#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

[wee-english-fella]

when my disabled and queer friends hold themselves to timelines for milestones and productivity designed for non-disabled and cishet people

[ID: Amol Rajan, an Indian man with short black hair and a beard wearing a suit, sits behind a desk on the set of University Challenge. Above him is a subtitle saying 'Plenty of time, Queens']

[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]

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.

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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.

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[weaversweek]

Pictionary

ITV made a short series of Pictionary, a game where people draw things.

Pictionary is a half-hour show, ITV's first 30-minute daytime game show since the early years of the decade. It'll fit into any daytime spot where they need to fill, and it'll fit better than Tipping Point Finals.

The only problem is, Pictionary is utterly banal. Devoid of energy. Dull. The first half of the show is a massive tie-break for the final round, and the top prize is a line-item in the budget.

And oh, Mel Giedroyc! You can do so much better! You are a talented and witty comedian, far better than this tat.

Plus!

The University Challenge stats pack: why I think Imperial and UCL should win their next matches, Darwin Cambridge are weaker than they look, and Warwick are annoyingly good.

And:

"average Tumblr post gets 3 attention from Only Connect question setters" factoid actualy just statistical error. average Tumblr post gets 0 attention from Only Connect. "petition to give carly rae jepsen a sword" is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[ludojudoposts]

Random Raffles Reference from University Challenge (2025)

[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

[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

[slowlystupendousdelusion]

Amol Rajan's being a picky bitch on UC tonight

[theuniversitychallengereview]

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.

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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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[a-dotrivenitupontop]

heartstopper mention on university challenge :))