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

UC was difficult.

I'll admit, I've parted ways with UC for the rest of the series. The questions get too boring for me at this point (ie the music ones are more opera/ classical) and I want to get on and watch Succession on Monday nights! I'll be back on board for the Christmas ones. maybe the final.

I think I got about four right last night, but yes, I start to tune out halfway through because it's just too hard for me.

> should I add Only Connect to the title of this thread?

yeah it's needed this for while. in fact this is now the de facto bbc quiz show thread, not limited to those two even. at least it's easy to search for because it's two exact words, no quote marks even.

Btw, if any of you fancy a crack at doing Only Connect, I do this Online Quiz League variant which is uniformly excellent, has really good hosts and writers. I understand the cost might be a bit off-putting, but it's less than a fiver per person per week even if you only have a three-person squad and it's dead good.

https://quizcentral.net/connections/coql/register

Here's a video featuring me (and Will Swygart, occasionally of this parish) against a team featuring Jenny Ryan off of the Chase and one of her teammates from actual OC champs The Gamblers. There are quite a few matches up on the YouTube channel for viewing, if you fancy some extra OC-type viewing without actually playing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKE5QI3BPJ0

https://quizcentral.net/connections/coql/register

Cheers, Ailsa. will watch that later!

Got 20 this week - Kamala Harris, rhizome, Italian, Malay, E=mc^2, Messien, 1923, 1989, Svalbard, Adidas & Puma, tungsten, theodolite, Uganda, John Ford, dabbling, calcium and fluorine, PG Wodehouse, Oceania, B, National Maritime Museum.

made the exact same mistakes as Birmingham - Glass for Riley and goosander for merganser!

My Brummie bangers with another beatdown. They still haven't played a good team, I think.

Thanks, emil.y!

i'm the american guy who watches only connect so i will check out that connections quiz

ha, did a search for university challenge and glossed over the first result because it was too long

anyway, celeb uc is more my level. pleasant change from the latter rounds of the proper version. but i don't see why knowing what a Nintendo Gameboy looks like should be "shameful".

always funny randomly coming across people here commenting on Twitter about such things. don't really know why I'm surprised. at least it was about Benny hill and not like the time i saw ex-colleague bitching about my current employer.

the "fourteen" on OC was more bullshit btw

lol I totally got that one
therefore I think it is a good and clever clue

I watched Mastermind and wondered what te maximum score per round would be. Was thinking 28 combined was really good but maybe wasn't as high s it could be.
Do wonder to what extent the speed with which a presenter asks the questions affected the potential score.

But good that people have managed to get over their nerves to such an extent that they can remember correct answers in front of an audience both studio and beyond.

I think 36 asa combined round score was among the highest

I got 28 when I was on, fluffed 3 of the 13 specialist Subject ones and I think 2 of 20 general knowledge (maybe 3 of 30, have never watched it back) so max I could have got was 33 or 34, and I was answering as quickly as I could to try and make Humphrys ask them faster.

3 of 21. Yes I am good at the clever stuff like adding 1 to 20.

The record is 41 but that was back in Magnusson days with no nonsensically long questions

For those who like quizzes, the film quiz in the Irish Times is always worth a go. Their film critic is a keen quizzer.

1st time I've known someone on the Christmas graduate specials personally (Aasmah, who was in my hall at Bristol).

Bristol started strongly, shame they were pipped by King's Cambridge at the end.

Got 19: stollen, devil's advocate, Do It Do It Again*, St. Petersburg, Madrid & Johannesburg, Zurich, May-, Blackpool, Leicester City, Handel, Berlioz, Haydn, Avignon, Fairport Convention, David Bowie, Fanny Craddock, Madhur Jaffrey, Plato, Vit. K.

* Started singing it as soon as Raffaela Carra was mentioned!

So much faffing about and conferring and looking baffled about having to know stuff on these specials.

Yeah that struck me, only caught the end of this evenings but jeremy has lost a seconds waspishness imo

Don't like the way they do the two-stage introductions, with Paxman saying what each person does, then the team members saying who they are afterwards. I feel that they could dispense with the first part.

Paxo was diagnosed with Parkinson's a while back, this is the first few shows where he's really seemed to have slowed down.

Jesus, that LSE team. Could the production crew not maybe remind the Christmas teams that this is a television programme, not a pub quiz? I don't care that you're all having a great laugh.

I mean, obviously I don't want it to be robotic and unfun. You know what I mean. There's a happy medium.

Was that mainly Robert Elms who was like a scene figure so maybe he felt it was expected of him.

