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

Ah I'd have thought you'd get those for sure :D

Kinder: no, I had no idea what those comedy questions were about.

Despite all this ignorance, I was still not much worse than the actual contestants last night, who were unusually poor.

Not a fan of the team that won and their interminable havering but then if the opposition couldn't beat them then that's what they deserve

One day when I'm vaguely less tipsy I'm doing a "new woke UC is great" post but not in detail today maybe

Flagging it now so when the Telegraph hate screeds start I've called it tho

Too late, Hitchens has already done it: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-9433255/PETER-HITCHENS-claims-University-Challenge-questions-dull-obscure.html

The hate screening, obvs.

Of course he has god bless the crazy little monster

Very likeable teams

Reading guess game is excellent

Drake AND Folk Horror, very ILXy today

midsomer was an answer on both OC and UC. possibly with different spellings. I've watched neither, but knew both answers.

Was Victoria inexplicably wearing sunglasses this week?

Last night's was the third UC I have watched this season. So far, my scores were 23, a miserable 10 and then 18, those being

Mexican wave, Christo, Cambrian, Hungary, Baldwin, Wilson, West End Girls, Edward VI, Guildford, Little Mermaid, Histogram, Ghent, Montessori, Calcium, Witchfinder General, integral, broch, Everton

Agree with darraghmac about the likability of the teams last night.

Reading guess game is excellent

Yes, apart from specialist knowledge, they seemed to have a good range of general knowledge and the good old quizzing standby of "here's a name I vaguely remember that might fit, let's give that a go", which is good tactics.

Those guys on OC were a TERRIBLE team. They did not listen to each other and they didn't know much more than we did in our house. It felt wrong that they almost won just by storming the missing vowels round. It doesn't seem in the spirit of the thing at all.

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