Friday 1 November 2013

University Challenge: Cromarty(IV) on Southampton vs Loughborough

Hi all, I’m the shady figure known on these pages as Cromarty(IV), a name which combines my interest in the eternally hypnotic tones of the Shipping Forecast and one of the notation systems that I regularly deploy in my chemistry degree.  (By writing Roman numerals immediately after the name of an element in a compound, often a metal, it denotes its oxidation state, which is roughly analogous to the charge that the element would carry if the compound were purely ionic.  I couldn’t resist choosing IV for my penname, because Cromarty-Four doesn’t sound too far removed from “Cromarty, Forth”, which are two consecutive area names in the Shipping Forecast!)

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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