University Challenge 2026 First Round - Manchester v. New College, Oxford

The Teams

Manchester

Ray Power

Kirsty Dickson

Kai Madgwick (Capt)

Rob Faulkner

New College, Oxford

Benji Stimpson

Paige Crawley

Jonah Poulard (Capt)

Daan Timmers

All ready then? Eyes down for a full house. Kai Madgwick came in very early for the first starter, things named after the city of Nice. Never even got onto those horrible coconut biscuits – yeah, just my opinion and feel free to disagree. Abi Morgan stubbornly refused to yield any bonus points. Benji Stimpson opened New College’s account with my long time favourite Nina Simone. What seemed to be a relatively gentle set on Monmouth’s rebellion did not bring them any bonus points. Clues to descriptions of the rainbow saw Benji Stimpson beat Kai Madgwick to the buzzer, but an incorrect answer allowed the Manchester skipper to give the correct one. Artists and designers who collaborated with Merce Cunningham (from Happy Days?) brought two correct answers. Which brought us to the first picture starter. An alternative national flag saw a buzzer race between the two captains won by Kai Madgwick who identified it as belonging to New Zealand. More flags with native flora or fauna brought Manchester the first full house of the whole competition. Nobody seemed to have heard of a depot injection for the next starter. A question which namechecked the Aztec fondness for crunchy frog tamales saw New College lose another five for an incorrect interruption and Manchester took advantage and earned two bonuses on theoretical physics while I earned a lap of honour for knowing that the theoretical particles named after the Greek for swift are tachyons. Manchester led comfortably by 70 – 5.

1837 History of the French Revolution? Gotta be Carlyle, but both teams sat back a moment or two before Paige Crawley buzzed in with the right answer. The 1954 FIFA World Cup brought two bonuses, but an inability to conjure up the name of Bobby Charlton’s brother Jack robbed them of a full house. Kai Madgwick knew various film directors called Jacques (Becker, Demy and Hattie?) Languages of India brought two bonuses and took us to the music starter. The more I heard of this piece from the 18^th century the more I thought it was Bach. Neither team did though. Jonah Poulard earned Amol’s approval knowing that the British Colonial Federation of Rhodesia and Nyassaland being dissolved in 1963 led to the independent countries of Zambia and Malawi. For the music bonuses pieces featuring more than two timpani brought precisely nowt. Daan Timmers knew about pair production for the next starter and the New College revival continued. Floods in Science Fiction brought a single bonus. Kai Madgwick was in very quickly to identify Morgan Le Fay as the legendary figure after whom the Italian mirage (the Fata Morgana) was named. To be fair to myself, protein shapes are of less interest to me than pasta shapes so I wasn’t surprised that I failed to add to my score. Manchester took two. The museum in the next starter in Barcelona wasn’t dedicated to Dali or Picasso, I reckoned so that brought Miro into the equation. Kai Madgwick thought so and it earned his team bonuses on Chinese history. Thank you very much, said Manchester and took a full house on Chinese Imperial dynasties. Kirsty Dickson buzzed in quickly to identify sarco as the Greek prefix meaning flesh. Lodis brought a full house, and despite New College’s mid round revival, Manchester led by 160 – 50.

For the second picture starter Kai Madgwick leapt a bit theatrically for his buzzer but Benji Stimpson beat him to identify a still from 12 Angry Men. (For some reason I have never yet seen this film. I really should.) 3 more Sidney Lumet film stills followed. New College only managed 1 but at least they were going again. Kai Madgwick leapt to the buzzer again, but just too early with the next starter allowing Paige Crawley in with the latin centum. Two bonuses on alphabets were taken, and captain Jonah Poulard was visibly becoming more animated with each correct answer. Paige Crawley, doing so much good buzzer work now, took her third starter knowing that the Phoenicians who founded Carthage came originally from Tyre. Nanoparticles? Nanothankyou I replied. I still knew Buckminsterfullerene. So did New College and more besides. The gap would still require more than one visit tot the table, but things were beginning to look interesting. Even more so when Benji Stimpson correctly linked Katherine Graham with the Washington Post. The petting of dogs in literature was a lovely UC special set which brought 1 bonus. Nobody quite knew the Medieval Warm Period and Kai Madgwick lost five for an unlucky early buzz. Again, Kai Madgwick buzzed early on Jebel Toubkal and lost five. He knew it was the Atlas Mountains, but that wasn’t the question. Jonah Poulard knew the country required was Morocco. Italian architectural terms brought two bonuses and narrowed the gap to five points. Paige Crawley took the next starter knowing the Ars Poetica of Horace. New College had wiped out a huge deficit and had the lead and all of the momentum. People sharing their names with European Capitals did not, annoyingly, ask for Karol Ljubljana, inventor of the hole in the lavatory seat. New College took the harder second but missed the easier first and third. Still Kai Madgwick hammered the buzzer on the next starter and this time he really hit the target knowing that we were talking about a Neutron star. Well, I wasn’t but you know what I mean. Just one bonus on rivers emptying into the Channel gave Manchester a five point lead. There was time for one more starter. The whole contest boiled down to this one question. Given several places in different countries Joah Poulard knew they each housed amphitheatres. He won the buzzer race, but . . . argghhh! He called them colosseums. Kai Madgwick gratefully came in with amphitheatres and the game was over. Very, very bad luck, but ultimately a correct call in my opinion. Manchester won by 170 to 150.

