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

Happy belated New Year to you all!  I can’t be the only one who thinks that this series of University Challenge is absolutely flying past us, but maybe that’s partially because I’ve just watched our Southampton team’s fourth appearance on the show!  We’ve made it into 2014, and here are my recollections and reflections on our face-off with Queen’s University, Belfast.

I seem to have acquired a habit in recent months of landing right at the epicentre of massive cultural events, and always a few days before Southampton has taken to the airwaves for UC.  Two days before our second-round game went to air, I attended the fantastic Doctor Who 50th anniversary celebrations at London’s ExCeL Centre, featuring speakers from Tom Baker to Matt Smith, and culminating in the world premiere of that day’s celebration episode.  Two days before the broadcast of our first quarter-final, I paid a visit to the Millennium Dome (as it used to be known), for my first experience of a major concert.  I’d hyped it up a lot beforehand, and I’m pleased to report that Taylor Swift certainly delivered a storming show!

These events each made such an impression on me that I was left wondering, both times, whether our upcoming UC game would feel anticlimactic!  I needn’t have worried either time.  When this latest match began, I felt that we looked much more at home with proceedings than we had done in the past.  Having made it to the quarters, we were firmly engrained in the series’ line-up, and after three previous appearances, you’d probably expect us to have found our feet here in the studios!

Proceedings began with a serious embarrassment for me: asked for a name that connects a French dynasty and a biscuit, I thought that it was probably going to be “Bourbon” until I heard the word “biscuit”, after which it was unquestionably “Bourbon”, but I was beaten to the buzzer by Suzanne Cobain.  As a massive fan of Bourbon biscuits, I really wanted to grab that starter!

Bob got us going after the second starter, which unlocked some enjoyable bonuses on astrophysics.  I briefly studied the subject during my A-Level physics course and have done an optional module all about it since filming UC, so we were relieved to be able to sweep the board on this set, largely thanks to our resident physicist, David.  However, I hope that our two-word expression “Big Bang Theory” doesn’t go down as a notorious slip-up in years to come (we were given the points for saying Big Bang, in any case)!  Well, even if it does, at least it’s not as bad as the American quiz show contestant who identified “alligator” as an animal with three letters in its name…

Starter no.3 gave me a flashback to a one-off radio quiz broadcast from Farnborough College of Technology.  I was a contestant on it when I was 15 years old, one of a team of six representing my school, and one of the questions that came up was “What is the atomic number of tungsten?”  Even then, my interest in chemistry was well-known, and I raised a few eyebrows by buzzing in very quickly and saying “74”!  This time, it was Jeremy Paxman mentioning “atomic number 15”.  I knew that all eyes would be on me, including from my family in the audience, so I had to get to the buzzer before too long!  When I said “phosphorus” and bagged 10 more points, I relived the “tungsten” moment.  (Appropriately enough, Fifteen is also a Taylor Swift song title.)

Following a bizarre bonus set about “bodily secretions”, starter no.4 sounded completely incomprehensible at first.  It was something to do with assassinations of two people with a shared surname, in 1948 and 1984, who were not related.  Something suddenly clicked in my head midway through the question, and I worked out that these mystery assassination victims were Mohandas and Indira Gandhi, thus giving me a double (although, thanks to a slip of the tongue, I came out with Mahatma instead)!  Our reward was a trio of bonuses on wars, which we all know are good for absolutely nothing, unless you’re on University Challenge.  The Pastry and Toyota Wars were good nuggets of knowledge to have, and the Emu Battle was a terrific revelation!

Interestingly, I remember knowing the name “Toyota War” pretty quickly while seated in the chair, but watching the episode live in Southampton, the factoid had slipped from the forefront of my memory.  Usually, it’s been the other way round with these answers.

David grabbed the first picture starter, which depicted the nationalities of the last five Popes and led into a bonus round featuring more flag sequences.  I always look forward to these, so we had fun identifying NATO, the IMF and (eventually) the Commonwealth as the organisations whose leaders were being depicted.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the UN was not on the list – that’s definitely been in a previous picture round of this type.

From there on out, the starters just kept coming our way, including a delightful incident in which Matt thought he’d buzzed in too hastily and sounded resigned to a -5 moment with his answer “Simon Rattle” – much to his amazement, this was actually correct!  Bob recognised the name Guggenheim for another quick 10 points – in fact, he told me this week that, watching it back, he had forgotten just how quickly he had buzzed in on that one.  I hadn’t forgotten, on the other hand, how slow I was in recognising the Warsaw Pact, despite it being part of the “20th century history” minefield that I am really interested in!  Interspersing these starters was a decidedly strange one that we haven’t yet deciphered, and which I think is far too much to work out mentally under the studio lights: “What is the smallest positive integer that can be written in the form 375a + 147b, where a and b are integers?”  Alexander Green and I took unsuccessful stabs in the dark before being told that the answer, apparently, was 3.  I can now see that 3 is clearly the lowest common factor of 375 and 147, but I would never have worked out in the studio that this could make 3 a possible answer – or perhaps I’m still barking up the wrong tree?

The bonuses were an interesting bunch as well.  It turned out that I knew a lot less about the 2011 census than I thought, and that the 5-hour organic chemistry experiment in which I worked with an azeotrope was actually quite useful, what with the term azeotrope being an answer!  As with the phosphorus answer, I really had to get this one in order to avoid being thrown overboard by the chemistry department this week!

