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

his name was Boyle too...

Wait what!

Easy mistake, anybody from outside Eurasia could've made it

I think he said Åland which is a pretty good guess IMO since the answer was Gotland

ah that seems right darnit

Yeah, I heard Åland which seemed a fair enough wrong guess to me and was quite surprised to see so many folk going "lol Ireland"

oh.

Yeah, Paxo almost did one but then he thought about it, I'm positive.

couldn't tell whether it was the Paxo stink-eye or the Paxo good guess response

This cunt

Hope he dies

Just watched it, so angry with interrupting goat woman right now.

I love it when you get a super intense dude

Also why are British composers always Elgar?

Same reason Hungarian ones are always Bartok.

just once they should go with bálint bakfark

It's never Saint-Saens.

Also good when they go for Nordic composers rather than specifically Norwegian, usually that means it's Sibelius rather than Grieg.

Euler's the only Swiss physicist

The only one who posts to ILX anyway.

xpost it's sometimes Bernoulli, just to annoy me.

Seems a bit odd that one of the key figures of an independent Finnish cultural identity always gets tagged as "Nordic" and never "Finnish". (PS I know v little about these things so maybe it's not odd at all, he was from a Swedish-speaking family and all)

Hungarian is 60/40 Liszt/Bartok I reckon, and Czech is usually Dvorak. There was a whole round on Hungarian composers recently iirc; the team guessed Liszt wrongly to the first two and didn't get the last one, which finally was Liszt. I felt their pain.

Always want "English composer" to be Finzi just for the not-English surname to throw off guesses.

... or Holst.

Goehr!

(There's two but Alexander's dad Walter actual was German)

British is always Britten, Elgar, Williams, or Handel or something from the Planets Suite. If you say Saint-Saens for a French composer, you're bound to get one answer right.

Delighted to discover I work with an acquaintance of the guy who called Jeremy Paxman last year.

Bálint Bakfark is an incredible name.

sorry, that is "called Jeremy Paxman a whore"

This is too bad. One of the SOAS team members died since the filming.

https://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem114853.html

:-(

Also a contestant on Pointless this week died since filming: http://metro.co.uk/2016/09/15/pointless-fast-tracked-an-episode-so-contestant-suffering-cancer-could-watch-it-before-she-died-6130754/

ah that's so sad

FUCK OFF HAT BOY, YOU SHOULD NOT GET POINTS FOR SCOTTISH "NATIONALIST" PARTY, THIS IS A BIG DEAL TO ME

I guess Bowie died in vain

'The man who fell to earth'?

'john lennon and the beatles?'

(syd barrett and pink floyd)

students these days...

I didn't get that :/ but I did get Peter Gabriel before the music even started.

xpost are awesome

Yeah, "Octopus" is sort of Lennon-ish, e.g. "Yellow Submarine", I admit I smiled..

tbf when they have the 50 year-olds on in the summer they always identify current pop stars immediately

bloke dressed as one of blake's seven gets the sci-fi movie still starter question...

and then they fail abysmally at the 3 follow up questions.

switched over to bbc2 after reading that post to see this outfit for myself, and he doesn't disappoint

second-round questions are always harder than first round, right? Gets more boring when I barely get any of them and the music rounds are all sodding opera

I thought that was mostly horrible tonight in terms of questions. Also the first wall on Only Connect was tough as fuck.

there were two rounds right after i turned on which were dickens novels and then sci-fi movies... i think that would've been my entire contribution for the evening.

I got the sci fi movies, got one music round ("which Austrian composer..." "probably Mozart"), guessed two of the Dickenses, basically fell asleep through all the sciencey questions.

Dickens is one of my major University Challenge weaknesses

'Which British Composer... '

(All together now) Benjamin Brittain!

xxxpost the Only Connect walls and the last two missing vowels rounds were impossible last night but I was very proud of myself for getting one of the connection rounds correct on two clues ("songs covered by solo Spice Girls")

xpost, yeah, said that without even hearing the music :-)

Also got Spice Girl solo songs, celebrity mugshots, Scottish election results and capitals of countries with Guinea in their names all after two. The sequences round was a total blowout.

xpost again

I knew the tie-breaker the second he said "Kullervo", so I feel like I won this episode.

Hacker T Dog on Celeb Mastermind tonight. might win it too.

(second by 1 point - 18 v 19)