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

I think so, yeah

To go back to the previous issue, there is some chatter in the community about trying to re-up previous content and future shows, but with the BBC being the BBC, it might not happen, but I'll try and remember to report back if anyone finds a way of hosting it

finally saw the new uc. the set seems fine, not great, not awful, except amol looks like a dwarf hunched down in front of his weird console.

i got 26: Berkeley kafka on the shore Norwegian wood uncanny valley ten commandments haneke o'keefe pasternak jekyll & hyde malthus dill coriander shoegaze great vowel shift mean free path vermeer gentileschi wide sargasso sea formaldehyde bakelite Shaw ibsen Golding miyazaki corsair guerilla girls

there were so many complaints to the BBC about the speed of rajan’s delivery and his apparent mumbling that the complaints dept didn’t even enumerate them all in their report about it

Fast delivery ≠ mumbling. Yes, he was fast, but he didn't mumble.

I was quizzing against Darragh 'The Menace' Ennis from the Chase in the Oxfordshire league last night and overheard him telling his team about the Dave Garda scam mentioned upthread. He also told me he'd been at an ITV party the night before in London so was feeling a little tender.

for anyone outside the UK this channel is uploading the new episodes: http://www.youtube.com/@CosmicPumpkin

thanks!
btw my 8yo really likes the 1% club on ITV. Lee Mack bants with the contestants but my kid finds him hilarious. It's a good puzzle quiz because it doesn't rely on much actual knowledge, and my son now thinks everything is a trick question and gets really pedantic about it...

I've watched a few episodes and got one or two really easy 1% questions but not the others.

1% Club seems a little weird in not guaranteeing a winner but otherwise good concept

If there’s some kind of “things you don’t want to admit in public” thread, my answer would be finding Lee Mack pretty funny (not his sitcom though, god no)

I think the sitcom made me think he was awful but I don't object to him in this and WILTY. and 3 by 3...

Ah, 3 by 3, there's a tale...

The sitcom is appalling. It was ok to start with but has outstayed its welcome by about ten years. I like 1% Club a lot. Has anyone watched Puzzling with Lucy Worsley? It's awful in pretty much every way - I applied and absolutely dodged a bullet by being out of the country when it was being recorded.

i was gently disappointed that she went for some of that sweet sweet quiz host money tbh. never fancied watching it tho

The quizzers I am most impressed by on TV are those on the Hit List. I consider my musical knowledge quite wide, but these people impress me as they identify music across a wide range of eras (60s to date) under pressure. Even when the contestants are of different generations - like the daughter & Dad combo who won tonight's - it is still a real challenge.

The Humeses seem like lovely people too.

Re: Lee Mack's sitcom: it was good when Tim Vine and Katy Wix were in it but is now dreadful now Mack's character and his missus have settled into cosy domesticity with kids.

I used to do studio run-throughs for the Hit List and can confirm the Humeses are lovely

I love the Hit List (and I really enjoyed telly Popmaster as well) because it rewards a certain kind of neurodivergence in a way few other television programmes do.

Amol Rajan clearly growing into the role last night, reacting with Paxmanesque incredulity to Aberdeen captain Osborne's wrong answer. Nominating your team-mates when they don't know the answers wouldn't seem like a winning strategy, but....

I got 28 Scott Joplin, lumbar vertebrae, noh, kabuki, mercury, Brothers Grimm, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, Sammi, bitumen, plastid, primers, thermophile, The Manchurian Candidate, Tahiti, Jakarta, agar, Oscar Wilde, Markov chain, Monte Carlo, Turner, Iago, bhaji, Erno Goldfinger, National Theatre, The Barbican, bath, sandstone

Yeah, Rajan seems a lot less awful than I expected him to be.

They're doing quite a good job of cutting away from Rajan's Serato Face wherever possible - but once you've spotted it, you can't un-spot it.

VC was WAY too harsh on the UC lyrical sequences round; a rare occasion when I thought I'd got it on the first clue, but my answer would have been disallowed for the same spurious reason.

OC was quite a drubbing despite a couple of schoolgirl errors (forgetting to press button on very first question, completing the 3rd part of wall giving themselves no time to work out link for 4th line)

(Ack, I meant OC not UC of course.)

Wow, that first match was a banger. I don't know Rajan but I like him as host quite a bit so far.

steward's enquiry for last week's OC. the one with plumbob and sword of damocles, the team's answer was suspended things but the actual answer was things above someone's head. victoria was clearly confused and gave them the point - then they won by one point!

a whole round on takeshi shimura on UC last night (with perhaps the 3 most famous japanese films ever as answers)

got the 0: points of view and the picture of a tablet both on the second clue last night on OC, but nothing more of note

I got one (on UC) that Keskin got wrong so that proves I'm cleverer than all of them.

