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

Was there an anniversary for taht Red Hot & Blue recently or something, Had the Iggy Pop/Debbie Harry pairing pop up elsewhere after not thinking about it for ages. I think even a few different times so not sure if that was all a coincidence or tied in with a date.

September 1990. I think I heard the songs a few months later.

i feel old. "what does VCR stand for?" now qualifies as a question on mastermind. moreso when they don't know the answer.

Kohn is pretty unlikable, but he was on fire tonight.

13 tonight on UC:
William Blake, Isaiah, William IV, Kohinoor/Kohl, Kant, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Uranus, Iceland, Albrecht Durer, Goya, Pakistan, Copper, Romania

i wasn't paying attention at all yesterday but another of the Ko... questions seemed quite easy, unless I'm thinking of the koh i noor one (it seemed unfamiliar to the captain but maybe she doesn't like Indian food). couldn't remember Durer's first name for a moment, but probably didn't need it.

Koala/Koan ?

ah, yes, that was it.

the kohinoor restaurant in tewkesbury appears to have closed.

Music round, you can see paxo's Q&A card!

16 tonight - JMW Turner, 1345, 1789, Lovecraft, Chennai, Jeddah, Mimas, The Kiss, chit & chat, cough & cough, a & I, hope, Brunei, The Gambia, Brazil, Merchant of Venice.

Kicking myself: Malacca (considering I've been there!) and sitka.

*Chough* & cough!

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