Monday 2 December 2013

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

Greetings from Southampton!  It hardly feels like two minutes since our game against Loughborough was on the air, but here we were again on University Challenge last week, facing off with last year’s semi-finalists, Bangor University.  Here are a few recollections from the surreal POV of a contestant in this fixture.

We arrived at MediaCityUK with plenty of time to go before we were due to take to the studios, and one of the ways that we passed the time was to watch the Clare – Christ Church match from backstage.  Between us, we couldn’t predict a winner with any confidence, but even so, the sense of disbelief among us when the game went to a tiebreaker was palpable!  I don’t think I’ve ever been so close to the edge of my seat when watching UC – probably because the two teams involved in this tiebreaker were teams that I’d got to know personally!  “Beat that,” I thought to myself thereafter.  “How can we possibly top that game for sheer spectacle?”

The battle of wits between Clare and Christ Church was certainly a very tough act to follow.  Nevertheless, when we took to the studio for our second-round game (accompanied by Susu the cat, as ever), I felt much more at ease with the whole thing than I had done in our previous games.  Maybe I was finally starting to get used to it.  Or maybe not.  My pretence of a steady nerve fell to pieces as soon as Paxo unveiled the first starter for 10.

Before the cameras started rolling, I’d noticed at least two members of last year’s Bangor team sitting in the audience, giving heavyweight backing to our opponents.  When Anna Johnson bagged the first starter and her quartet proceeded to sweep the board on a lovely bonus set about statues of fictional characters, a convincing victory for Bangor looked like a clear and present danger!  (We were fully aware that they could be a fiery team on the buzzers because they impressively snared one of the pre-show warm-up starters in double quick time.)

An early intervention from Bob on the starter that followed meant that we were able to tick off another entry on the “list of things that you have to do while you’re on UC”, namely to go into negative points!  Our stay in that most ignominious of regions didn’t last long, though, as Matt, Bob and David grabbed one starter each in quick succession to pull us out into the lead.  The “colours of the year” bonuses that came our way were delightful, especially “Tangerine Tango” – we deciphered the two clues that led us to that name, but it sounded so implausible that we were slightly reticent when declaring it as our answer!  Who thought the power of guesswork could get us so far?  Well, you certainly wouldn’t get that question on a National Lottery quiz…!

With the first picture starter, depicting 5th Avenue in New York City, Matt established himself as a force to be reckoned with on the buzzer.  I was pleased that we got to deal with the NYC picture bonuses – I’ve only visited the city once, and that was nearly a decade ago, but my younger self was mesmerised by his experiences there, so I hoped I could call on my travel log to beat the bonuses.  Alas (or thankfully, depending on which way you look at it), my teammates identified Times Square and Broadway almost before I’d had a chance to look at the pictures!

Following on from NYC was a starter question that couples nicely with the Dvorak episode from last week’s match, in a slightly morbid manner of speaking.  Paxo asked us to spot the next country in a clockwise sequence after Ethiopia that borders Sudan, and I buzzed in on a knee-jerk reaction and said “South Sudan”.  Our esteemed chairman paused before saying no, which led me to fear that I’d made a disastrous mistake.  Apparently, I had, because the answer on his card was Kenya… but close inspection of an accurate world map reveals that since the partitioning of Sudan in 2011, Kenya shares a border only with South Sudan!  We should have got 10 points!  (Surprisingly, and perhaps disappointingly after the Dvorak situation, the Daily Mail hasn’t got all fired up about this South Sudan question…)

I don’t regret not challenging the call in the studio, however.  It would only have disrupted the flow of the episode at a time when I was really focussed on moving forward.

Matt narrowly beat me to the buzzer on a starter about the cathode ray tube thereafter, and this was not the last time he would do that in this game!  The resulting bonuses were on 20th century history, which made my eyes light up somewhat, although I was ultimately less helpful than I would have liked.

A starter about the coat of arms of a European country fell very nicely into David’s pocket, gaining us some bonuses on graphic novels – the subject promised little for me personally, but the bonuses turned out to be quite gettable.  When we abruptly said Watchmen instead of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, I realised our mistake precisely half a second too late – and this was not the last time that this would happen in this game!

Following my second narrow defeat in a buzzer race by Matt, on a starter about the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, we failed to deliver on a bonus set about the Orange Prize, which inevitably led to some mockery from Paxo!  It was surprisingly enjoyable being on the receiving end of one of his insults, primarily because nobody can expect to take part in UC without being in that position, but also partly because we had it coming after the Margaret Atwood moment!

The music starter fell to Matt in the space of about one second, in which time I hadn’t even worked out what was playing!  Now that I’ve watched the question in the broadcast, I can just make out the word “firestarter”, but even then, I wouldn’t be able to buzz any faster.  What followed was an intriguing series of bonuses on songs that were banned by the BBC, which was a subject that I know has been employed before on UC.  Perhaps that’s why I had a feeling that Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax would not be turning up in this round.  Instead, we got Walk Like an Egyptian by The Bangles, which I recognised, although I had no idea that those over-paranoid lefties at the BBC had banned it during the Gulf War.  Matt’s George Formby impression helped me to recall the name George Formby on the last bonus.  That incident speaks volumes about the merits of teamwork on UC: I didn’t recognise Formby from the song, but Matt did, only he couldn’t recall the name, and it was thanks to his Formby impression that we were able to drag it up.  As a result, we were ahead by 145-20.

