University Challenge (also featuring Only Connect and other BBC quiz shows)

i had a ridiculous haircut (black/white striped) at the time, which loads of people seem to remember when i mention it ("ohmygodyouwerethatfreakonuniveristychallengewiththeweirdhair!!" etc).

She had an Italian name, but I have forgotten it, so no stalking for me.

-- toby (toby_ge...), January 8th, 2002.

My mate David was on it the year Durham won it - he was UCL, who were you with toby?

As part of the Lancaster team we made it to the final round of auditions two years ago. They actually interview you as if you're going onto an actual game show ("What books have you been reading recently?"), which I found vaguely disconcerting, but answers to the questions on the test we sat included "Tony Hawkes" and "Sixpence None The Richer". So that's alright then.

OK, that may be just me.

1. Stream of Consciousness

2. Greil Marcus's Mystery Train

3. something else interesting - what was it?

I thought he did well.

1970s video games? paxman was aghast that people knew all these, i thought they were piss-easy. (pong, tetris, asteroids, snake)

Perhaps we should not be surprised that you thought they were easy?

I'd like to see how many questions he was actually asked as compared to the others.

Uni Chal Mastermind and Buzzocks makes Monday night the best BBC2 line up all week.

"what's 'amped' mean then?"

I found it strange that they didn't know what COBOL or SQL were yet got the (IMO) more obscure Ada question right.

University Challenge makes me realise how much stuff there is that I don't know. I'm usually chuffed to bits if I get a run of Starter + 3 Bonuses correct.

Discovered a fairly good quiz show called Eggheads yesterday while I was off work. A team of "boffins" (I think most of them are former champions of 15-to-1 or similar) is challenged by a different team of plebs every episode. Plebs can win £20000, boffins just get to be smug about being clever. Plebs won yesterday for the first time in umpteen episodes.

UC was good, I knew more answers than usual (ie, about 5). The Greil Marcus question reminded me of RJG. I liked the set of questions where they had to say who ruled in a X-ocracy, and one of the words sounded very much like phallocracy, and they dithered and snickered and then it was something not rude at all.

I like Eggheads too.

That was because it's named after Ada Lovelace innit. I didn't know the others but I know who the daughter of George Gordon, Lord Byron was. Hung out with Babbage, nice one.

(still, not as bad as the cow-orker who pronounces "spamhaus" "spamhorse")

My old drama teacher got to the semis on MM in '86 or so.

Didn't he get a wee bit more time than the others - Humphrys explained something by way of explanation about the lipreading thing but I was in the other room so missed most of what he was saying.

I wondered about the cane too.

Was the other interesting thing the karaoke backing tracks of cheesy ballads (all of which I recognised, much to the amusement of my husband and parents)? Wasn't there a Smiths lyrics question too, or was that last week?

We were watching Challenge the other day, and an episode of The Chase comes on. Jen immediately said "I think this is a really early one", and we checked and it's season 1, episode 1!

No chatter with the contestants, no intros to the Chasers, because there's just Mark (which is good, can't stand the intros usually), and the standard of contestants are a lot better than in future.

I'm not alleging anything, but if you were to design an intro to The Chase, you couldn't get much better than this:

First contestant has an okay cash builder, goes for the middle offer, goes out - that's how the show works
Second contestant gets 7k, takes the high 20k (also the high amount offered to the other contestants, they're not doing the progressive offers yet), takes it home with Mark one step behind most of way - you can get a lot of money in the pot - it's exciting!
Third contestant gets 8k, takes the middle offer, goes out - being smart won't guarantee you the money if you get bad questions.
Fourth contestant gets 9k, takes the low £200, takes it home - you can do that, too, but the other team member might be a prick about it (and Bradley might encourage him to be)
And then they rack up 18 on the final chase, and Mark just tears through it, but slows near the end - 3 questions to go at 42 seconds, still 3 seconds to go at 17.