Well, at 20 minutes it looked like a fairly comfortable stroll in the park for Manchester, but a really splendid fightback gave New College at least the chance of a repechage spot and made for a very exciting contest. For the record New College had a BCR of 40 while Manchester’s was 67. So it’s a tribute to the New College buzzing that they managed to come as close as they did.

Amol Watch

It was a little bit much to say that every football fan in the country was cursing New College for not knowing Jack Charlton. Not everyone is obsessed with the boys of 66, Amol. Not any more, anyway.

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

The California Grizzly Bear as featured on the state flag is actually extinct.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

In medicine what five letter term is informally applied to a injection that delivers a slow release form of a medication – for example, contraceptives (incorrect buzz at this point ) for example contraceptives or anti-psychotics. They are so named because they create a reserve of the medication in the injected muscle. The word in question being used in other contexts to mean place where goods are stored. Hmmmm – dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum?

Mastermind 2026 First round Heat Four

Maybe unfairly, I often feel that when Mastermind returns after arbitrarily being taken off for a week or more the BBC owe us a top class edition. As we saw after the prolonged Christmas break last season, we don’t always get it. So would last night’s show go with a bang or turn out to be a damp squib?

Well, it certainly started brightly enough. Basab Majumdar was answering on the playing career of the great Sunil Gavaskar. Now, when I tell you that of all four of last night’s subjects this was supposedly my banker, then all that tells you is just how little I know about all four subjects. To be precise, I got none of these, even by randomly shouting out cricketing test playing countries whenever given the opportunity. Basab was very well prepared, and from where I was sitting a double figure score seemed the least that he deserved.

Alright, I have seen the first Hunger Games movie. That’s not where I got my singular specialist point from though. No, in a unit of work I taught for the last few years we used a passage from the original book which is how I knew Katniss’ little sister’s name. Thus concluded the specialist round for me. Not so for Hannah Mimiec. Like Basab before her she seemed very well prepared and a double figure round of 10 seemed only fair. I don’ know, there was something in the specialist rounds last night, which meant that each of them ended up with a point less than I would have said they were worth.

On with Miles Searle. Miles was answering on Leonard Bernstein. Again, this was another very well prepared contender. I don’t know much about Mr. Bernstein – as demonstrated by my zero points on the round – but this was a wide ranging, testing round. I thought that Miles was unlucky to miss out on double figures. Still, being realistic it did mean that he was only one point off the lead, with only one other contender to go.

That final contender was Devon Krohn. Devon is a teacher trainer. I’m not sure if that means she trains people to be teachers, or she delivers INSET to train people who are already teachers. Well, even if the latter is the case we won’t hold that against her. Ah, INSET, or as I like to think of it, the best part of 1000 hours of my life that I will never get back. However, I digress. Devon was answering on Edvard Munch, brilliantly, as it happened. She scored a perfect round answering every question correctly, yet only scored 11. It wasn’t as if she was going particularly slowly either. As I said, something in the air in last night’s show?

Normally you wouldn’t be first back to the chair for GK if you had scored 9 in the Specialist round. However that’s exactly what happened to Miles. How did he respond? By going like billy-o, showing an impressive breadth of knowledge and answering 13 questions correctly. All of which shows just how important momentum is. When you go first in the GK round all you can do is post the best score that you can and hope to do enough to at least put the others within the corridor of doubt. In Miles’ case this was a job well done.

