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

Brown from Royal Holloway was really good, but man, did that drag tonight, the conferring was at Christmas special level of "get on with it".

Yeah, St Andrews (and Cryan) were doing my head in

Brown was great though, and she had a lovely soft-spoken manner

ursula le guin as an answer two weeks in a row.

I like this Robert Gordon team a lot. Very strong performance from their captain Cullen.

A solid 30 for me x-ray, covalent, Constantine, Dominican, Avignon, Ozymandias, Wexford, garlic, celery, goosegrass, Tasmania, Liberia, Creation, Rough Trade, Def Jam, border, Albanian, Francium, John Lanchester, Scott, Shackleton, okra, primates, chain, polymerase, period, war, Yemen, Oman, Peru

I had no idea amino acids had code letters to identify them, let alone which was which.

think I got 25.

Lol, students have no idea who Joanna Newsom, The Byrds or Jefferson Airplane are, I should be on there instead (though I would be useless for all the other questions)

Oh I got those. And Linda Perhacs.

But, nobody else home to witness, so hey.

mastermind specialist subject tonight: Friends guest stars. not even the whole of friends, just the guest stars.

UC

How is Liberalism and Libertarianism the same thing?

We were having a go at the wall earlier and husband coined the word "spanger" and we both fell around laughing for at least two minutes. What do they do on the real programme if that happens, I wonder? Does that ever happen?

Ach, just got a double pointer for "Rite of Spring"

if anybody laughs on OC they cut and then shoot it again with no laughter ime

I'm sure you're right - and someone will possibly confirm..

My impression is that Mastermind specialist subjects have gotten softer in recent years, in terms of breadth of coverage.

xp i was confirming it!

Soz, I read ime as "in my estimation"

Have to admire the tactic of shooting your toes off one by one. Think this Newnham lot got more minus 5s than the bunch last year who seemed to see it as a positive move.
Distributed it right across the team too how egalitarian. Guess they did relatively ok despite that.

watching last week's, southampton's captain is wearing a t shirt saying LEONARDO and a picture of a bicycle he supposedly designed, but it's a well known fake.

Has Kehler heard any popular music?

I lolled that after all their wayward guesses, they thought REM were "Byrds" - which is kind of close in a way!

The finals of University Challenge has ended up being a rematch of the very first match in round 1. Symmetry.

rock lobster!

is that the trophy? it looks like a bit of corrugated tin roof. can't decide whether if it's good or bad.

Is that thing heavy, just looked like it wasn't so much presented to as picked up by the team captain. Or was that social distancing requirements.

Also the subtle way that Jeremy Paxman bowed out by saying 'I look forward to watching it with you' though maybe a big issue has been made elsewhere of him leaving .

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/the-new-york-times-just-invented-only-connects-connecting-wall/

I noticed they added the Countdown numbers game a while ago, but I guess that is not nerdy enough to be remarkable.

OC, UC back on Monday

too soon

Am genuinely kind of dreading post-Paxman university challenge. I’ve never not found Rajan annoying. Hopefully it’ll be fine

Amol Rajan is speaking too fast but without the enunciation of Paxo, so I can't keep up!

In a twist, Rajan is fine (if boring) but the set looks like a ghastly reject from primetime 1987 BBC1, all felt and grey and neon paste. I’ll get used to it but first episode was offputting.

The oddest design decision is the weird lines behind the players that ****don’t line up**** when you see both teams in splitscreen. It looks ugly AF.

*neon pastel

haven't watched uc yet, too busy being outraged at how the second oc wall was outrageously easier than the first.

it's an outrage I tells ya

Yeah the set is terrible, like it's floating in space like the phantom zone

oc's last word of films featuring Richard e grant is some bullshit

I didn't get it until I saw them together, but I thought it was grand as a question? But yes, the first wall was a lot easier.

I hope I'll get used to the UC set eventually, but I also didn't like it. The shape of the numbers is very offputting.

yeah the font used for the numbers is actively difficult to read!

the other board had blockbird on it. which screams 'change a letter'

lol, have just seen the tron-like UC sets

xp and their film group had more recent films (who remembers jack and sarah?) which were only missing one word (rather than only having one word) and didn't require any knowledge of the cast (who thinks of rise of skywalker as a reg film?)

amol is a bit too chummy

He was good at helping the teams to make it a contest, though, I thought, something that Paxo got worse at as it became harder for him to speed up his delivery.

I might be imagining it, but overall UC seemed more visually confusing than it used to. Are they using wider shots? Different camera angles? Whatever it is, I'm pretty sure nobody asked for it.

Agree with the “floating in space” vibe. Some lonely shots of Amol looking like Colin Baker on the stand in Trial of A Timelord.

Also seems to exarcerbate his “small boy dressed in adults clothes” vibe.

I seem to remember Paxman had a stand-in host, a female celeb, who was miffed not to get the job and might’ve been great at it - can’t remember who though

Samira Ahmed!

(am listening to her talking about the Barbie film on last night's Front Row as i type)

I believe that wasn't the first one Rajan filmed, but was clearly a humdinger of a battle worth showing first as a lead-in, so not sure it's any gauge of how he's settled in or not. Though him being impressed by people knowing things is going to get very annoying very quickly.

Can't remember if Paxo was as fast as Rajan when he took over 25 years ago before the Parkinson's and age did a turn on him but he's been slower recently so that may have exaggerated the speed with which he was rattling through (that and the excitement of the game)

i thought UC was tough for a first round game. but my reception went out just as he was asking about vermeer (which was funny because I'd just watched the bbc4 vermeer thing immediately before) and didn't come back until he was saying goodnight

It was interesting, given that it is a new start that they didn't have a new arrangement of the theme tune. The current strings-based one came in a few series in to Paxman's run, iirc? Think they used the bouncier, louder Gascoigne-era one to begin with? I may be misremembering.

Didn't the like the new opening credits, which did my head in! I agree that the mismatch in lines was irritating, tho the number font didn't bother me.

Rajan's desk console was ODD. Cash register from the Flintstones, as this Graun writer said. Think this is a fair assessment overall:

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jul/17/university-challenge-review-amol-rajan-is-lighter-kinder-and-more-passionate-than-paxman

miss the days when people would say how they did question-wise. Here are my answers from Monday:

Got 20. Kafka on the Shore, Norwegian Wood, uncanny valley, Honolulu, Liechtenstein, Boris Pasternak*, Ethiopia, Magritte, Elgar, Malthus, dill, coriander, shoegaze, Vermeer, Gainsborough, formaldehyde, Bakelite, George Bernard Shaw, Ibsen**, yak.

* good to hear the contestant from Białystok putting the stress on the right syllable. he would - it's the Polish (and Russian) word for parsnip.
** guess - of course, only Norwegian playwright I know.

tie break in the first ep. Wow!

> i thought UC was tough for a first round game

forinstance, 3-word phrases with words of the same length. (from memory) i wasn't familiar with any of the concepts, including the example.

the russian questions felt like a gift to the polish guy (although i realise they weren't just the english titles in cyrillic, but the proper nouns helped)