TV Watch - University Challenge

Repechage Round – 2/2 – Christ’s Cambridge v. Emmanuel Cambridge

JP seemed almost indecently eager to crack on with the show tonight. He introduced the two colleges as next door neighbours, introduced the two teams, and we were off. On paper, this was going to be a very close match. However you may recall two weeks ago that Emmanuel seemed to benefit from a couple of marginal Paxman calls for two starters, and some people have felt that they were rather lucky to gain their place in the repechage round. Well, time would tell.

Anderson of Christ’s took the first starter, on a word with a whole plethora of definitions, the word in question being ‘device’. From then on, though, Emmanuel consistently beat them to the buzzer, not allowing them another look in until the match was safe, and dead as a serious contest. By half time Emmanuel had a 100 point lead. By the 20 minute mark they looked certain for the highest score of the series so far, and even had a chance of crashing through the 300 point barrier.

Full credit to Christ’s for not giving up, though. In the last ten minutes John Anderson and Will Critchlow particularly started to build up the score towards three figures with some timely starters and bonuses. I have to pay tribute to Emmanuel’s captain Alex Guttenplan. He stood out in this show, winning the majority of Emmanuel’s starters. I don’t know if it was just me, but it seemed like there were a lot of science based starters tonight, but Mr. Guttenplan showed a very wide range of knowledge as he ate up starters across the board. Well done , sir. Emmanuel won by 280 points to Christ’s 105, which was the highest score of the series so far. As the impressed Jeremy Paxman pointed out – “You were on fire tonight. “ Which brings me to : -

Jeremy Paxman Watch

I thought that JP seemed to be rather on autopilot tonight. Yes, there was a little flash of temper when the teams were given as a starter a phonetic rendition of the words “Call me Ishmael “ , and then asked to identify what it said, and who wrote the novel it begins. Jenny Harris buzzed in, gave half an answer, - call me Ishmael – then hesitated for half a minute before offering “Moby Dick”. Then Christ’s buzzed in, and offered exactly the same answer. If there’s one thing our Jeremy doesn’t seem to like its people not paying attention, and he barked out that he had asked for the name of the author. Other than that he kept himself on rather a tight leash, even pulling himself back at one stage, when he told one of Emmanuel
“Well done ! Spectacularly good guess. “ he immediately qualified it with, “ Maybe it wasn’t a guess. I’m insulting you. “ Its never seemed to bother you before, Jeremy.

Interesting Fact That I Didn’t Already Know Of The Week

I’m a member of Butterfly Conservation UK, so I did actually know that the Spanish for butterfly is ‘mariposa’. However I did not know that mariposa is derived from the phrase Maria posa – which means the Virgin Mary is resting. Brilliant. Seriously, it was worth watching just for that.

Looking forward to next week, when round 2 begins.