The lack of teamwork is also hilarious:

In the final chase, the fourth contestant buzzes in on nearly everything, racks up a decent score (18), including a few where he got it wrong and it looked like the second contestant was going to punch him.
On the first pushback the second contestant's answer is immediate, confident, and wrong and it looks like the fourth one is going to punch him instead.
And in one of those bobbling-around-the-three-question-mark pushbacks, the question is about a theme tune to which Bond film, and four says "From Russia with Love", and two says "but it's not" then "Casino Royale" - neither of them are right, but you can imagine someone jotting down "Get Bradley to only accept the first answer".

<about Bradley>(watch old ones to see how much better he's got at it over the years)

ailsa otm as usual, he was just tongue tied a few times in the questions when he really never does that recently.

I don't think we've mentioned his Cash Trapped, from his own idea - I've never seen a show from the start but it seems weirdly overcomplicated, never really clear whether something is a good strategic move or not. But also I might be (I probably am) missing something, but I don't think there's been a UK gameshow reliant on the continuity of seeing it every night, one with a returning champion in the same way as Wheel of Fortune? Which we're getting another bloody version of, weith Graham Norton, by the way.

Oh and also there's a lot more interrupting before the end of the question in the first one, contestants and chasers, though this might just be both sides wanting to prove themselves.

Because Jen's smarter than me, she pointed out that they'll have filmed them in a block and probably picked the most impressive one to go first.

The afternoon reboot of Jeopardy obvs has returning champions but is also full of Twitter chumps going "I wish Emma/Michael/whoever would lose, I hate them, they think they're so clever". It's very weird and part of the reason I'm glad I didn't go for it.

They could have done with 500 Questions, a very good format, but chose instead to cast characters and make it a last-man-standing standalone per show thing, where you could theoretically go through the entire show answering everything then get knocked out on the second last question and someone just rocks up and takes all the money you earned for doing sod all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/500_Questions

Also chose the odious Giles Coren as a host, urgh

That was a great match!

Was Henderson's answer for the London Zoo question really not specific enough? I thought that was ungenerous scoring.

What annoyed me was when the Cambridge team captain put up his finger in a way that appeared to signal that he was going to answer the starter question. Surely that counts as conferring?

The question ultimately asked for the organisation and specified it was what ZSL stood for, I thought, which is wider than just the zoo.

xpost

was that Jenny from the Chase on OC repeat this week?

Haven't seen it yet but it was Mark from The Chase last week. He sure is tall.

Also it was from series 2 with the greek letters, not hieroglyphs.

Yeah, that was Jenny on this week's repeat

i missed last week's because the epg had it as a different series id from the previous specials 8( don't think i've seen an episode with greek letters.

the personal facts at the start of oc in 2013 were dull

caught the end of the one with the beast on it and that was quite the drubbing, highest score i think I've seen.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/mar/06/tory-peer-jacqueline-foster-pays-damages-university-challenge

I hope Gorgianeh got handsomely compensated for the disgusting abuse she suffered.

Was it on here we talked about the UK rebooting The Genius? Anyway, David Tennant!

https://www.itv.com/presscentre/media-releases/david-tennant-front-itvs-genius-game

So that's one way to confirm I didn't get through the sift.

Good to see people know Borges. Is that a constant? Not sure how I discovered him could it be Colin Wilson or Martin Esslin or something. But seemed the guy knew him pretty thoroughly.
May need to reread Labyrinths etc.

David Tennant? Jesus, there's no hope for the mid-tier lads if that's the kind of talent they're recruiting. Oh well.

was that the final of UC last night? I've just deleted it from the pvr by accident...

No, next week

Final of Mastermind though.

and last of the OC specials (which is what i should've deleted)

Exciting semi-final. IMO the show feels a lot pacier since Rajan joined: it's more like a contest between two teams, instead of nerds in parallel play. Rajan's interactions tend to goose that up - they are occasionally cringey, like a slightly-too-loud parent at a school sports event, but that's fine.

Questions this week varied between exceptionally easy (I got an unusual number of 4 out of 4s) and no-amount-of-reading-could-prepare-me-for-this impossible.

