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

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)

yes, all that fancy wordplay stuff always befuddles me. I realise they put it in to make the programme less predictable and broaden the scope of the questions, but yes, whatever, I am never quick enough to get it even when I'm just sitting at home on my sofa.

It appears that Dave Garda's channel on YouTube has been deactivated? That was where I'd been able to watch University Challenge. I wonder if BBC cracked down on him or if he just quit.

Oh, there's a right good story there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/UniversityChallenge/comments/14uw823/hello_this_is_the_truth_about_dave_garda/

Wow! I always feel a little bit bad about how much I love this kind of gossip from niche interest communities - I hope not too many people got too badly scammed, but the drama! The scandal!

A lot of people I know were taken in by it. I was away at an event with a ton of quizzers the weekend the story broke and it was quite the topic of conversation.

Wow, that story is insane!

That's mad, Ted. I hope people get their money back. I assume they do if the fundraiser is just taken down?

I think so, yeah

To go back to the previous issue, there is some chatter in the community about trying to re-up previous content and future shows, but with the BBC being the BBC, it might not happen, but I'll try and remember to report back if anyone finds a way of hosting it

finally saw the new uc. the set seems fine, not great, not awful, except amol looks like a dwarf hunched down in front of his weird console.

i got 26: Berkeley kafka on the shore Norwegian wood uncanny valley ten commandments haneke o'keefe pasternak jekyll & hyde malthus dill coriander shoegaze great vowel shift mean free path vermeer gentileschi wide sargasso sea formaldehyde bakelite Shaw ibsen Golding miyazaki corsair guerilla girls

there were so many complaints to the BBC about the speed of rajan’s delivery and his apparent mumbling that the complaints dept didn’t even enumerate them all in their report about it

Fast delivery ≠ mumbling. Yes, he was fast, but he didn't mumble.

I was quizzing against Darragh 'The Menace' Ennis from the Chase in the Oxfordshire league last night and overheard him telling his team about the Dave Garda scam mentioned upthread. He also told me he'd been at an ITV party the night before in London so was feeling a little tender.

for anyone outside the UK this channel is uploading the new episodes: http://www.youtube.com/@CosmicPumpkin

thanks!
btw my 8yo really likes the 1% club on ITV. Lee Mack bants with the contestants but my kid finds him hilarious. It's a good puzzle quiz because it doesn't rely on much actual knowledge, and my son now thinks everything is a trick question and gets really pedantic about it...

I've watched a few episodes and got one or two really easy 1% questions but not the others.

1% Club seems a little weird in not guaranteeing a winner but otherwise good concept

If there’s some kind of “things you don’t want to admit in public” thread, my answer would be finding Lee Mack pretty funny (not his sitcom though, god no)

I think the sitcom made me think he was awful but I don't object to him in this and WILTY. and 3 by 3...

Ah, 3 by 3, there's a tale...

The sitcom is appalling. It was ok to start with but has outstayed its welcome by about ten years. I like 1% Club a lot. Has anyone watched Puzzling with Lucy Worsley? It's awful in pretty much every way - I applied and absolutely dodged a bullet by being out of the country when it was being recorded.

i was gently disappointed that she went for some of that sweet sweet quiz host money tbh. never fancied watching it tho

The quizzers I am most impressed by on TV are those on the Hit List. I consider my musical knowledge quite wide, but these people impress me as they identify music across a wide range of eras (60s to date) under pressure. Even when the contestants are of different generations - like the daughter & Dad combo who won tonight's - it is still a real challenge.

The Humeses seem like lovely people too.

Re: Lee Mack's sitcom: it was good when Tim Vine and Katy Wix were in it but is now dreadful now Mack's character and his missus have settled into cosy domesticity with kids.

I used to do studio run-throughs for the Hit List and can confirm the Humeses are lovely

I love the Hit List (and I really enjoyed telly Popmaster as well) because it rewards a certain kind of neurodivergence in a way few other television programmes do.

Amol Rajan clearly growing into the role last night, reacting with Paxmanesque incredulity to Aberdeen captain Osborne's wrong answer. Nominating your team-mates when they don't know the answers wouldn't seem like a winning strategy, but....

I got 28 Scott Joplin, lumbar vertebrae, noh, kabuki, mercury, Brothers Grimm, Hansel & Gretel, Snow White, Sammi, bitumen, plastid, primers, thermophile, The Manchurian Candidate, Tahiti, Jakarta, agar, Oscar Wilde, Markov chain, Monte Carlo, Turner, Iago, bhaji, Erno Goldfinger, National Theatre, The Barbican, bath, sandstone

Yeah, Rajan seems a lot less awful than I expected him to be.

They're doing quite a good job of cutting away from Rajan's Serato Face wherever possible - but once you've spotted it, you can't un-spot it.

VC was WAY too harsh on the UC lyrical sequences round; a rare occasion when I thought I'd got it on the first clue, but my answer would have been disallowed for the same spurious reason.

OC was quite a drubbing despite a couple of schoolgirl errors (forgetting to press button on very first question, completing the 3rd part of wall giving themselves no time to work out link for 4th line)

(Ack, I meant OC not UC of course.)

Wow, that first match was a banger. I don't know Rajan but I like him as host quite a bit so far.

steward's enquiry for last week's OC. the one with plumbob and sword of damocles, the team's answer was suspended things but the actual answer was things above someone's head. victoria was clearly confused and gave them the point - then they won by one point!

a whole round on takeshi shimura on UC last night (with perhaps the 3 most famous japanese films ever as answers)

got the 0: points of view and the picture of a tablet both on the second clue last night on OC, but nothing more of note

I got one (on UC) that Keskin got wrong so that proves I'm cleverer than all of them.

(he was scarily fast)
(it was Chartreuse)

(idly wondering if i can grab the uc subtitles files and if they'll be in a format where it's easy to scrape all the answers)

as usual the last one i watched started well but then had a swathe of nothing in the middle. but i didn't write them down and am a couple of episodes behind.

I got 16 last night. My wife was impressed by my knowledge of Guy Debord, I knew reading Greil Marcus would come in useful.

I wondered what the maximum amount of points scorable was. I was thinking that most times I've seen a team get 200++ points the other team has done pretty poorly. It was good to see Open do reasonably well.
& I know not every answer given was right so there were more points that could potentially have been got.

Also am I right in thinking that they have changed the rules about who gets to return. Like with Paxman unless one did spectacularly badly one was going to get a chance against another team which seems to have been stopped. Or has it.

Just was thinking if 1 team got >200 seemed like other team was getting <100 but could just be confirmation bias with my head full of flu.