University Challenge 2014-15: Series Highlights

OK guys, time for me to give my annual series highlights post. This might be a bit harder than the past two years, but I'll try.

We'll start, as usual, with my favourite match for each stage of the contest:

• First Round + Play Offs: Leicester vs Open, by a country mile. Selwyn beating Manchester and the huge victories of Caius and Durham also stand out.
• Second Round: Durham vs York.
• Quarter-Finals: Definitely Caius vs Magdalen; their preliminary victories also stand out.
• The Final Three: The final, followed by the first semi.

Like last year, there were very few close matches. The fact the joint smallest win of the series was by 10 points, and it and all the other narrow-ish results were all low scoring games tell something.

As for the spread of institutions competing, the big news was the return of the Open University after a fifteen year absence. After last year's Oxford-Cambridge imbalance, order was restored with five from each. And London's representation went up to four from last year's one. Also, the post '92 unis were represented for the first time in years by our friends Oxford Brookes.

Now for the records: biggest score of the series was Magdalen's 315 against Trinity in the preliminaries; that match also saw the biggest win of the series, at 260 points. The lowest score of the series is Brasenose's 35 against Durham in the first round.

Now, time for some series highlights:

• "Thalium?" "Valium?!" "Thalium!"
• LSE suggesting the Pet Shop Boys wrote 'Hit me with your rhythm stick"!
• Liverpool guessing 'Vladimir Putin' for a Russian physicist!
• "Hoar!" Also, "Philip Larkin?!"
• "What happened to you?!" "We were waiting for musicals!"
• Cameron Quinn's "The Smiths", followed by a hair flick! Shame we never saw any more of those!
• "Sex?" "Correct!" Also some more lucky guessing from the same show.
• York's expert knowledge of the alma mater of TV characters.
• "Amsterdam!"
• "Your bonuses are on sausages Bristol!" And they won the match on them!
• "Even More Freakonomics?!"
• Mr Crew's forgetting to buzz! (Now, that caused some discussion on here)
• "Gangnam" (No YouTube remix though!)
• A suggestion that Millwall opposed the banning of shin kicking!
• "Some Peter out, some...?" "Peter Pan?" No, "pan out"!
• "Hapax legomenon!"

Anyone got any more?

I'm amazed I managed to come up with that many, TBH. As Dave Clark said on LAM earlier, Paxo has been surprisingly quiet and well behaved this season. Not very many memorable Paxo-isms this season, but what we did get tends to have been quoted frequently.

So, I'll finish by once again thanking the production team for another fascinating series of UC, which has been interesting to watch and report on. There are a couple of things I would like to see fixed next series, especially the penalty harshness that overshadowed a few matches this series. But, whatever the case, I keenly await the next series, and hope it will be another fine series to commentate on.

I'll maybe post some more thoughts of women on the show and format reform next week. I also suspect I'll be talking about the Brain of Britain final on Monday night; we shall see.