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

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.

Lol at those dweebs getting a hip hop round

Was like playing Public Enemy to a row of cats.

"Bass, how low can you go..."

<deathly silence>

If they'd guessed that one right, they'd have won this week.

I like the new BBC1 daytime quiz, The Tournament. The generic name suits it because it's 45 minutes of quickfire head-to-head rounds with no gimmicks.

Oh, I like the sound of that. Might record a few.

To be fair I didn't get the Lil Wayne or Ariana Grande (although neither did they)

Is it me, or does it seem like the UC always put teams with better gender splits against each other in the second? Because teams are routinely 4 guys or 3 guys, any team with a different ratio seems to stick out. And then those teams always seem to get pitted against each other.

*in the second round

How do we feel about Paxman throwing in the Oxbridge nicknames during a game ("Cat's", "Eddie's"). I know he's been doing that forever and I like him but it still makes me throw up a bit in my mouth.