It's relatively rare to see a round come completely off the rails. Poor Basab Majumdar had the horrible experience of needing to score 12 to just draw level, then seeing his first four answers miss the mark. I give him full credit for taking stock on the fifth, dredging up the right answer and building a score from there, but in all honesty it looked a struggle. He finished with a total score of fifteen. Sometimes it’s just not your night, I’m afraid.

To get 13 in a Mastermind specialist round you either need a very good general knowledge – you might almost say a quizzer’s general knowledge – or a lot of luck. Only having Hannah Mimiec’s round to judge by, I would say that luck didn’t seem to have much to do with it. She scored 9, a good total in this day and age, but not a great one. Not a quizzer’s one and not a heat winner’s one. She finished on a very respectable 19.

Only Devon remained. If you’re an experienced quizzer the answers contenders give to one or two specific questions will give you an idea whether the contender is going to finish with a big score or not. Devon gave a couple of these early doors in her round which made me think she was going to fall short of the target. Like Hannah before her she scored 9. That’s a good score and in the current era anything in the 20s is a good total. But even so it meant that she finished outside the winner’s enclosure.

So very well done to Miles. He hinted that he is a very young Masterminder indeed by saying that he is on a gap year before starting university, which means he may be 18 or 19. If he went on to win the series he would in that case be the youngest ever. Such talk is premature, so when he did explain that his Dad is a taxi driver and he thought he could maybe chalk up another one for the cabbies by going all the way, namechecking the great Fred Housego, I did worry a little. I just think that this sort of thing unnecessarily tempts Fate. Nonetheless, I give you my congratulations, Miles. Well done and best of luck in the semi finals.

The Details

Basab Majumdar	The playing career of Sunil Gavaskar	10	0	5	1	15	1
Hannah Mimiec	The Hunger Games	10	0	9	0	19	0
Miles Searle	Leonard Bernstein	9	0	13	0	22	0
Devon Krohn	Edvard Munch	11	0	9	0	20	0

Admitting you're a Mensan

I hope that I haven’t given the impression that I’m doubting the intelligence of any of the players in Destination X, because I’m not. Geographical knowledge, well, that’s maybe a different matter, but knowledge and intelligence are by no means the same thing. Now, episode 4’s ejected player, Chloe-Ann, revealed that she was a member of Mensa. During the show many of the other players singled Chloe out for her intelligence, which the editors gleefully used to heighten the shock when she was out.

Incidentally, I stopped paying the fees and let my Mensa membership lapse. This is not the reason for that, but personally, I never found that anyone who learned that I was in Mensa was very impressed to find it out. In fact, it was while this was passing through my mind watching the show on Thursday that it brought to mind probably the most ignorant comment ever made about Mensa to me. This was about five years ago An acquaintance I’d only met a few times got onto the subject of quizzing. “Well,” he asked at one point, “never mind pub quizzes and leagues, what have you won?” Well, I have done well in lots of things but haven’t won a lot of biggies, so I replied, “Mastermind and Brain of Mensa”. His brow furrowed. “Mensa?”  Then it darkened. “Jimmy Savile was in Mensa.”

In all honesty I couldn’t think of anything to say. Had I possessed any wit at all I might have said, “Yes he was. And you know, Adolf Hitler was in the Mothers Union and Jack the Ripper was in the Salvation Army as well?” But then, they weren’t, to the best of my knowledge while Savile was definitely in Mensa.

On reflection, I think that my actual reply which came after a few moments of silence was ‘Yes, I believe he was. I never met him.’ And I don’t know that anything other than that reply, and walking away after saying it would frankly have had the slightest effect.

Destination X - 3 and 4 - Spoilers

Well, being as I don’t have a Mastermind preview to post today – last week’s still stands – I thought I’d give you an update on Destination X. Yeah, I’m still with it, although not necessarily for the reasons the producers might hope.

Well, in this week’s two episodes we did get to see, I suppose, some of the treachery we’d been promised. Although I will have something to say about that. In episode 3 the first stop was a railway station, presumably in the middle of nowhere. The players were split into two teams and then given three challenges. Now, every member of both teams got to see several clues, one of which was a ticket to the Oktoberfest. There were others, but that was the most glaringly obvious clue seen by everyone. The team that completed the challenge got the other glaringly obvious clue – a magazine with an article about Harry Kane.

