In fact, I’m Mr Evans from the Southampton University
Challenge team. Earlier this week, our
repechage match against Loughborough beamed its way onto BBC Two, and so I
thought I’d share a few recollections from the contestants’ desks.
I was awaiting the filming of this repechage match with a
mixture of anxiety and excitement. I’ve
been wanting to appear on UC for at least 9 years, and as exhilarating as our
first-round match against SOAS was, I was terrified that it would be my only
game. So when we got the call back to
the repechage stages, we resolved to play a much more brutal game on the
buzzers. We didn’t want to get outplayed
on the buzzers again and to leave the competition through silence!
These two repechage games were the first in the series to be
filmed in MediaCityUK, Salford, rather than Granada Studios, Manchester. Shortly after our arrival there on the day of
filming, we met the teams from Durham, Loughborough and Christ Church, and
learnt that our opponents would be Loughborough. My mind immediately cast itself back to the
British Universities Lifesaving Championships held the previous week, at which
I watched my friends flying the flag for Southampton… and the Loughborough team
winning a large number of events. I thus
had an “old score” to settle with Loughborough, making the match-up an
extremely interesting one!
In the studios, following Paxo’s introduction of our team, I
was able to introduce myself without fluffing my lines, which was a small
achievement in itself! (In the first
round, I somehow came out with “I’m originally from Frimley in Surrey”, and I
thankfully managed to drop the “originally” for this game.) I then turned my head to face our captain,
Bob De Caux, which I hadn’t done in the first round. It was another UC quirk which I just had to have
a go at! Unfortunately, there was no
fanfare for our team mascot, Susu the cat, this time around.
So on came the first starter for 10. The first clue of a question about “a given
name” played very much to the strengths of our ancient history specialist,
David Bishop, who grabbed it impressively quickly. This unlocked a series of bonuses on
Parliament, so I was very eager to have a go at them! Sadly, the Septennial Act of 1715 was not
something which I knew anything of, and I am still kicking myself for not
remembering that the Parliament Act was a direct response to the political
deadlock at Westminster in 1910.
Thankfully, I managed to avoid flopping completely on this subject that
I’m very interested in, by identifying the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act as a
product of Nick Clegg’s latter-day constitutional meddling. This took us to 15-0, so there was plenty of
room for the game to go either way.
For the second starter, on a three-letter prefix, I
considered “exo” almost at once, but wasn’t brave enough to chance my
luck. Bob was, and he earned us some
bonuses on songbirds in poetry. I’m
ashamed to admit that I’m not as well-read as I would like to be, so these
bonuses were never going to be my cup of tea, but I did manage to offer up the
correct answer to one of them! The bad
news was that my poor old blackbird wasn’t submitted as our final answer! On the recording, I am audibly surprised when
Paxo looks in our direction and says, “No, it is a blackbird”!
This was shortly followed by a great starter about the
British monarchy, another favourite subject of mine (I think there’s a bit of a
trend developing here). Embarrassingly,
I failed to pick up on the fact that William IV’s widow was certainly not Queen
Victoria’s mother, and Charles II’s widow was certainly not James II’s mother,
so my minus-five for saying “Queen Mother” was my just desserts! However, this premature buzz meant that I
could tick another prestigious item off my list of “things that I just had to
do while I was on UC” – namely to lose five points like that. When the question continued, only to reveal a
strong emphasis on the line “..who is NOT the mother of his successor”, I felt
rather foolish!
My next positive contribution to the game was to recall one
of the most often-churned-out nuggets of information from GCSE and pre-GCSE
biology, namely that malaria is transmitted by female Anopheles
mosquitoes. I then almost redeemed
myself for missing the blackbird question when a starter related to British
wildlife came up, but Ali Thornton beat me to it, identifying red and grey
squirrels and getting a set of bonuses on websites that I certainly wouldn’t
have been able to navigate.
Then came the first picture round. It was to do with the recent US presidential
election. It was a fantastic subject
area for me – or at least it could have been, had we not gone one election too
late every time! I had a sinking feeling
that I should have pushed 1992 a lot harder for the final bonus, what with
Texas showing up red again, a sure sign of the presence of a Bush. But I have no regrets over 1984/1980 –
Reagan, Mondale and Bush Snr were all around for both, so there was very little
to choose between for those two years!
(For the starter, I unfortunately didn’t look closely enough at the red
Massachusetts, so I was thinking along the same lines as Matt. When he came out with “bellwether states” and
then couldn’t stop himself from elaborating further, we could all tell that he
was wrong! That moment was one of our favourites
from this particular episode.)
By the time the music bonuses rolled around, I was just
starting to think to myself, “I’m not being very useful in this game” – after
all, the only thing I’d really done was to lose five points! I’d also lost a buzzer race to Kathy Morten
of Loughborough by what felt like nanoseconds, and hence missed the chance to relish
some chemistry bonuses that would have been home questions for me. (Watching these questions back, I’ve noticed
– or, rather, my sister noticed – that Paxo asks Loughborough to identify a
“cation” that forms a white precipitate when tested with silver nitrate
solution, although the correct answer is an anion – the very opposite of a
cation! Someone among the question
setters has been rather sloppy!)
I would also have loved to get the “You’ve Got to Pick a
Pocket or Two” bonuses, as my family are all fans of the musical genre – but I
might well have said “Omid Djalili” as Loughborough did, and thus been berated
by Paxo! (On that note: Paxo clearly
wasn’t aware that Djalili has actually played Fagin in the West End, and that
this answer wasn’t as bad as he thought!