Our classical music expert, Matt, couldn’t capitalise when Joseph Greenwood dropped the music starter, which allowed Mr Greenwood to ensnare the music bonuses with a very impressive subsequent buzz about Voltaire’s dying words.  A few starters later, Queen’s also got their hands on a bunch of bonuses about perfect numbers, including the old quizzing chestnut “what is the first perfect number?”  I had an immediate flashback to our game against Loughborough, in which I buzzed in to answer this exact same question in a different format (what comes next: 8128, 496, 28…)!  Perhaps we wouldn’t have been given these bonuses if we’d got the associated starter!

Around this time, the bonuses that we did sweep up were, to an extent, reminiscent of questions from previous games in this series.  Terry Eagleton came up again, having haunted us in our first round game with his critiques of fellow authors; this time, I guessed that the writer being described was Frayling (rather than the correct answer, Eagleton), which got me a telling-off from Paxo for “thinking of Sir Christopher Frayling”!  I confess, I was thinking of Sir Christopher Frayling, and I even knew his full name, but we didn’t have any other answers to fall back on!

Then there was the inevitable round on “films whose titles contain a word from the NATO phonetic alphabet”, adding to the running theme that was established back in the first three shows of the series, and a good picture bonus set on Russian writers – when he identified Dostoyevsky for the associated starter, Bob very narrowly avoided getting a “next time, you must buzz straight away” from our esteemed chairman!  We didn’t avoid getting a lashing when we failed to recognise the “unmistakeable” Chekhov, though…

If the 20th century history specialist, the literature specialist and the classical music specialist among our team had received their callings by the three-quarter mark, it was suddenly time for the ancient history specialist to pull out his trump card: on cue, David took a full set of bonuses about enemies of Rome.  Suzanne Cobain recognised the house colours of the Suffragette movement to land Queen’s a bonus set about “separation”, but I feared that the game was definitely over as a battle by this point.  However, since one of my guiding mottos is “complacency kills”, I didn’t want to let my guard down or take my eye off the ball; instead, I took a half-guess that Churchill’s “greatest capitulation in British history” was the Fall of Singapore, which turned out to be correct.

Geological periods were on the cards for the ensuing bonuses, one of which was the Ordovician, which – as Owain Wyn Jones of Bangor pointed out in our last game – is one of the three periods whose names are linked to Wales.  Now, for some reason, I have never been able to assimilate a complete timeline of the geological periods into my memory, so although I knew all the answers once they’d been proposed by my colleagues, I would certainly not necessarily have come up with all of them on cue by myself.  Devonian was a good one on which to finish the trio.

If I had managed to avoid a chemistry department lynching on the azeotrope question, I finally earned myself one in the last five minutes by suggesting that toluene is used in the preparation of dynamite!  The correct answer was nitroglycerin, which I recognised straight away.  I’d just been looking in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If it had been a massive coincidence that perfect numbers and Terry Eagleton had cropped up for a second time in Southampton’s University Challenge 2013-14 career, the exchange of answers to a subsequent classical music starter blew them out of the water.  Compare and contrast:

(FROM THIS GAME) PAXO: “..are piano trios by which composer?”

MATT LOXHAM: “Schumann?”

PAXO: “No… Queen’s?”

JOSEPH GREENWOOD: “Chopin?”

PAXO: “No, it’s Beethoven.”

(FROM OUR FIRST ROUND GAME) PAXO: “10 points if you can name the composer.”

SOAS, MAEVE WEBER: “Schumann.”

PAXO: “No, you can hear a bit more, Southampton.”

MATT LOXHAM: “Chopin.”

PAXO: “Chopin is correct.”

The gong was undoubtedly imminent.  I was keen to grab just 1 more starter, as this would take my tally to 5 for this game, and carry on my trend of getting one more starter each time I stepped onto the set (2 against SOAS, 3 against Loughborough and 4 against Bangor – although I’d forgotten about the South Sudan question from the Bangor game by this time, which was technically a fifth starter from there).  Miss Cobain stopped Mr Evans from saying “Evans” on one of the remaining starters, which was a humorous happenstance, but Mr Evans buzzed in on a knee-jerk reaction to hearing the acronym ECHR thereafter, identifying it as the European Court of Human Rights.  My blood boiled when I uttered those words.  I am by no means a supporter of the one-policy party that calls itself UKIP, but I would describe myself as a soft Eurosceptic, and the ECHR’s sometimes excessive diktats have been known to make me sit back and sigh – so mentioning it on an outlet of the pro-Europe BBC was not necessarily on my list of things to do on University Challenge!

David was just jumping in on a starter about long-lived British monarchs when he was gonged out.  He would have taken us to 300, so we had to settle for 290.  I can’t complain about not making 300 for a second time – I, and I like to think we, enjoyed this game even more than our previous three, with the starters and bonuses being particularly well suited to our interests.  Plus, our supporters in the audience for this game included the President of Southampton’s Student Union (SUSU, after which our feline mascot is named) and, for the first time, my immediate family, so we just had to stay calm and enjoy this one for them.

Commiserations to Queen’s: you had some excellent buzzes over the course of the game, but as Paxo said, I’m afraid we never really let you into the match.  However, having beaten hot favourites Downing in round 2, you’re definitely not out of it yet.  We shall see in a few weeks’ time whether you will overcome a second Cambridge college, Clare, in order to be in with a chance of semi-final progression.

We’ll see you in three weeks’ time, when we try to get past Somerville College, Oxford in order to catch a fast train to the semi-finals.  Place your bets!

Also this week: RIP Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?  You were a great inspiration in my formative days as a quizzing fan, but I’m afraid you ran out of steam some time ago.

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