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

There's a new production team, but same old Humphrys and his interference with question process, so I won't be going back any time soon.

The quiz shows wot I have done, all the hosts were reasonably friendly and chatty afterwards (beyond the perfunctory, anyway).

The 'audition' I related above, the host wasn't involved obviously. I wasn't bothered about meeting RKS, to say the least.

That new one with Zoe Lyons is a bit odd. I like the questions, but I'm not sure about the whole lightning conceit, and I wish ZL would relax a little and be more like herself.

I quite like it despite thick contestants and they do get eliminated quickly. I think Zoe will eventually get more comfortable in her role. It is very similar to weakest link though.

It is similar to Weakest Link and what's with the stupid games they get the contestants to play? Definitely a quiz show designed by committee.

Zoe's sparkly suit is nice though, a nod to shows past.

It's an excellent suit, for sure.

I also quite like the final round. It reminds me of Trivial Pursuit, with a little bit of being your own chaser thrown in. But the insistence on being able to spell is, frankly, ableist as well as being unnecessarily convoluted.

Fuck me not these dark enlightenment cunts again what have I done to deserve this?

Humphreys is gone...who will be next??? Nobody will beat Magnussson's stint anyways.

Somehow I missed that Clive Anderson and Peter Snow had ever presented MM. I am beginning to think I was asleep through most of the Nineties.

Anyway, UC I got 16 tonight.
Invisibilty, ether, Crick & Watson, El Salvador & Honduras, kingfisher, kookaburra, Jack London, Jump, cyclops, Cooperative Society, Suomi & Kronos, duckbilled platypus, Vanuatu, Mary Quant, Cathy Come Home, Tamar

The French round killed me. In common with Fairfax & Carstairs, I don't speak a word of the language.

i got invisibility, tesseract, lulu, kookaburra, jack london, shepherd's bush (represent!), jump, cyclops, quant and cathy come home for 10. would've probably guessed coop and platypus but they answered before i could think.

You'd never get tired of smacking Rout

There's a new production team, but same old Humphrys and his interference with question process, so I won't be going back any time soon

A week's a long time in quiz shows.

Second thoughts on this, Ailsa?

Depends who it is :-)

Living for kohn interrupting an increasingly unpleasant paxman

Also kohns kindly but impatient handling of rahmans windiness while answering

Think the gambling commission needs to take a look at Triggs

wondering if Imperial needed quite so many points which must have occured to them at the end there so they started giving them away like

Managed 12 last night - D'Artagnan, oyster, beefsteak, Richard II/second city derby, Titian, 2nd Amendment, Beaverbrook, Goliath, Rotterdam, Felixstowe, orbit, Cossacks

Living for kohn interrupting an increasingly unpleasant paxman

I was the opposite. How can I answer the question if you've answered it before it's finished? There should be an interruption penalty on all questions. That'd settle Kohn's hash for him.

too clever by half

As evidenced by thread i do tend to have a low threshold of annoyance for precocious uc captains but what can i say, the more prickish paxman gets the more a direct challenger is to be welcomed maybe

I don't have time to figure out if I concede fictional points due to contestants' interruptions. In last night's episode I just found the subjects were things I didn't know much about.

i got Herschel, which they didn't (although couldn't remember her forenames) - one of the components at work is called herschel.

29 correct last night.

dang, beats my 24.

Herschel was the only one where I kicked myself afterwards.

weird to see how some of the most iconic voices of teh 20th century are slipping into obscurity or is that overkill, certainly recognised a couple of those. though whoever did get Aretha rapidly

24 / 29 is good going especially this late in the game. i was distracted last night (css formatting seneca's troades for my ereader...) and only remember a few questions. the art mirrors, johnny cash, 5+9 in binary, the le corbusier round (fail)...

Lol more like Clownedgarden

Fun Madness facts there.

Finding it v tough going tonight after doing well at mastermind and OC

Have been wondering what is up with Parkinson's eyes since the start and maybe previously. Thought it might be contact lenses now see she has glasses on.
Seemed to be popping eyes or something.

Crowther is proper brilliant

Very spooky shit getting Tristram Shandy half a dozen questions before it was asked

Yeah

Durham were just knocked out early here i dont think theyre a bad team tbh

some really confusing starter questions.

Yeah! Poorly worded or very open to interpretation

21 right tonight, best showing yet. Off to a flyer with the author of 'At Swim Two Birds'.

Durham should have done better with the location of the waterfalls, it's in their back yard.

John Husston?

Yes, Flann O'Brien as the first part of the first question was a nice gift.

22 correct answers here tonight including Padua, Don Quixote, Stanford, Solnit, T Shandy, The Colour Purple, Debussy, F L Woman, Hardy, Hoar-frost (a term from Old English poetry I've just been reading), H Tubman, Hadron, Scylla & Charybdis, Reagan, Eisenhower.

Funniest moment when the answer was Rebecca Solnit author of 'men explain things to me' and female contestant Parkinson, from the village I am currently in, wanting to know the answer, cheerfully said to the other, male contestants: 'Men, explain things to me!'.

Did I miss an explanation as to why she suddenly put her specs on .

sad to see Parkinson go. She's probably my favourite contestant this year.

13 this week - Pretoria, Don Quixote, Stanford, apples, The Cob, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, electron and positron, hadron, Scylla & Charybdis, Wensleydale, volcanic eruptions, Eisenhower.

"Please men, explain to me" is genuinely the funniest aside from a #UniversityChallenge captain to her all male teammates that I have ever heard as she tries to remember the name of the author of 'Men Explain Things to Me.'
I doff my cap to Durham, Parkinson. pic.twitter.com/LmR61phkdt

— Charles Dundas (@cdundas) February 22, 2021

i got 63 (333 in base 4, which is (16+4+1)*3) and harmonics and mode. basically all the maths questions.

and french lieutenant's woman too, from the movie posters.

12 total.

first time i've seen two complete wall fails in OC.

Thought they were very tough walls but i never, never crack the first one so...?

I would blitz the final round unchallenged tho

We pause the wall (I think I've said this before) so we can have a go at it before the teams distract us. We did a lot better than they did last night, in that I think we put together at least two groups on each wall.

yeah, but it's hard to emulate the actual walls because you don't get to cycle through options and eliminate stuff.

they gave up on the helicopters (maybe more) too easily.

Yeah, that was just weird. They just seemed to panic.