University Challenge

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?

you got Lovecraft but not MR James?

started well on OC knowing that Bayer lost the heroin trademark (and aspirin, which is why it's now got a small a) after the war but that and famous tony's was pretty much it.

Yep. I am not really familiar with MR James, koogs. It's a name that people on here have banded around from time to time but I've never checked out.

OC tonight was the hardest I've known it to be. Not that that's saying much.

I'd happily do 3-film-mashups on the missing vowels round all day

OC tonight was the hardest I've known it to be. Not that that's saying much.

I feel like I have a memory of a wall in a final one year that was nothing but the letter i in various cases. There may have been some 1s in there as well.

not bad tonight - 19!

Dr. Faustus, Troilus & Cressida/Cressida Dick*, King John/John Smith, Twelfth Night/Night of the Living Dead, impressionism, cubism, Main, Ambrosia, Dogme 95, Roberta Flack, Plovdiv, James Baldwin, Keith Haring, Lysander, raven, Tarka the Otter, sable, stoat, poppy.

* inadvertently topical answer!

TV Highlight of the Weeeeeeek #UniversityChallenge pic.twitter.com/ZIrcoTBSil

— Ariadne Griffin 🦋 (@Ariadne_Griffin) March 22, 2021

That were good. Rout's fairly blossomed on the show!

I got 19 or 20, a marked improvement on the last few weeks. And the OC magic square.

I don't think I've ever wanted a team to lose more than Warwick, heartbreakingly

Yeah, even with the interrupting cow, I really wanted Imperial to beat them. I always want a more diverse team who look like they're having fun to beat a team of four white blokes who look like they've been forced to do this to make themselves look more human on their CVs, basically. Oh well.

hate paxman of course but enjoyed "no you're wrong" to one of last night's interruptions

IMperial female team member had a really illuminating smile so wanted tehm to win even more so.
Shame they didn't keep going how they started.
THought they might and yeah would have far preferred them winning to Rout et al

Am I the only one who thought the final Only Connect walls were easier than usual? Because you'll instantly realise they're all going to be abbreviations, homophones or symbols. I think the only one I didn't get was the comedians.

was not expecting balliol to get whooped so thoroughly geez

bad luck dungarees

not the outfit you'd want to have chosen to take a beating like that

Did not understand that outfit on any level

Yes, when dungaree man said what he was doing now I immediately thought "O RLY? Thought you were going to say kids' TV presenter".

Was not expecting Balliol to take such a drubbing.

There's probably a mnemonic for recalling the order of the Chinese dynasties. It comes up a lot.

Anyway, I got 12: Turandot, Chancellor, metathesis, dragon, Chemnitz & Karl Marx Stadt, Flaming Lips, plutonium & cerium, Qatar, The Scarlet Letter, Starsbourg, Frankfurt, Anthony Powell.

Magdalene are very strong on science and maths, that often seems to win out in the long run

the entire 'artists that do their own artwork' round was easy, i thought (but are the only ones i remember getting)

I have to admit I did get a chuckle out of them guessing Daft Punk for Flaming Lips, but in fairness there's really no reason a current college student would know the Flaming Lips.

They nearly said "Take That" for 'something to say' on the Flaming Lips question, but

Am I the only one who thought the final Only Connect walls were easier than usual?

Definitely. I think the netball one was the only group we didn't identify.

I have to admit I did get a chuckle out of them guessing Daft Punk for Flaming Lips, but in fairness there's really no reason a current college student would know the Flaming Lips.

I like how the teams all know that this music question only exists so that we can all laugh at them and feel superior to them for five seconds before they get back to answering obscure questions about amylases or whatever.

pretty much all my points come from genre films, with a couple more for punts on titian and sibellius. and 9000 Newtons (it's a wall so area so squared).

I knew "pinion", and got a high five from the husband for getting a non-arts question correct, even if it was an easy one. I also knew Titian, because chubby cherubs = Titian.

heh, "pinion" was one of two where I was kicking myself afterwards - the other being "cavitation".

anyway, I did better in the final than in any previous round I think - 23!

hell, Bonny Prince Charlie, Tichbourne, smooth, Mendel, dominance, I4 (Blue & White Nile location), elephants, Pyrrhus, Only Lovers Left Alive, Bewick, OEU, hedgehog & fox, Platyheminthes, Escher, Titian, Perseus & Andromeda, Campbell-Bannerman, British Honduras, Belmopan, potassium, Hairspray Tchaikovsky.

bump.

OC and UC start again tonight, 8 and 8:30 on bbc2.

About time. I've just run out of Jeopardy episodes on Netflix.

Yay! Pointless is back from the break too.

guess what i forgot?

second time in about 10 days i've heard a question about the longest year when expressed as roman numerals (1888)

thanks, forgot to look that up. Intrigued me at the time.

1888 is the set of numbers where each one is just before where you start referencing up to the next rounded digit like i before the letter innit.

m dccc lxxx viii

ilx.wh3rd

St Hilda's College team, 3 dudes, fuck this shit tbh

"soddor" what

How does the time limit on conferring with your team work? Sometimes teams are allowed a long time to chat, and other times Paxman is very fast with his warning. It feels sort of arbitrary.

I'm sure it's edit

St Hilda's College team, 3 dudes, fuck this shit tbh

― Southgate Serves Imperialism (Noodle Vague), Monday, July 19, 2021 7:36 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

enforced gender parity NOW, which would also have the welcome side effect of boiling the gammons' piss

hard to do with single sex colleges (are there any?)

also, the guys on OC got their asses handed to them by the gals last night so...

yeah that's a consideration but could be accommodated I think, and in any case AFAIK the only single sex colleges left are for women so in that case who would really mind?

obviously the "what about International MEN's Day?" crew would care but who cares about them?

olympics opening ceremony is a nice way of putting faces to a lot of Pointless answers.

London Business School rocking the generic postpunk band look

What did they say when the answer was the Manics? Whatever it was, it wasn't as good as renowned violinist Nicola Benedetti being recognised as a San Marinan footballer on OC.

i only know her from the sky arts British library thing, where she looked into Italian settlers in Scotland, amongst other things (Beethoven's tuning fork).

early green Day, aerosmith. stone roses, i think one of them said and then dave gardo(?) for the manics answer. he looked confused when told it was the manics

Evidently they guessed Dave Garda, which is the name of the person who uploads the University Challenge episodes on YouTube.

"You are about to hear a piece of... POPULAR music... from the 1990s..."

Me: https://64.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_ltypofBBq21qzyewi.gif

The best music rounds are the ones where you correctly predict the questions, never mind the answers
Sadly they are about 1 per series for me

We were actually discussing this after, about how Nicola Benedetti is a (posh-ish, but not exclusively so) household name up here and relatively less well known outside Scotland.