University Challenge: Cromarty(IV) on Southampton's match against Somerville

Can it really be that three weeks have passed since our first University Challenge quarter-final was broadcast?  Apparently, it can.  Here we were again this week, battling it out to access the fast track to the semi-finals.  But to coin a phrase from Peter Davison’s final scene as Doctor Who, it felt different this time.

I say that because our opponents on this occasion, Somerville College, Oxford, were in a position that none of our previous opponents have been in: we’d already watched them in battle by the time our paths met.  Their resurgence to overcome Clare, Cambridge was played out right before our eyes, and we’d heard some very good things about their previous performances, so there was no doubt that our work was set out for us on this occasion, more so than ever before.  If we were able to overcome these quizzing powerhouses, we would achieve something that Southampton had never achieved before on University Challenge – a place in the semi-finals.  The scene was set.  Battle began with our first starter for 10.

This first starter was snapped up by Somerville’s Chris Beer, which unlocked a bonus set concerning novels set in London.  This set the tone for the next two rounds of questions, in that the arts were on the cards in both the second and third starters (as well as the third bonus set), and they all fell to Mr Beer, who was already living up to the formidable reputation that we’d heard about.  55 points were on Somerville’s board after these three cycles, giving us a good reason to be a bit worried about the next 25 minutes…

With the fourth starter, literature was off the cards and chemistry was suddenly on them.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t worked with urea before the recording date of this game, so I couldn’t play my trump card.  Even more unfortunately, I performed two syntheses involving urea just two weeks ago, so it’s been at the forefront of my mind since then!

Starter no. 5 was all about a “Serbian city”.  The clues that were offered to us about this city largely related to the early centuries of the second millennium AD, so I suspected that David was lined up to buzz in for it, until Paxo read out the giveaway clue – that it is the capital of Kosovo.  I pounced for my own buzzer in a knee-jerk reaction to the last clue, thinking that all eight of us in the hotseats would have done the same, and was genuinely stunned to win what I thought was an eight-way buzzer race!  By the time Roger Tilling had called “Southampton, Evans”, I had two cities in my head, Podgorica and Pristina – and I just couldn’t let Somerville take control of the question.  I swiftly purged Podgorica (which, as I knew deep down, is the capital city of neighbouring Montenegro) from my mind and stumbled my way to an answer of “Pristina”, which took us off the zero-point mark.

“Films based on journalistic works” was the theme for our first set of bonuses.  Now, back when I was 9 or 10 years old, the cinema was the subject that really fascinated me, and I would memorise long lists of films based on their release dates, cast and crew.  This served me very well in our second round match, but it wasn’t quite so helpful this time; we were able to identify The Killing Fields and Adaptation, but not Saturday Night Fever.  Having watched the game live on air this week, I now see the irony in our failure to get SNF: on the evidence of the first five minutes, only one team was doing a good job of Staying Alive, and it wasn’t Southampton…

Médecins Sans Frontières, whose logo served as the first picture starter, were of very little assistance in keeping us alive – Matt buzzed in and said UNICEF, but I think he saw the correct answer seconds too late.  Chris Beer couldn’t find MSF either, but it was he who netted the picture bonuses when he took the following starter, thus meaning that all four of Somerville’s starters so far had ended up in his pocket!  Is that a record blitz start by an individual who ultimately wasn’t to get every single one of their team’s starters?  Possibly.  The ensuing picture bonuses, on other organisations to have won the Nobel Peace Prize, were tricky, but the UN Peacekeepers were correctly identified.  I’m vaguely surprised that, this being the BBC, there was no reference to the EU in this round…!

One of the many morals of this episode is that NHK is most certainly not the state broadcaster in North Korea, as that man Chris Beer found out to his cost when Paxo seemed to find that answer amusing!  Perhaps the amusement came from the fact that this game was filmed shortly after the worst of Kim Jong-Un’s threats of nuclear war against the USA, and that the self-styled Democratic People’s Republic of Korea had been front-page news for at least a month.  I really should have recognised “NH” as signifying “Nihon”, seeing as I studied Japanese at GCSE level, but I didn’t, so no progress was made there.