Now the three players who won this final clue, Nuclear Judith, Marketing Saskia and pilot Josh (my nicknames, no offense intended) decided to use a bit of disinformation and told the others they had seen people dressed in Borussia Dortmund kit. Before the map room there was a distraction when the three original dumped players returned, to face a challenge with the others or a place on the bus. Judith, Josh and Saskia as challenge winners were all exempt, and could pick one other player to go through. Liverpool James, who had an alliance with marketing Saskia, confidently stood in anticipation he’d be the one thus pardoned but Pilot Josh was having none of it and burst out with Taxi Daren’s name. (I was tempted to call him Jackie P’s husband, but I do find his constant references to her as Jackie P rather endearing). Saskia protested but to no avail.

Now, the challenge saw the three newbies each teamed with one of the old hands. The challenge actually required knowledge of places, or sheer luck. Liverpool James gulped apprehensively, and rightly so. Two by two the others claimed their places on the bus until only he and Economics Ashvin remained. In the short time he’s been with us Ash has seemed pretty much on a par with James as regards Euro cluelessness, but he won the challenge anyway.

So on to the destination and the map room. The three newbies were safe for now, while the others had to digest the fact that all the clues everyone has seen that they have been able to decipher point directly to Munich. Only Josh and Saskia now claim to have seen anything relating to Dortmund. Marathon Nick goes correctly with the body of evidence. Surf School Ben in his own words ‘ignores his gut feeling’ and goes for Dortmund. Ben is forced to leave the bus but at least gets to join in with some Bavarian dancing, and the majority of the audience at home are left to ask – how the hell did he not know it was Munich? Well, I have an idea about that which I will come to.

So to episode four. Now, it’s not clear whether Taxi Daren had also gone for Dortmund – but it looks likely. Still, he pushes the idea that the old hands must stay together and work against the three newbies. Challenges make it crystal clear that the destination is connected heavily with the film The Sound of Music. History Chloe-Ann doesn’t know where it was filmed. Taxi Daren strongly suggests they’re going to Vienna. No, says Sergeant Claire, it was filmed in Salzburg. Once in the map room, it looks as if Economics Ash is plumping for Vienna. However History Chloe-Ann definitely does, and she is the furthest away. Like Ben before her she laments not going with her gut.

Okay, observations. On the Traitors, when a majority of the remaining players decide to get you out there is nothing you can do. On Destination X, unless there’s some new rule or rule change that we haven’t foreseen in a upcoming show, nobody forces you to make the specific location choices that decide whether you stay or go. Let’s be clear on that. Thus far your fate has been in your own hands, and no amount of ‘treachery’ can change that.

So far, the destinations have been pretty clear if you ignore all of the white noise and concentrate only on the clues you yourself have seen or heard. Alright, we don’t all have the same amount of Geographical knowledge, to be fair. But if we take Ben’s case, he said he should have gone with his gut. I take a little issue with it. You see, all the knowledge he had, all of the primary evidence he’d seen told him it was Munich. I’d argue that it was his ‘gut’ that told him to go for Dortmund. Likewise, all the clues in episode four didn’t just point to The Sound of Music, they screamed it out in capital letters. Sergeant Claire even told Chloe-Ann it was filmed in Salzburg. Alright, maybe Chloe-Ann has never seen the film. Well, neither have I. But come on – the hills are alive with the sound of Music. Well, there ain’t many hills that are alive with the sound of music in Vienna. But Chloe-Ann still went for Vienna. She claimed she should have gone with her gut. Again, I think she did go with her gut – her gut feeling that Daren, with whom she had shared the prize for winning the first challenge, was telling her the truth, the gut feeling that made her ignore the facts as they were. I suppose you could claim that this is a form of confirmation bias.

So I shall watch the show again this coming week. Not for Rob Bryden, although he does his job perfectly well. Not for the challenges, although these are proving to be quite fun. Not for the minuscule amount of scenery we get shown. Not for the players being sneaky to each other. No, I am primarily interested, I will admit, in just how obvious the destinations will continue to be and just how players continue to convince themselves to plump for the wrong one. Which I suppose is schadenfreude. Well, I don’t have to like myself for watching it.

University Challenge 2026 Round 1 heat four - Newcastle v. Edinburgh

The Teams

Newcastle

Anna McCully Stewart

Alice Groth

Laurie Guard (Capt.)

Dan Hill

Edinburgh

Parthav Easwar

Johnny Richards

Alice Leonard (Capt.)

Rayhana Amjad

Well, at least we were allowed to watch OC and UC last night, which is something.