Not sure i would have been able to put a face to Soweto Kinch before last night but do think I knew the name.

lol at john robins' mohican

she seemed so sure at the elements answers but they were all RONG.

first of 4 christmas Only Connects on at 8 (not series-linked to the current series, mind). followed by a continuation of xmas UniChall (as nobody calls it)

the fuckin' FROMAGES q was another THIRTEEN and it got me again

and it spelt FROBMAGES unless you knew to discount one capitalised letter.

Looked for ages like nobody was going to get to triple figures.
I think I had gone into the kitchen section of my front room when that fromage thing was on so didn't see excess letters.
Bad amount of passes going on too.

Singapore Sling was my first 5 pointer in awhile

i got FROMAGE at least, assuming the singular would be acceptable, didn't think about making it plural.

That FROMAGES thing was bullshit (I got it on the last clue because I've got wise to that shit, but bear in mind these teams wouldn't have seen the recent run of those types of questions) And wow those were some bad teams on UC.

Hacker and Dodge T Dog on pointless celebs later. i am curious how they will do this.

^ they were stood behind a crate. made it to the head-to-head. beaten by mrs mcclusky and the scouse kid from grange hill.

16 on celeb UC is quite poor, i think. large runs of questions i had no clue about. mary magdelene, ginger rogers, ginger baker, nougat, noisette, aleph, rnli, orange county, victoria wood, tonya harding, skateboarding, bmx park, chameleon, toy poodle, crossby, woodpecker

I got nearly all the ones from that list and almost nothing else.
And I got fromages! I was feeling very smug, let me tell you. I'm really enjoying the themed OCs. The teams seem to be having a lot of fun while still playing properly.

17 on UC tonight

1 strangers on a train
2 defenestration
3 bashful
4 kitchen
5 bloody mary (thanks OC)
6 0 points
7 cobol
8 gaslighting
9 doo wop
10 callow
11 prokofiev
12 girl woman other
13 all things bright and beautiful
14 the apartment
15 mansplaining
16 sportsball
17 colette

OC question writers been consulting ILX? Songs where the title is only sung once, as the last line of the song

Ooh I got the Parasite one

I've enjoyed the Christmas University Challenge episodes as the questions are easy so I can get many correct. I also enjoyed seeing a couple of people I had known on the episode 2 nights back.

re Paxman and his illness: there is plainly a case for keeping someone in post as long as they can do it, on the grounds of (neuro?)diversity, anti-discrimination, 'making disability visible', etc. Yet I wonder if there will also be a point where he, or they, or both, think he has to stop. I take no pleasure in saying that on a thread where we've been discussing his programme for almost literally 20 years.

They also had a music round on UC a couple seasons ago themed around songs where the title is only sung as the last line, with nearly the same set of songs. As soon as they started playing the end of "Just Like Heaven" I knew what that connection was going to be.

Enjoyed the Christmas UC Final last night. As usual with this short series, it was easy to score highly.

Taxi Driver has the be the easiest question yet, i think.

also knew 0xAA in decimal from my Sinclair Spectrum programming days - it's 10101010 in binary and was used for checkerboard patterns (along with 0x55, 01010101)

Stunned my wife by getting the % of Chlorine correct. Pure guess, but will take these victories when they happen.

Teams looked so young today.

THink I did ok with answers but i don't keep score.
Not very good at teh science ones cos Physics and Chemistry aren't my area. Though Dad was a Physics major i think & worked in Energy for most of his life.

Picture of Brian Eno. "... Brian Eno or something like that?"

Elvis Presley, "All Shook Up". "Is it Bobby Darin?"

I felt the general knowledge of (young?) students pulling away from mine (their more specialised knowledge is also, of course, distant from mine because better).

I realise that series are filmed at different times but I also observe: Paxman on the regular series last night seemed sharper than he did on the Christmas series 2021.

the old rock and roll round was brutal, i thought - i find that era all very identikit. but i was only half-watching by this point.

The rivers and their tributaries...arghh! Managed one (the obvious one).

I did laugh at Bicester Village.

24 this week, after my usual slow start... Mississippi, gymnosperms, cycads, gingko, Ginger Rogers, saved a penalty, Portland, Stanley Cup, double-pointed, Cotswolds, Taxi Driver, Elvis Presley - All Shook Up, Augmented reality, Prague, rickets, Tim Berners-Lee, Norman Foster, Brian Eno, Vivienne Westwood, Banbury, xenon, erratic, drumlin, moraine.