(he was scarily fast)
(it was Chartreuse)

(idly wondering if i can grab the uc subtitles files and if they'll be in a format where it's easy to scrape all the answers)

as usual the last one i watched started well but then had a swathe of nothing in the middle. but i didn't write them down and am a couple of episodes behind.

I got 16 last night. My wife was impressed by my knowledge of Guy Debord, I knew reading Greil Marcus would come in useful.

I wondered what the maximum amount of points scorable was. I was thinking that most times I've seen a team get 200++ points the other team has done pretty poorly. It was good to see Open do reasonably well.
& I know not every answer given was right so there were more points that could potentially have been got.

Also am I right in thinking that they have changed the rules about who gets to return. Like with Paxman unless one did spectacularly badly one was going to get a chance against another team which seems to have been stopped. Or has it.

Just was thinking if 1 team got >200 seemed like other team was getting <100 but could just be confirmation bias with my head full of flu.

First time I'd seen Rajan and he seemed very poor. Just blinking into his screen most of the time (why have they changed from cards to screen?). Very little charisma, very little interaction with the contestants.

I did notice he seemed to look at his lectern a lot more than Paxman did. Not sure what kind of screen Paxman had seemed to be a lot less conspicuous.
But may be a knack one develops over time and he may reduce how much he leans on it if he gets to stay with the show.

Paxman read the questions off cards IIRC.

My friend Ann was the captain of Open University last night and I did a little cheer when the music round was punk women because I knew she'd be all over that. Keskin was really good though, a very enjoyable match all round.

I'm absolutely fine with Rajan by the way, he doesn't have to be Paxo and it's still early days. He's clear and concise and doesn't faff and that's pretty much all I want off my UC host.

it's nice to have someone more enthusiastic about the pop music rounds.

Oh, we loved Ann! We also think Rajan is settling in very well, unavoidable "Serato face" notwithstanding. Found it hard to make out what Keskin was saying a lot of the time, but he was phenomenal.

Keskin was good because though brilliant he wasn't an infallible machine, he got a fair few wrong including some incorrect interruptions

> (idly wondering if i can grab the uc subtitles files and if they'll be in a format where it's easy to scrape all the answers)

yes, the fabled ubuttd files are right there. here's a part

     <p begin="00:03:12.680" end="00:03:15.240" region="agr_0_20_39.5_4_after" style="S2" xml:id="C69_1">
        <span style="S3">Also known for the development</span>
        <br/>
        <span style="S3">of the lambda calculus,</span>
      </p>
      <p begin="00:03:15.240" end="00:03:19.720" region="agr_0_20_39_4_after" style="S2" xml:id="C70_1">
        <span style="S3">which US mathematician is named</span>
        <br/>
        <span style="S3">along with Alan Turing...</span>
      </p>
      <p begin="00:03:19.720" end="00:03:20.760" region="R4" style="S2" xml:id="C71">
        <span style="S4">Church.</span>
      </p>
      <p begin="00:03:20.760" end="00:03:23.120" region="R4" style="S2" xml:id="C72">
        <span style="S3">It is Alonzo Church, yes.</span>
      </p>

it's 2800 lines 8(

s.replace('</p>', '\n').replace(/<[^>]*>/, '')

forgot the global flag -

/<[^>]*>/g

awesome, Ann was great, and finally a decent music round!

Looking back overf the scores in the last few series listed in wikipedia it does look like it is a lot more common for the score to go as I had thought earlier. If one team gets much over 200 the other team seems to be struggling which may also be part of the cause. I was thinking with time constraints etc if one team does get onto a major winning curve it reduces the other teams opportunity to also be on one. Like only one team is getting all the starter questions and then the subsequent follow up round. I did see a couple of spots where a losing tema was getting 100 points plus but seems to be the alternative is more frequent.
Was just wondering what kind of scores could be got by each team if there was a more egalitarian alternating of starter question being got right by each tema and if that did mean you would have them closer and both below 200 which it appeared there were a couple of cases of.
Probably makes for a less interesting show though.

& have the rules of the set up been changed with teh new presenter or are they going to be having most teams coming back for a second chance. Not sure hwo long taht had been going on with the Paxman set up. I don't remember how long a season was when I was growing up etc.
I could see costs of extended rounds being higher and prohibitive but I assume there is a fixed audience plus for this now. Or is taht tentative with new presenter.,

It's the 8 highest scoring teams who get a second chance - sorry repechage - isn't it? Or some number n - I don't think this has changed although I obviously haven't paid enough attention to be sure what n is.

ooh, lots of food, pop culture and an easy last few, so I did ok this week.

although I thought Amol was saying "lounge" not language for the start of the SA one

Briefly:

Sheffield : -5
Loughborough : 0
Me: 10

Why was VC wearing the mask? We've taken to skipping the initial bantz.

Same here

I only watched the second half because you can't rewind live tv with the chromecast. I'll watch the first half later and report back.

absolutely no explanation.

Working on her "murder mystery" book? Hence the masquerade thing.