Was that "Beatles songs that mention places" the easiest round ever?

> and last of the OC specials

this isn't true. it said 4/4 in the epg but that was 4th of the series 18 specials and next Monday they are showing part 4 of the series 14 specials, QI Elves v Inquisitors

That was a bit of a shellacking. At least UCL rallied and made 3 figures.

My poorest score of the series too, with only 6 right.

ucl made some basic errors (answering "rome" when that was mentioned in the question) and then seemed to lose all confidence. ucl were very strong though, lee especially.

*imperial* were very strong

Lee was brilliant. Also I'm genuinely astonished at how quickly Amol Rajan has established himself as a very good host of this. He's had some huge shoes to fill and has comfortably just made it his own thing.

My only issue was with the second semi-final, where he rushed through the last set of qestions for the losing team so fast that I felt he panicked them. But otherwise, yes, he's really good. I was very amused by UCL all dressing up in their good suits for the final. Bless them.

after a certain point did Imperial realllly need any more points. I mean, like surely they had nowhere to put them.

The ending was very odd. Amol Rajan presenting Imperial with the trophy in the studio and then cutting very suddenly to the roof of Imperial for them all to meet Tom Stoppard, rather than having Stoppard come into the studio to present them with the trophy.

There was an interview w/Amol where he was asking if anyone knew anybody that would be suitable to present next year's trophy. I wondered why, and now I know. (ish)

So, was it that Stoppard was meant to present the trophy in the studio and then didn't show up then for some reason?

Maybe he got COVID?

I've never seen a grand final where the presenter was like "well, here this is yours I guess..."

venice, urea, parker, ai wei wei, spline, thailand, aspiration, fric(a)tive, psyche, proton, frank lloyd wright, keep the aspidistra flying, bildungsroman

couple of guesses included there and there were a couple more that i might've got given time (son of odysseus...) or a second attempt. i think i'd've gotten away with the mispronunciation of ɸ

but, yes, quite a drubbing for something so late in the competition

Not sure I have warmed to Amol Rajan…he always has a ‘too cool for school’ air…much preferred the detached schoolmasterly distain of Paxman…maybe I’ll be proved wrong

I think it's good that he's on the contestants' side. Social media too often treats contestants horrifically, I think a host who isn't sneering at them really helps to humanise the whole thing.

(Yours observantly, someone trolled on social media for going on telly to do a quiz)

Thinking that paxman is any good just feels like a kind of Stockholm syndrome for forelock wankers tbh

I also like the idea that Rajan doesn't think it's beneath him to ask questions about video games or knitting.

and doesn't berate people for not knowing obscure classical composers

Ailsa it was a real delight to watch you on OC (and then to read back up this thread and see you gradually saying "hey, maybe I should try and go on OC")

I for one have kinda enjoyed the UC shift from affronted schoolmasterly "good lord how could you be so dreadfully wrong" to a coolly dismissive "nah, bro, that's kinda embarrassing" response. I hope to live long enough to see lots of different modes of shaming contestants applied

There was a round about 80s rap which concluded with Amol gently berating the team for not listening to enough hip-hop. I think that sealed the deal for my fandom of him - IMAGINE Paxo saying that.

On a bit of a tangent, it was funny to see Only Connect alumnus Michael Joel Bartellein the first episode of The Regime.

Yeah, I went into this season expecting AR to be a bit crap, but he’s turned out to be adorable and I like what UC has evolved into under his stewardship. And of the contestants, I particularly liked ailsa’s mate, the Open University captain who knew her female punk singers and rocked some fierce looks.

She popped up on BBC London news recently on the panel auditioning buskers for the Tube.

Yeah, she works for TfL and is just an all-round fantastic person. I was so happy she got the questions on female punk singers!

Also, thanks Nabisco!

She looked so pleased and confident about that one! (As opposed to the relatable share of people who, getting a topic they're familiar with, immediately panic at the prospect of still being stumped, which is almost certainly what I would do)