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

Reason for victory was the weight of classics and literature questions towards the end. MANCHESTER WOZ ROBBED!!!

she didn't know thomas love peacock though, i trumped on that in front of my family and everything

*trumped her

you the man

Trimble Trumped Claims Frogman

She came through like a train at the end - in the last 5 minutes I don't think anyone else answered a question.

I don't see why anyone would object to her, for doing her best on a quiz show.

I don't really see why anyone would be erotically excited about her either, unless they find her knowledge and intelligence attractive.

Not objecting to her, just saying that the questions fell nicely towards the end there.

but at the start... they didn't

The order of the questions is random and is not produced to favour one team or another.

Not saying it was, nor am I suggesting any kind of conspiracy. On another day Manchester might have won is all.

Reason for victory was the weight of classics and literature questions towards the end.

Not enough classics and literature in the rest of the show!

Yeah probably. Sour grapes from a Manchester fan!

Manchester, so much to, errrrr, answer, errrrr...

I don't see why anyone would object to her, for doing her best on a quiz show.

Because of the air of smugness which hung around her like a thick cloud throughout the competition, particularly after she was promoted to captain.

We were amused when she ignored a team-member's suggestion on one question and went with her own, which was wrong. Although to be honest I can't remember whether her team-member was right or not.

some say she's arrogant/can yall blame her?

Are there always this many Classics questions or have I only noticed this year because of Trimble? It's not just the straight-up Classics ones - it's the questions about prefixes, scientific terms, etymology, etc, where a knowledge of Greek and Latin is bound to give you an advantage. But then this series has also had a disproportionate number of questions about US politics, state capitals, etc, which suits me fine so maybe every series bends somewhat to the pet subjects of the question-setters.

Also, slight annoyance that when the final stages loom the pop questions always get shelved for classical ones as if they're too frivolous for the serious rounds, when, on the contrary, they would probably be more challenging to the kind of people who know their violin concertos and Greek tragedies by rote but have only a glancing interest in popular culture. And by popular culture I don't mean Celebrity Big Brother.

You're an original Big Brother purist then.

I guess at some level there's going to be a bias towards "questions the production team find hard" at the later stages, which isn't going to be the same thing as "questions a Latin Literature DPhil student is going to find hard"

x-post And lame zings aside, I agree. There did seem to be fewer science questions this series (though this could just be my perception), the kind of ones about the spins of electrons for example, which could only be answered by a specialist. It's that balance between questions that could be considered general knowledge and those that definitely aren't that make it so interesting I think.

I forget sometimes that it's about student knowledge rather than general knowledge. Hence teams getting most of the Shakespeare questions right, yet getting stumped by a fairly easy Lolita one last night - I guess Lolita isn't a set text in a lot of places. I just wonder if too many Classics-biased questions excessively favour a certain kind of educational background.

Undoubtedly

I get annoyed by easy questions I know, I like the hard ones

There was one that had a pic of Oscar Wilde and the question was "Who's this?"

Much scratching of heads.

ehhh if you want to win, get 1x rounded team who can do all the science bs as well as the classics. or, you know, go on telly addicts.

who would have thought that a programme called UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE would favour certain eduicational backgrounds, the elitist fucks.

There was one that had a pic of Oscar Wilde and the question was "Who's this?"

It wasn't quite that simple: it was a picture of Oscar Wilde next to a picture of HMP Reading; the question was something like: "on your screens is a picture of someone and the place they lived from (date) to (date), name both".

Still: I was rather amazed that nobody got it.

sorry, question was a bit easier than I made it out to be.

I don't remember anyone not getting that.

I don't remember a Lolita question last night either.

I probably can't concentrate enough to be really good at this programme.

The easiest ones last night were re presidential approval ratings, etc - almost embarrassing.

have to agree with meme economist, on this thread, I think

xpost:

It was still pretty damn easy, I thought. Then again, we did "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" in our GCSE English.

The presidential approval ratings were very easy, too, if you can remember the dates of 20th-C US presidents.

My kids were "Ooh, look there's Reading Gaol"

OK, so we live in Reading. Still..

And they didn't know who Oscar Wilde was? Not-like-in-my-day why-oh-why hell-in-a-handcart etc

Well, either that, or they didn't feel like saying "That's Oscar Wilde and (a randomly-guessed prison)"

Is it Norman Stanley Fletcher?

Johnny Cash, San Quentin.

they were probably trying to remember which prison stephen fry went to.

Whichever team got the next question right did get most of the similar supplementaries, I think, apart from Rudolph Hess (and the Tower of London).

xpost: HMP Ashfield, according to Wikipedia.

the wilde and lolita qs were last week. i think they were given wilde's name, just had to guess the gaol.

An open gaol really, sorry, an open goal

"who would have thought that a programme called UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE would favour certain eduicational backgrounds, the elitist fucks."

I don't mean universities. I mean schools which teach Latin. I don't think the questions should be easier but I did think too many this series favoured a certain area of knowledge. But I guess part of University Challenge's job is to reassure viewers that there are still young people out there who spent their teens revising their Latin declensions rather than hosting Facebook parties.

And yeah, I watched the last three episodes back to back on Sky + so forgot that the Lolita question was in the semis. It asked which book Clare Quilty appeared in and nobody got it.

i reckon it evens out. i got the lolita q, never get any science or classics qs. obviously a 'classical education' is mostly the preserve of the privately educated. one of the most knowledgable classicists i've known was a comp-educated autodidact -- doesn't prove anything, of course, but just sayin. the show is inherently 'elitist' and would be pointless otherwise.

I don't think there is much Latin, in general, on this programme.

Really? OK then. It just seemed that way to me. I suspect Meme is right that it evens out. Perhaps I just took an unusual dislike to Trimble's mannerisms and therefore noticed the Classics questions more than I otherwise would have. That's the problem with trying to square objective analysis with visceral dislike.

i found her steez hilarious, seemingly deliberately overdoing middle-class swot mannerisms, the whole hairflick thing. so grating but i kind of feel, 'own it'.

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00492/Gail-Trimble_492179a.jpg http://barney.gonzaga.edu/~tlarson1/mkg2.jpg

I was taught Latin (for a year, but some people did take it to O grade level and beyond) in my high school, which was generally acknowledged to be one the three worst schools in Fife.

I did latin at school- grammar school though so probably usual in the 1970s? It was all about some family living in Pompeii and going to the taverna. It didn't end well.

you were either in horto with Caecilius, or you weren't cool

I did my year of latin in 87/88, left school in 92.