A first starter on films with the word ‘All’ in the title allowed Anna McCully Stewart to open the Newcastle account with an early buzz. I really liked the bonus set on books read by the Monster in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” – I always thought that the Monster was more of a ‘Titbits’ sort of guy. (Ask your grandparents). Two bonuses were taken. Poor Alice Groth fell right into the trap with the next question. Ullrich Salchow and Alois Lutz identified the sport in question, but she answered with ice skating – while Amol had asked for the correct specific term. Parthav Easwar went the wrong way, trying his luck with ice dancing, while figure skating was the answer required. For the next starter Rayhana Amjad began Edinburgh’s run for home by recogising Simone de Beauvoir’s “Must we burn De Sade?” World capitals and languages brought us both a full house. The next starter asked for the three letters ending a series of words to which we were given the definitions. Newcastle skipper Laurie Guard came in too early with -asm and for the second consecutive starter Newcastle lost five. I’ll talk more about that later. Johnny Richards waited to hear the full question then gave the correct answer of mma. The French actor Vincent ‘Qui?’ Cassel brought two bonuses and the picture starter. Lovely one this. I have never seen the flag of the Russia oblast Volgograd before. But I have seen photos of the Mother Russia statue featured on it, and I knew it is in Volgograd. Nobody had it although Dan Hill came close with Volga. Parthav Easwar knew that La Malinche helped the conquistadores to overthrow the Aztec Empire. This earned the picture bonuses on further flags of Russian oblasts and they didn’t do badly at all with them, scoring a full house. Parthav Easwar knew that pistachios are used in baklava (not only that but they were my least favourite flavour of ice cream available in the sadly missed Rossi’s ice cream parlour in West Ealing.) The human digestive system brought two bonuses. This meant that after Newcastle’s positive start Edinburgh seemed to have the whip hand, leading 90 – 10.

The next starter gave me this week’s baby elephant moment, but also a lap of honour. When it eventually mentioned human papillomavirus – HPV – and smear test the disorder in question had to be cervical cancer. Laurie Guard had that to set Newcastle moving again. A full house on Caspar David Friedrich – been a while since he was namechecked on UC – was swiftly taken. The clues were all there that the next starter was referring to Yeats (W.B. and not Eddie) and Rayhana Amjad gave the answer. Fast growing cities in Africa brought two correct answers. Rayhana Amjad seemed delighted to hear Amol announce that the music round was on Jazz. Nonetheless Dan Hill very nearly beat him to it. Sadly, he gave Art Brubeck as the answer, allowing Rayhana Amjad in with Dave Brubeck. I wonder – if Dan Hill had just said Brubeck, would Amol have accepted it? On balance I think he might well have. More tracks with titles referring to their time signature – look, just go with it, ok? – yielded nothing for their pains. I’ve never heard of tropicalia as referenced in the next starter but I still said Brazil. So did Johnny Richards, correctly. Dynasties of Roman Emperors proved tricky for Edinburgh and they only managed the Julio-Claudians. Newcastle’s bad luck on the buzzer continued when Dan Hill guessed that Jupiter was the second densest planet in the Solar System. Give that it also has the smallest radius Rayhana Amjad knew it had to be Mercury. French mathematician Sophie Germain promised me nowt, but, like Edinburgh I took one on Fermat’s last Theorem. You had to wait and wait with the next starter but as soon as Amol mentioned the Blue Rider Alice Groth was in with Kandinsky. Mythological depictions of scorpions brought a full house and made things look slightly better for Newcastle who now lagged by 55 to Edinburgh’s 145 at the 20 minute mark.

Both teams sat on their buzzers a little for the next starter but Rayhana Amjad worked out that if it’s in ACT it must be Canberra. Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi were not members of Steps, apparently, but architects who brought no more points to Edinburgh. So to the picture starter, and nobody recognised the Rokeby Venus of Velasquez – one of the most famous bottoms in the Art World (Venus’, that is, not Velasquez’s). Alice Groth knew the writer Alice Munro which won the picture bonuses. Other paintings that had, like the Rokeby Venus, been targeted by climate activists brought just one correct answer. Amazingly I got the next Science starter on things linked by the number three. I guessed the cusps mentioned belonged to the tri rather than the bi. Laurie Guard had that one. Endonyms brought us both two correct answers. I believe that having those two penalties early doors in the match had made Newcastle withdraw into their collective shell. Now they seemed to have surmounted that mental hurdle. Time, though, was not on their side. I think that Johnny Richards got the word young (youth) from the reference to the German word jugendstihl for the next starter– that’s where I got it from.’Not even wrong’ brought only one bonus, but Edinburgh were well over the event horizon by now. Dan Hill knew that the bloke in the Wilton Diptych was Richard II. The legacy of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” brought Newcastle a triple figure score at least. Several clues to the word bubble brought Rayhana Amjad another starter. Tuna in Japanese cuisine brought a full house. Nobody knew Bone mineral density for the next starter. There was just time enough for Alice Leonard to give weaving terms warp and weft to take her team to 200, against Newcastle’s 105 at the gong.

