallengereview]

The Fame Game

For the past week or so, I have been obsessed with Chappell Roan’s album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. It is full of incredibly catchy hooks and playful lyrics and is very addictive. I also listened to Brat by Charli XCX and it paled in comparison, just in case you thought I was playing to the crowd with my admittedly late-to-the-party hot take on Roan.

The past week has also seen a swathe of articles about how Roan resents the fame she has acquired as a result of this banger album. She describes this fame as having the “vibe of an abusive ex-husband”, and talks about how people act like they have a right to her time and fail to respect her boundaries with creepy behaviour.

Backlash to the backlash

This complaining opened her up to criticism, as she is someone who has courted fame and is now seemingly rejecting those who are responsible for her being famous (and by extension, rich) in the first place.

But that’s not really fair, is it? Regardless of who you are you should be able to have some boundaries. Football players are sometimes slagged off for ‘not being able to take’ the abuse which gets hurled at them from the stands, but its not normal for someone to go to work and get yelled at by strangers.

Social media unfairly gets the blame for a lot of things these days, but on this one I think the finger is correctly pointed. People as mildly famous as YouTubers with a few thousand subscribers are subjected to online abuse (albeit on a smaller scale than Roan and Premier League footballers). This abuse is sent partly because the abuser doesn’t view the abused as an actual person. They are merely an Internet persona, not a thinking, feeling person who may read those posts.

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Parasocialites

When this view translates to the real world, as can happen in instances where people are super-famous, you get things like a fan grabbing and kissing Roan in a bar. These are not people, they are avatars through which the viewer is free to do anything they please. Characters in a video game.

One of the lower-level examples of this are some of the tweets you read about University Challenge contestants. Most tweets on the hashtag are lovely, encouraging and celebratory, about the enjoyment of the show. But every week there are a few which single out contestants (more often than not the non-male contestants) for abuse or creepiness.

The podcaster Blindboy (whose recent episode prompted me to give Chappell Roan a proper listen) gets around the problem of fame by wearing a bag on his head for any public appearance so that people don’t recognise him without it. But this isn’t a solution for most people.

It would be better if people remembered that fame doesn’t reduce the wearer to a caricatured cardboard cutout, free to be moved around as they please for whatever purpose they see fit.

So with that in mind, let’s get onto the episode which featured eight very real human people from the Universities of Reading and Exeter.

Reading were making their first appearance since a run to the final in 2022. Their captain that year, Michael Hutchinson, was on Only Connect last week with Fatima Sheriff, a member of the Imperial team who beat Reading (the third member of the OC team was Michael Kohn, who had reached the UC semis with Imperial the year before).

From rivals in the #UniversityChallenge final to teammates on Only Connect

Hutchinson 🤝 Sheriff (plus 2021 UC semi finalist Michael Kohn!) pic.twitter.com/hfqfi81fot

— Joe (@TheUCReview) September 16, 2024

If you want to watch the episode before reading the review you can do so at this link.

Here’s your first starter for ten.

To be fair to them they manage two out of three bonuses (and the third one on the Great Glen was pretty tough), but they answer them in the way you would answer a question about Norway, if that makes sense.

The second starter also goes to Mouelhi, as does the third, and the fourth, and the… no, that was where the run ended. But still, four starters in a row to kick things off is pretty incredible. It is not the all-time record, as confirmed by statman Jack McB, but it doesn’t happen very often.

Also, for the record, Mr Mouelhi’s getting of the first four correctly answered starters of the game isn’t a record; I know of at least one occasion where this has been bettered (the first six in a QF many years ago). #UniversityChallenge

— Jack McB. (@jack_jmmcb) September 23, 2024

This streak gives Exeter a lead of 95 points before Finkelstein finally gets Reading off the mark. He takes a second consecutive starter, and I’m already thinking about what I’m going to write if he takes four-in-a-row like Mouelhi, but Moorcroft hits back for Exeter to put a halt to these musings. Four-in-a-row-in-a-row might have been the opening sentence.

We Gonna Rock Down

The music starter on Electric Avenue goes to Exeter’s Rock, and they clean up with a hat-trick of bonuses on British synth and new-wave. Reading look like they are building some momentum, but Moorcroft stops them again with condensation, winning Exeter a bonus set on Euclid’s elements, a book about maths which describes a cylinder as:

“a figure created by carrying a rectangular parallelogram around and restoring it to its original position, while keeping one side of the parallelogram about the right angle fixed”

Which I can’t wrap my head around at all. Does wrapping my head around an idea also create a cylinder somehow? I don’t know.

Finkelstein grabs another starter, and Reading close back to within 40 points, but this would be the end of their resistance as Exeter ended the show with a 100–0 run.

Reading 100–240 Exeter

A close-ish match, before Exeter ran away with it in the last five minutes. They posted a decent score, and could make the quarter-finals so long as they avoid one of the big hitters like Bristol and Imperial in the second round.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week for Birkbeck vs Darwin.

[lesbiansandgayssupporttheminers]

Apparently people don't like the new university challenge presenter because he says haitch instead of aitch. Classism alive and well in Britain, then.

(It's probably also relevant that he's brown, but they can't say they don't like him because of that, so they're finding classist things to pick on instead!).

[goroldioa]

every monday, my parents and godfather have a tradition where they watch quiz shows. university challenge, QI, pointless, that kind of thing. & sometimes i come along. and sometimes there are really really smart people on these shows (obviously) & the host will play like 5 seconds of a classical piece and be like 'who wrote that?' and a guy will buzz in and be like 'Johann Gottlieb Naumann of course 😌' and me and my dad will look at eachother like 'what???' and ill google him and its an obscure swedish composer from the 1700's. and like yeah, that's objectively impressive. i should be impressed. but really, inside, im just like, 'fuck you nerd. fuck you. how do you know that? no one knows that. nerd.' & then i mentally stick this probably very nice quiz show contestants head down a toilet. i don't have an explanation for this. probably some kind of suppressed childhood thing

[e-von-dahl]

When it’s Monday night and you get a question right on only connect AND university challenge that’s when you know you are the smartest person alive

[turquoisewaves07]

URSULA LE GUIN and GALL WASPS mentioned in university challenge

[theabigailthorn]

here's a link to me on University Challenge! https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0026dxw/university-challenge-christmas-2024-7-st-andrews-v-lse

[slowlystupendousdelusion]

Amol Rajan's being a picky bitch on UC tonight

[a-dotrivenitupontop]

heartstopper mention on university challenge :))

[unnamednarrator]

one time i got an answer right on university challenge that none of the participants did and no one can take that away from me

[justlesbian]

Watching this UK quiz show called "University Challenge" with my family, and usually it's a show with really hard Oxford level questions but tonight one of the questions was "who sings this song" and they played 2 seconds and this bitch on one of the panels pressed that buzzer SO QUICK and was like "GIRL IN RED"

And then they had to know names of movies and they showed a picture of Kristen Stewart and one of the guys on her team looked at her desperarely and was like "KRISTEN STEWART!! Do you know this one??" (she did OBVIOUSLY)

And THEN they were asked something about iconic women in history or something

University Challenge more like the Great Lesbian Challenge these questions were done by some lesbian who was like fuck this pretentious shit

[theuniversitychallengereview]

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.

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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.