And if Laurence Olivier had ever taken the role, that really would be
unmissable…)
The music bonuses gave Loughborough a five-point lead, so I
was more anxious than ever to get back into the game. It was a great relief all round for the team
when Bob worked to his strengths and solved a word puzzle relating to Asian
countries. When I watched the episode
back this week and saw the last of the bonuses that followed, I immediately
knew that the country that was governed by Spain for 400-odd years from 1492
was Cuba, which was not what we came up with in the game. It just goes to show that the old story is
very true: the studio lights do have a habit of frazzling your mind at times!
I should point out now that, back in 2007, five members of
my local chess club appeared on Eggheads.
In their episode, Judith Keppel failed to identify the numerical series
that started with 6 and 28 – they are, in fact, perfect numbers, and I looked
the term up shortly after the episode aired.
It turned out that the next two perfect numbers after 28 were 496 and
8128. So when Paxo read out a starter
question that began, “8128, 496”… I had a feeling that there was only one way
this was going. I mashed my buzzer and
said 6, gaining me one tally on the starter chart. (I seem to remember sounding ridiculously
overexcited when I said 6, and much to my relief, it doesn’t show too badly on
the broadcast!)
Our reward was a set of bonuses on bread. The good news was that I am renowned in my
household for eating more bread than everyone else put together – I absolutely
love the stuff! The bad news was that I
am not a baker, and nor do I know very much about international breads, so I
couldn’t offer much in the bonuses. The
other good news was that we had definitely regained the initiative and were
beginning to power away on the scoreboard.
I threw a bit of a spanner in the works by buzzing in on a
subsequent starter as a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the name F Scott
Fitzgerald. The QI klaxons silently went
off all around me as I said The Great Gatsby.
Bob later admitted that he knew the correct answer, but his buzz-in
wasn’t at knee-jerk speed, so a good opportunity was sadly missed there.
David got an opportunity to stand in the spotlight when a
series of bonuses on military engagements of the 1500s came our way, and he
ably took control of them, with a small amount of support from my appalling
pronunciation of Tenochtitlan (or “Tenoch”, according to Paxo)! The starter that followed shifted the focus
from centuries-old history to 20th and 21st century
affairs, so the onus was on me to get this one.
(Actually, the broadcast shows that Matt turns and looks in my direction
hopefully midway through the starter!)
“Add the number of the current French republic” – I pictured
the number 5 in my head – “..to the number of permanent members of the UN
Security Council” – I pictured another number 5 and made 10, then waited for
the next clue – “What number results?” I
was extremely surprised that this question didn’t go on any further. Either way, I took to the buzzer and made 10
more points. The adrenaline rush from
going to the buzzer so quickly was fantastic, which is yet another reason why I
strongly encourage anyone who’s thinking of applying to appear on UC to get out
there and have a go!
The following bonuses were on “an acid”, namely uric
acid. Strangely enough, Matt’s first
starter in our first round game was also about uric acid. I, still dazed from saying the number 10,
couldn’t think of the name, so we went with a bit of a comedy answer to move
the game on; I hope “ornithic acid” will never fail to make me smile!
With less than 3 minutes to go to the gong, and our lead
standing at 105 points, I allowed myself to break slightly out of the mindset
that I’d been adopting all through the game (“You’re probably not going to
win”), and I accepted that we were home and dry. I had decided even before our first-round
match to go into every game expecting to lose, as I do whenever I play chess,
thus forcing me to play with all guns blazing all the way through – largely
because of the sad story of last year’s Lincoln College, Oxford team. But our lead felt absolutely unassailable by
this point. I felt sorry when Katie
Spalding buzzed in on the next starter to no avail, with a resigned tone of
defeat in her voice. Grant Craig won a
terrific buzzer race on a chemistry starter thereafter, beating Bob and I by
the narrowest of margins, allowing Loughborough to take their bow with a set of
bonuses on their institution’s famous strength – sports!
The final starter of the game involved a quotation about
treaties with Russia. I had a flashback
to my A-Level history course on German nationalism in the 19th and
early 20th (ie up to 1919), in which that exact quotation (or a form
of it) featured prominently at one stage.
The buzzwords “which statesman” were all I needed to hit the buzzer,
deliver the Iron answer “Bismarck” and bring the curtain down on the show. Just as Bob was answering the first bonus on
our behalf, the gong went, confirming a victory for Southampton by 185-80. (We had to reshoot the “Kim” answer several
times. We variously jumped the gong,
were beaten by the gong and got drowned out by the gong, while we were supposed
to be saying “Kim” just on the gong, which led to much mirth from Paxo!)
I’m slightly less happy now with the outcome of this show
than I was in the studio. There were
plenty of bonuses that were very gettable for us, but we just threw them away
somehow or other. But the main line was,
and is, that we had succeeded in doing what we came back to do: we were much
better on the buzzers than before. We’ve
seen many times that a team with ultra-fast buzzer speed can win a match with
deeply lacklustre bonus conversions simply by keeping their opponents quiet. That was why we had to up our game on the
buzzers, and I’m pleased that we managed to do so. 185 is not a bad score by any means, or so I
felt while I was sitting in the chair.
We nearly made 200, but I was happy to settle for 185 – on the condition
that we scored at least 190 in round 2!
I ended the show with the notoriously slightly clumsy
“Goodbye from Southampton” moment, in which I unintentionally channelled the
great Corporal Jones by waving and saying goodbye considerably later than my
three allies!
When I phoned home a few hours after leaving the set, I
summed up the experience with just six words.
I had won a game of University Challenge, something that I’d wanted to
do since I was ten years old. “I can die
a happy man,” I said.
(Thank you Mr Evans for your comments; much appreciated!)
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