When they took starters Newcastle did not do badly with them achieving a good BCR of 67, noticeably better than Edinburgh’s 55. If you can’t at least achieve parity on the buzzer, though, you are always likely to struggle. Hard lines, and congratulations to Edinburgh.

Amol Watch

“Bad luck Dan,” said Amol in response to the Art Brubeck answer – “Them’s the breaks. Quite so.

Amol was pushing it when he said “plenty of time, Newcastle” just past 17 minutes.  

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

Shaming as it is to admit it, I was not previously aware that Dar Es Salaam means abode of peace.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

A test for which specific disorder was developed in the 1920s by the physician Georgios Papanikolaou? (who was surely a character in the League of Gentlemen. Hello Dave.) The test involves the collection of squamous and glandular cells, which are observed for abnormalities such as the presence of koilocytes, a hallmark of infection by the human papillomavirus and the test is often known - (here there was an incorrect buzz from Parthav Easwar) – by an abbreviation of Papanikolau’s name as a pap test or pap smear.

Need I say more? Dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum.

Off piste on the Butter Mountain

You must forgive me for going off-piste again with this post. Blame it on me being piste off that there's no Mastermind tonight

In the building where I work there is a ban on putting used Dolce Gusto/Nespresso coffee pods in the bins. And the thing is that I do like a Dolce Gusto when I sit down at my desk in the morning to find out how many calls to the DAP have come in overnight. Normally the empties are taken and disposed of by one of my colleagues. However, she was on leave all last week and part of the previous so on Thursday I took a carrier bag into work in which to carry away the empties and dispose of them elsewhere.

Come the end of the day, as I was taking my empties-filled bag to my car, my boss asked me what I was going to do with them. To which I replied that my plan was to add them to the EU’s empty coffee pod mountain. At this point it’s probably a good idea to tell you that my manager is still in her mid 20s. She looked at me askance. “You know,” I continued, “like the EU butter mountain?” No, of course she didn’t know. Total incomprehension. For one thing, we haven’t even been part of the EU for a good few years (sadly in my opinion, but feel free to disagree.) For another thing, according to my perfunctory research there hasn’t even been an EU butter mountain since about 2017.

I mean, it’s not that I’m nostalgic about the European butter mountain, you understand. I’m only nostalgic about the mental picture it conjured up the first time that I heard the phrase. When I was a kid it conjured up images of various woolly hatted continental types skiing down an unusually yellow and slippery mountain somewhere outside Strasbourg. I suppose I felt it belonged in the same category as Max Boyce’s outside-half factory and Ken Dodd’s jam butty mines. Somehow I can’t see the Destination X team visiting any of those destinations. Well, not in the first series anyway.

It's sodding started early this year.

It’s sodding started, hasn’t it. Look, I get it that the ending of the England v. India 5^th test was a big sporting occasion. Not of that much interest to me if truth be told, but I get it. But come on, don’t take Mastermind off to make room for it. Or if it HAS to be one of the Quizzy Monday trio, then take it in turns. This time Only Connect, next time UC and then Mastermind after that. Not gonna happen. What makes it worse is that I didn’t know Mastermind had been taken off until I actually tuned in for it.

Destination X Review (Spoilers)

Should we talk about the BBC’s Destination X? Of course we should. But it’s not a quiz? So what, it’s my ball and we play by my rules.

Okay, so it’s been inaccurately described as The Traitors v. Race Across the World. I will come to what’s so inaccurate about this a bit later. Now, I love both of these shows and if you’re familiar with both of them you’ll be aware that these are very different shows. Now, the danger of trying of combine the appeal of two very different shows is that you end up falling between two stools and when you fall between two stools you often just fall.