Bob identified the term corona approximately 1.5 seconds before I did for a subsequent starter, but the ensuing bonuses, on disorders of the eye, were of no use to us.  I have received a small amount of abuse in this past week for not recognising “astigmatism”, which a number of my friends tell me they suffer from!  After failing to score in this set, I was suddenly overcome by the realisation that the time in the competition had come when the difficulty level of the questions was really being stepped up.  With Somerville firing on all cylinders, I began to fear that this was the beginning of the end for Southampton.  But I couldn’t afford to lose sight (pun not intended) of what we really needed to do in the minutes ahead: get some more points on the board!

An intriguing starter about “who occupies the northeast”, given the occupants of the southwest and southeast, did us no favours in that regard (or any other regard).  My mind immediately turned to major conflicts involving English monarchs, with the English Civil War sticking out strongest for no apparent reason.  I had nothing to lose by buzzing in, so I buzzed in and tried Charles I, but this wasn’t the answer on Paxo’s card.  Nor was James I, as suggested by Sam Walker.  It was George IV, whose statue occupies the northeast plinth in Trafalgar Square.  I may not have found the right answer, but I had at least crossed off a bizarre bullet point on my “list of things to do while on UC”, namely to give the name of an English monarch as the answer to a starter question! 

Thereafter, two more starters went Somerville’s way, and so did a memorable series of Paxmanisms, which never fail to liven up a game.  The first of these came when economics (and philosophy and politics) student Michael Davies took a series of bonuses on economics, including one on President FDR’s New Deal, without pausing for breath!  “Some people find these questions quite difficult!” complained our chairman, forcing Mr Davies into an apology!  I, myself, am no expert on economics, but I did write two essays about the New Deal in my school days, so I did envy Somerville for having control of that particular bonus.  The second Paxmanism was directed at Chris Beer, for his apparently unbelievably quick recognition of a Herb Alpert instrumental.  “I can’t believe you confessed to that!” Paxo exclaimed.  Well, you can’t accuse Chris of aping Phil “I’m embarrassed to know this, but it’s Celine Dion” Ostrowski!

I’ve mentioned the what-I-call “losing streak effect” a few times over the course of this series, by which teams that are consistently being outbuzzed tend to retreat into their shells and lose at least a bit of confidence in their instincts.  When we didn’t buzz in on an elementary maths starter, I was under no illusions that we were certainly being struck down by the effect.  I worked out that the answer was 6 (my one-time lucky number, no less, and the perfect number that served me so well in our repechage game) pretty quickly, but my confidence was not there, so my buzzer remained quiet.  My buzzer also remained quiet when we were asked to name the opera from which the aria “I am the Widow of Mao Tse-Tung” comes – I wouldn’t have been anywhere near certain that Nixon in China was correct, but I could, and should, have gone for it.  I really kicked myself on Monday at this point because I knew the answer immediately… albeit 10 months too late!

A starter about a magnesium alloy used in nuclear reactors meant rather less to me than it perhaps should have done, but Matt was able to capture it, so we got our hands on a bonus set about a US architect.  I was relieved that we could sweep the board on this occasion.  What I wasn’t so relieved about was the second picture starter, which immediately followed this bonus set: asked to identify the political philosopher in the portrait on our screens, I took a punt at Jeremy Bentham, but it was Zac Vermeer’s punt at John Locke that was correct.  (I trust that Zac won’t do a Guttenplan!)

Apparently, Edmund Burke was not as fat as Paxo thought he was.  I certainly didn’t expect to hear that, to coin a phrase from Harry Hill.

Going into the final quarter of the match, three terrific bonus rounds awaited the teams – their subjects being a planet of the Solar System, years of the 1920s and an African country.  All of these would have been good rounds for us (I always enjoy it when a “name the year in which the following took place” round comes up), but we only got to tackle one of them, and it was the African country round.  Once we knew that the African country in question was Senegal, there was no holding back, although this did mean that we dropped the first bonus.