Two starters were quickly dropped, including one featuring a line from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  I was disappointed not to have recognised the line, because when I was back in school, several of my friends and peers acted in a short production of this play, which I absolutely loved watching – and which I almost auditioned for before chickening out, much to my severe regret later on!

Following on from them was a good starter about the average kinetic energy of gaseous molecules; I recalled some A-Level physics knowledge and identified the expression as “3/2 kT”, prompting Paxo to correct my “three-halves” to “three-over-two”, for reasons best known to him!  The bonuses that this unlocked were also beauties, all about crystal lattices.  Polonium was an old quiz chestnut, but the latter two were only gettable thanks to the chemistry teaching that I received during my first term at Southampton.  That’s what I go to university for!

Catriona Coutts tried “Queen Anne Fund” on the next starter, but she was wrong; she’d narrowly beaten me on the buzzer race, and I would have said exactly that, so I didn’t know what to say when we had a free go.  I did know what to say for a subsequent starter about how many decades separated the first manned spaceflight and the last Space Shuttle mission – suddenly, I had reason to be very thankful that I’d been so intrigued by space exploration when I was much younger!

When a starter about the notorious Oxford comma came up, Matt beat me to the buzzer for the third time (and quite a few other contestants, according to the broadcast), unlocking some bonuses on national trails, during which my tentative guess of “Devon” did us no favours.

Bangor took the second picture starter, giving them a shot at a great bonus set involving military/political figures.  Our chain of 12 starters had ended, allowing us to rest our voices for a while!  Taking stock at this point, I didn’t quite believe what the scoreboard was telling us.  Having been silenced by SOAS for much of our first game, and struggled to shake Loughborough off our tails in our second, we had somehow built up a 200+ lead in the first three-quarters of this match.  I had never thought that this was possible – all four of us have decent all-round knowledge, but we’re no David Stainers or Kevin Ashmans (I certainly have no right to call my general knowledge fantastic), and we knew that Bangor had secured a good victory in their first round.  If anything, the moral of this story is that split-second victories in the buzzer races really can add up to something spectacular, and a set of questions that fall very nicely for one team over another can make all the difference, especially if both teams are competent.

In the final quarter, we suffered from two major embarrassments!  The first was when Matt answered a cell biology bonus (a favourite area of his!) with hemi-desmosomes, only for Paxo to stop the recording and have a long consultation with the adjudicator upstairs, who eventually declared that hemi-desmosomes was not correct… the correct answer being desmosomes.  The second came in a bonus round on “isograms”, which are defined as names in which no letter is repeated.  I think we all know that Liechtenstein is not an isogram.  On the plus side, one of the other isograms in question was Scunthorpe, which just so happens to be my dad’s place of birth, and where many of his immediate family still reside!

Bangor grabbed another starter and swept the board on some bonuses about the UN, but we were very much on full speed ahead, and Bob, David and I swept up the remaining starters, taking us over the magic 300 mark.  The oxidation state starter was a home question for a chemist – I clearly remembered when my A-level chemistry teacher identified hydrogen peroxide as an unusual molecular species, in that it contained oxygen in the -1 oxidation state (as opposed to the more usual -2), so I was able to pull that out of my hat on cue.

My second consecutive starter, the last one of the whole game, was definitely my finest hour on the buzzer.  “Cape Fear,” said Paxo – at which point I was thinking “Which one?  There are two films of that name!” – “The Age of Innocence” – I saw the only answer that he could possibly be after, and went straight for it on the buzzer.  They were connected by their director, Martin Scorsese, and nothing else that I was aware of.  I thereby accomplished a feat that Ronnie Corbett accomplished off-screen in 1980 by “answering the question before it was asked”!  With this answer, my nine-year-old self’s fascination with films and film credits finally became worth something, so it was my favourite buzz-in of the game for that reason.

The gong interrupted the bonus set that followed, leaving the final score at 335-60.  “You guys are on fire,” said a dumbfounded Paxo – but he was not as dumbfounded as us!  Bob’s delightfully unexpected “I won’t do a Guttenplan” remark said it all.  I’m relieved that the editors didn’t cut it out!  What I half-wish they had cut out was my “goodbye from Southampton” moment – for the second time in a row, I managed to do a Corporal Jones by saying goodbye distinctively behind cue!

Commiserations to Bangor, though; as I’m not the first to observe, they’re a much stronger team than the scoreline suggests, with a strong first-round victory under their belts, and a bonus conversion rate in this game of 77%, which is undeniably very respectable.  It just goes to show that we certainly focussed our resources in the right area between our first and repechage matches, namely buzzer prowess.  They always say there’s no smoke without fire, and if starter questions and buzzing in constitute fire, bonuses are analogous to smoke.  Bangor had the smoke in this game, but we had the fire (which The Prodigy started!), and that was what made all the difference.

After the cameras stopped rolling but before we left the set, Paxo asked Anna Johnson to elaborate on what her studies constituted.  The private lives of dogwhelk were then explained in great detail, which provided our chairman, the audience, her teammates and our quartet with great amusement!

When I headed back to the Manchester hotel that evening, I took stock of the day’s highly dramatic proceedings.  We were official quarter-finalists.  That was the stage that I’d really hoped we could get to.  Of the five Southampton teams that have tackled the show before us, none of them made it past the second round.  We were the first team from our university to get to the quarters.  That was quite a thought to end on.

I also discovered that night that The Saturdays had achieved a long-overdue No.1 on the UK Singles Chart.  That was the icing on the cake of an amazing 24 hours!

Thanks once again to Cromarty(IV) for these thoughts!

No comments:

Post a Comment