To briefly summarise what the show seems to be about, 13 contestants met in what looked to be a very small and rather fake departure lounge in Baden Baden airport. This was narrowed down to 10 contestants, who were helicoptered away to where 2 buses with windows (temporarily) blacked out– one for the day and one for the night awaited. On each show they were taken to a well-known European destination. On the way there were stops for clues. At the climax of each show, each remaining contestant had to put their x on a high-tech interactive map to mark where they believed they were. The one who was furthest away was unceremoniously ejected.

Does that sound in any way similar to The Traitors to you? There’s no voting, for one thing. Yes, the contestants don’t all get all of the clues, and so they can be sneaky about what they reveal to each other, but it’s all very tame considering how much the promotion for the show has been pushing this angle. As for Race Across the World? Well, both shows see people travelling a lot. That’s about it. In Race Around the World we do at least get a glimpse of the life and culture of the places being visited. There are chances for us to vicariously stop and smell the roses a little. Alright, to be fair we did get to see a little more scenery in episode 2, but there’s only so much they can show you without losing the play along at homeability. And in Race Across the World, an integral factor is players negotiating hurdles with transport. In Destination X, the transport is all laid on.

So, if you choose to watch because you’ve bought the hype about its similarity to those shows you may well be disappointed. Watch it with an open mind and judge it on its own merits and you may find, as I did, that you give it a cautious approval. The first two episodes did enough to make we want to watch episode 3 this coming week. You know me, I’m a bit of a misanthrope but for all that I do find some of the personalities on board to be quite interesting. Having said that, I could do without Nick – the one who has run a marathon in every country on Earth – continually being dragged into the diary room to tell us he is prepared to be ruthless when it is necessary.  Rob Brydon is a good old Baglan (area of Port Talbot) boy, so he will get no criticism from me and he does the job of presenting the show perfectly well. I think he realises that this is not The Rob Brydon show and that a relatively understated approach works.

It all comes down to the game play, though, and I felt that episode 2 did this better than episode 1. The destination of Episode 1 was Paris. I was pretty much certain it would be so after Mr. Brydon said that the destination was one of the first cities in Europe to be electrically lit. Then he gave us a list of European cities with copies of the Statue of Liberty and didn’t mention Paris. Admittedly there was a strange interlude in Alsace Lorraine, where, amongst some red herrings the contestants were given some clues that belonged in Sybil Fawlty’s Mastermind round on the Bleedin’ Obvious while others would not have been out of place amongst the prize clues in 3-2-1 (ask your grandparents).

I enjoyed the second episode more especially the set piece where the contestants were separated into two teams, put in cable cars which stopped at the same point, high above the ground, and then told to carry out activities to earn a clue. That was fun. Mind you, the big clue that the winning team earned couldn’t have made it a lot more obvious that we were going to the Matterhorn. I mean, it wasn’t quite the full Alpen box, but even so. Mind you, only Marathon Nick seemed to understand it.

Well, as I said there was enough to make me want to give it another go for episode 3. I have to say, though, normally when I like a reality game show, I’d like to play in it myself. In the last 9 years or so I’ve visited over 20 European countries. I love travel, and the idea of travelling all around Europe – and never seeing hardly ANY of it! – is something which just seems wrong.

Mastermind Heat Four subjects

Good morning all. I’ve just had a glance at tomorrow night’s specialist subjects on the Mastermind website. They are – the playing career of Sunil Gavaskar, The Hunger Games, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein and Edvard Munch. I’ll be honest, it’s a case of - pools dividend forecast poor - for me. Cricket is not my favourite sport (unlike several relatives. Both my first cousin and my daughter’s soon to be father-in-law work in cricket in the South East.) I’ve only seen the first film of The Hunger Games series and never read any of the books. I know very little about Leonard Bernstein and as regards Edvard Munch, I’ve seen one version of the Scream in Oslo, but that’s about the length of it. I hope there will be some pieces of low hanging fruit in at least a couple of these rounds, because if I get any points, that will be where they’re most likely to come from.

We got a lot of points in Thursday night’s quiz, but typically it was one of the points we didn’t get that I remember most. Thursday night’s question master, whom I like a great deal as a person, is the same one who has been nicknamed Captain Slapdash by my team. It’s a nickname he’s earned, I’m afraid, by giving some answers that he could have found were just plain wrong by the simplest google search. Well, he was going great guns on Thursday until we got to round 7 out of 8. “Sport.” He announced. “Who was the only British swimmer to win a gold medal in the 1980 Summer Olympics, and you can have a bonus if you give me the event.” – Easy – said I – Duncan Goodhew, 100m breaststroke.- The answer the Captain gave ? Sharron Davies – 400m individual medley.- I couldn’t stop myself from protesting but it did no good.