I took a guess at the next starter, which related to logarithms, but to no avail.  It was one of those questions where it’s incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to work it out accurately in your head at high speed under the studio lights, so all I had to go on was my mathematical intuition, which my A-Level maths teacher was keen to encourage in his students.  My answer was 3, but ten points would only have come our way if I’d said something much larger: 81!  With a new starter question being read out immediately, I couldn’t stop to convince myself that 81 was correct, so the question slipped my mind, and remained slipped until Monday night!

For this new starter, David intervened quickly, spurred on by his very strong knowledge of all things Roman – but he unfortunately gave the name of a country (Brittania), whereas the question went on to ask for the name of a city (York).  Zac Vermeer couldn’t identify York, and David lost five points.  I watched on the screen before me as our score fell from 75 to 70… but for some reason, Paxo paused the recording at this point and asked, “Did we take 5 points off you, or did we forget to do it?”  I assured him, in all honesty, that the penalty had been applied, and so we moved swiftly on.

UK general elections were mentioned right at the beginning of the penultimate starter of the game, which made my eyes light up somewhat; were it not for the losing streak effect, I might have come up with an answer (that there were 4 general elections in the 1950s) more quickly.  As it was, Matt beat me to it, and so we made it to 80 points.  When Bob answered a subsequent microscopy bonus with a very firm “It’s dead”, hilarity ensued across the studio!  Looking at the four of us by this time, you could have been forgiven for thinking that the question was about us…

One final starter was forthcoming.  It was about a human intestinal parasite.  I only had one answer in my head from that moment onwards: tapeworm.  This was partially because my flatmates, two of whom study medicine, had mentioned tapeworm in a decidedly unsavoury dinner table conversation a few days/weeks earlier!  With only one answer coming to mind, I was in no mood to buzz, because whenever I’ve had only one answer in my head in every previous episode of UC that I’ve contested or watched, my one answer has always been both predictable and wrong.  However, I was also desperate to reach 100 points, so I ultimately decided to chance my arm after all.  Much to my astonishment, I was right!  Sadly, the gong stopped us at 95.  I joined the audience in applauding the very worthy winners of the match, whose score was resting at 215.

In his closing remarks, Paxo accused us of being a lot less lively than usual, and we could hardly argue with him on that one.  So, in response to all of you who’ve been speculating over what happened to us in this game, I largely attribute it to the losing streak effect.  We’ve seen many times that a team that’s never quite managing to reach its buzzers can go one of two ways – down and out by buzzing with reckless abandon and getting many penalties, or back and out by being shocked into silence.  When Somerville got going very quickly in the early questions, I think we all went back and out.  The questions in this game were not particularly ideal for us – certainly not relative to those we got in our first quarter-final – but, as we’ve been saying to each other a few times since this one, there were several starters for which we had good answers in our heads, but we didn’t offer them up because of that loss in confidence that a battering on the buzzer brought over us.

Plus, to coin a phrase from former UC champion Sean Blanchflower, our fear of losing to Somerville probably played its part in ensuring that we did!  That said, I’m not particularly ashamed at having lost to them – we knew they were good, and they were simply too good for us on this occasion.  There’s no two ways about that.  Congratulations to them on making the semis – we shall look forward to seeing how they get on next!

The thing that is fairly awkward about the outcome of this match is our score of 95.  It means that we’ve now achieved the best individual score out of all the Southampton teams that have ever appeared on UC (335 in the second round), and also the lowest!  Needless to say, as we headed backstage at the end of the game, I didn’t feel that this was setting us up very well for our last quarter-final.  No team has ever made it to the semis with that low a score under their belts.  No team has ever made it to the semis with two losses under their belts.  There was also every possibility that our last quarter-final would be a rematch with SOAS (we didn’t find out whether or not this would actually be the case until some time later – and I’m not going to name our next opponents until we’re next on the airwaves!).  Could we pull off a comeback against all the odds, and make it through to the semis after all?

We’re back on Monday 10 March.  All the answers will be revealed there and then!

On a final note, for a reason that completely and utterly escapes me, I distinctly remember the George IV and urea starters being asked in our next game.  I can still hear Roger Tilling calling the name of one of our opponents from that game, and I can hear that opponent saying “James I”.  Don’t ask me why!  This is destined to become one of my life’s great unsolved mysteries!

Thanks once again to Cromarty(IV) for this input!