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?

yeah, I was wondering whether the guy team was actually really good at missing vowels or if the other team was playing safe with such a huge lead.

i do a simiar job to them, based on their team name, and i'd also expect to catch up in the missing words round. not really different (in terms of points available) to being good at walls.

(oh, that said, you don't get docked points for getting the wall wrong. and you can stab at random things and luck upon answers. plus you get a second go at connections you didn't find. maybe it is completely different!)

I thought the team storming the mssngvwls round fell short by 1 point?

they did, but they were behind 10 points before the final round so it was close.

And I knew they were going to storm the missing vowels, too, because they were so far behind that I thought "there's no way this team should have made it past the auditions. They must be really good at the missing vowels."

LOL the folk horror segment has been doing the rounds on various interested Facebook groups that I belong to. A lot of the discussion has been about if Blood on Satan's Claw should have a definite article, as Paxman favoured.

The thing about folk horror from the 60s and 70s is, there are only about three or four movies that remotely quality as such, so you could've guessed without seeing the pics - Witchfinder General, Blood on Satan's Claw, The Wicker Man (to be fair, UC did pick a not entirely obvious - in fact slightly misleading - still from the last one).

Argument being tbf that if hadnt come up already you could safely pick is as the third option with yr eyes closed id say

(xpost true, I nearly didn't say "Wicker Man" at the end)

After “west end girls” and “integral” I was on alert for some sort of covert pet shop boys song title theme

Really enjoying these teams

Mays might be a bit of a cunt tho

This is high qual stuff from all concerned

Paxman is acting up a bit mind

George looks like scotty parker imo

Yes, good teams.

Managed 22 last night: Longfellow, Principia Mathematica, railway stations, collie, Poland, Turkey, turtle dove, kittiwake, woodcock, Colombia, Fantasia, Smetana, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, axon, axiom, Mississippi, faro, cribbage, bouncing bomb, Tyne, Mary Rose, helium.

That ABBA question on OC - has there every been one of those step-by-step links where one of the steps is (none) before???

fuck periodic table maths

Periodic table maths is indeed annoying! Daresay I would've worked them out but certainly not in the time available.

Yesterday's episode? OK, I'll put this here...

Never meant to make your daughter cry. pic.twitter.com/mVrMgOT30B

— Paul Sinha (@paulsinha) September 13, 2021

Oh yes

That was a great match -- so close! They really gave the Central Asian expert free rein setting the questions tho.

Scott was annoying, but the rest of his team were very nice. Good to see a 3:1 female:male ratio too. St. Catz Cambridge may well make it to the final.

21 for me: N. Macedonia, Pevsner, it, tits, raven, puffin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 37 & 73, 17 & 71, 13 & 31, Fitz, Irish Free State, Donna Summer, Chic, Thelma Houston, Gloria Gaynor, Nietzsche, foliate(d), Krebs, B12, Ivory Coast.

We really liked the Catz team; captain clearly on the spectrum, and supported wonderfully well by his three female team-mates - I got a warm feeling from the kind and happy way in which they interacted.

i got pevsner and perpendicular and one of the other silence questions, oh, inside number 9 as well as the Buffy. and one of the Jane eyres. and the kundera film (is there more than one? the joke maybe). and Godard.

can't remember any others

(one of Jane eyres was Ruth Wilson from Luther)

Giorgio Moroder's favorite disco songs was a cool set

I found it somewhat obnoxious that Paxman started, re both Oxbridge teams, by saying "the college is often affectionately known as [x]".

This is a long-standing phenomenon.

condescending twat Paxman harumphing about questions on computer games made me v angry

Me too! Especially when they'd just had a round about football, for god's sake.

he merely looked world-weary when reading out questions about Polish football

loads of pop culture Qs this week. loved the synth themes. Is it weird that Carew knew the Sonic answer as Sega Genesis rather than Megadrive?

xp yes loved the reactions of RNCM to "football... in Poland..."

If you only know the Sega history as history or thru emulators I think it's understandable to think of Genesis

For last night's episode I started on my own, then my wife and I were a team for the 2nd half (when she walked into the room) and we got 28:

mint, High Rise, Christopher Nolan, lemming, Albrecht Dürer, Phoenix, Rhesus monkey, red blood cells, Krakowia, Legia Warsaw, cold fusion, dark matter, poikilothermic, Moliere, Dutch, Twin Peaks, Assault on Precinct 13, sun spots, Japan, Civilization, Sega Megadrive, Torquay, Scarborough, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Austria, Frankfurt, date, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Got the wrong Polish dynasty for one of those football teams and said Jagiellonia (who are in a team, but out east in Białystok) rather than Piast!

Didn't catch the answer to the Zelda question...what was it? I know I could watch again but I can't be arsed. I've only played Breath of the Wild.

Anyway, I hope the Royal Northern College of Music *do* make it back as one of the highest scoring losers as I quite liked them, Carew and Captain Chrisp especially.

a link to the past

can't remember the 3rd of the electronic themes. oh, vangelis bladerunner. they got that before i could really hear it.

the tv adaptations were quite easy, given they were recent, but had quite generic names.

I assumed RNCM would get completely trounced, and they did okay, considering - but it was an unusually softball week for questions.

The disco round was slightly harder than I would've expected, though

a link to the past

Nice punny name. Cheers, koogs.

Uzbekistan BABY

agree

"Dr. Glissando?"

I got the first three letters in the German words for... before Jeremy had said any.

i got pikmin and ico

Nowakowski was a clown, but I did laugh when he challenged Captain Aggarwal about Chopin: "he's Polish actually but you're the captain".

got 20 this week:

time, and, event horizon, Von Braun, Jimmy Wales, enzyme, electron, Byron, Thomas Becket, Shangri-Las, Bobby Gentry, casino, Madame Butterfly, Jackson Pollock, The Ridgeway, sch, Montana, Maine, Alaska, Aristophanes

Terrible pop culture knowledge tonight. How does no one know cabaret?

Will Sussex be lowest ever scoring team?

Do they always have this many Shakespeare/ olde literary questions?

Both of my brothers' Universities vying against each other or not as the case may be. Birmingham vied, not sure what Sussex did .
THought they might take off but never did. Was trying to remember what the scores in previous heavily imbalanced scores were. I do remember thinking do you need all the points on a couple of occasions in i think this series previously but yeah not a good score for Sussex at all.

If Sussex had buzzed and answered the question Jeremy had asked when the gong went, they'd have doubled their score.

...or lost 5 points

trying to think what i got last night, and it wasn't much, but more than i can remember now

tunguska (thanks x-files), 36

Man, that was a real ass-kicking. Go Birmingham!

I went to Birmingham for one year of study abroad, and I think that was honestly the first time I've ever felt any Brummie school pride whatsoever.

Apparently Sussex is joint lowest scoring team ever tied with themselves in 1971-72, says wikipedia. Also Royal Northern College of Music will be back next week or the week after in the highest scoring loser playoff. Last time they were here they managed to get to the quarterfinals.