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

second-round questions are always harder than first round, right? Gets more boring when I barely get any of them and the music rounds are all sodding opera

I thought that was mostly horrible tonight in terms of questions. Also the first wall on Only Connect was tough as fuck.

there were two rounds right after i turned on which were dickens novels and then sci-fi movies... i think that would've been my entire contribution for the evening.

I got the sci fi movies, got one music round ("which Austrian composer..." "probably Mozart"), guessed two of the Dickenses, basically fell asleep through all the sciencey questions.

Dickens is one of my major University Challenge weaknesses

'Which British Composer... '

(All together now) Benjamin Brittain!

xxxpost the Only Connect walls and the last two missing vowels rounds were impossible last night but I was very proud of myself for getting one of the connection rounds correct on two clues ("songs covered by solo Spice Girls")

xpost, yeah, said that without even hearing the music :-)

Also got Spice Girl solo songs, celebrity mugshots, Scottish election results and capitals of countries with Guinea in their names all after two. The sequences round was a total blowout.

xpost again

I knew the tie-breaker the second he said "Kullervo", so I feel like I won this episode.

Hacker T Dog on Celeb Mastermind tonight. might win it too.

(second by 1 point - 18 v 19)

Good, I hate that fucking thing.

goth historian

i love her so much

yay for token City of Dug Up Pavements 2017 questions

This programme was tremendous!

I don't know what koogs' comment above means.

I did enjoy watching the vivid expressions of a couple of the winning team.

Simon Armitage was remarkably bad - I imagine there has been some kind of twitterstorm about his poor performance.

PF: http://www.oxfordtimes.co.uk/news/features/13810742.Medieval_treasure__Meet_Janina_Ramirez___the_woman_making_history_hip/

Everyone I knew who did Anglo-Saxon/Norse/Celtic was some kind of goth

ha

I nearly did an Anglo-Saxon evening class this year, but then I baulked at paying £300/realised I was too lazy to do enough work to get £300 worth of learning out of the course

guess that makes me a cheapskate slacker goth-wannabe

(have not seen the prog yet, have residual crush on S. Armitage or at least his voice from the Mark & Lard Graveyard Shift days so I shall prepare to be disappointed, I suppose)

I didn't think Armitage was so useless - he got two Geoffrey Hill questions right!

Paul Ross very impressive yet still very annoying; quite a feat.

one managed by most contestants tbph

It did come across rather like he was determined not to look stupid (which he didn't anyway) - so much "I'm not sure but I think it's...." then passing to someone else so that a potentially wrong answer didn't come out of his mouth if at all possible. I used to play in a quiz team with someone very like him, it's beyond irritating. Just admit you don't know everything! It's OK!

must've been awful for the Bristol captain being forced to be there against her will

oh it was working for her

have we got a different thread for The Chase? guess which of this week's contestants was a uni triv machine playing friend of mine.

I assume it was yon Terry dude? He plays in a quiz league team with a friend of mine.

that's the one. he was always a lovely guy, too.

straight up likeable teams tbh

Yeah..

Not getting the set up of the competition if a team getting 70 against something higher in what I'd assumed would be an elimination round has to beat 2 other teams.

How long does the competition go on if that is true? Seemed to be what Paxman said at the end. One team had to come back and beat 2 more teams while the other only had to beat one.
Would have just thought one team was out.

that was episode 26/37

> must've been awful for the Bristol captain being forced to be there against her will

ha, thought i recognised her

i found that attitude v cool and v appealing and was intersted

It's 37 episodes and so is Only Connect. OC was put to 37 eps to run alongside it, so the decision to then consign it to Friday nights is just baffling.

bobby seagull!

Yes. He was likeable.

I like how happy he was whenever his team got a question right.

Yes!

He was knowledgeable also.

i just liked his name. but he did well, yes. reasoned things out.

I was impressed by his route to Goodison Park, even tho I knew it straight away.

disliked bobby seagull

I know people who know Bobby Seagull irl. He seems very chirpy.

wah wah waaaaaaah

Mr Jose, 48, said his son has become known as "Seagull", a name taken from the book Jonathan Livingston Seagull, because of his desire "to reach for the sky". "He has worked in a systematic way throughout the years. This is a culmination of that. He is well motivated and wants to do well."

I was so tempted to make Jonathan Livingstone jokes before I knew

Hey seagull shut the fuck up there's a good man

Not least about Johnson is her adorable lapse into Scots/Ulster when guessing

That working-out-the-numbers one, God, I thought I'd die of boredom. Paxo seems to let them away with it though.