Being the kind of person I am I thought – well, Duncan definitely won gold, and Sharron definitely got silver on the podium, but in light of revelations about the East German doping programme, and Gold medal recipient Petra Schneider’s subsequent admission that she was doped, has Sharron Davies, I wondered – been retrospectively awarded gold? Apparently not, which is a bit of a scandal if you want my opinion. It’s not even as if she was the only silver, either. Phil Hubble – who I think was swimming for Hounslow at the time - won silver in the 200m butterfly.

Is it some comfort that at least the East German cheating was eventually revealed to the world, even though Sharron Davies has yet to receive the gold medal that her performance deserved? You’d have to ask her that. She’s been quite open about the fact that everyone in the sport knew the East Germans were at it at the time.

Still, it is interesting to speculate how many cheats who won Olympic titles who have never been conclusively revealed as such. The first three Olympic Marathons have all had the finger of suspicion pointed in their direction. First across the line in 1904, Fred Lorz, was definitely cheating, and found out too. He said he had caught a lift after dropping out, and ran into the stadium after being dropped off a mile or so away as a prank. In 1900 baker’s roundsman Michel Theato has been accused of using his local knowledge to take shortcuts enabling him to win. A similar accusation has been levelled at the inaugural 1896 winner, Greek shepherd Spiridon Louis. Host nation Greece were without a win going into the final event, and to an outpouring of national joy the first three men to finish the race were Greek. However, 4^th placed runner Gyula Kellner from Hungary reported that the third placed man had boarded a carriage for at least part of the journey. Kellner was awarded third while the hapless cheat had the athletics vest stripped from his back in front of the stadium. The speculation goes that Louis, the winner, may have cheated in a similar way. I suppose you have to say, though, that considering any Greek winner had been promised free haircuts for life, you can understand the temptations.

Probably the most famous case of a disqualification in an Olympic Marathon, in 1908, wasn’t a case of conscious cheating at all. Dorando Pietri entered the White City stadium comfortably ahead of the field. However he was in a bad way. A group of officials kind of gathered him up and ushered him over the line, by the Royal Box. When the second person over the line was an America athlete called Johnny Hayes the US officials protested and Pietri was disqualified. Urban myth has it that one of the officials in the photograph taken as Pietri was bundled over the line was Sir Arthur Coan Doyle. I suppose there is a vague resemblance, but it has been proven that it wasn’t.

Dorando’s is not quite as sad a story as it may sound, since there was a huge outpouring of sympathy for him and he was presented with an inscribed silver cup by Queen Alexandra. This cup is still in existence and is currently kept in the vault of the Unicorp branch in Carpi in the province of Modena in Italy. For the centenary of the Dorando Marathon, it was displayed in London during the London Marathon.

Coming Back to Loomis Day

I broke my shoulder on 30^th May, and in the short post I wrote the next day I said I had planned a great post on Loomis Day. This was during the spring break from Quizzy Mondays, you appreciate, when I planned to keep the blog going by posting on anything I found interesting. Best laid plans of mice and men ganging aft agley there.One of the interesting things I found out about was Loomis Day. On a whim on about the 29^th I googled to see whether the 30^th May was anything sigificant, and the fact that it was World Loomis Day caught my eye.

Mahlon Loomis was born in New York state in 1826. By the end of the 1840’s he had qualified and begun to practise dentistry. The second half of the 19^th century really was the Age of the Inventor and nowhere more so than in the USA. Loomis invented a process for making dentures entirely from porcelain, but as an invention it was not a great success, commercially or otherwise.

His fame, such as it is, and the whole basis for Loomis Day rests on his claim to have sent a primitive radio signal between two peaks in Virginia in the late 1860s, decades before Guglielmo Marconi. He demonstrated his wireless telegraph system before Congress in 1868, applied for a patent and four years later, received patent number 129,971 for it.

I don’t think it brought him much luck or success. The theories on which he based his work were severely flawed, and when Marconi came along it seems that what Loomis did was largely forgotten. It’s a funny thing, but History shows us that just because you invent something, this doesn’t mean that you’re going to make any money from it. You may be aware that a man called Elisha Gray submitted a patent for a telephone at more or less exactly the same time that Alexander Graham Bell did. There’s allegations that Bell’s crafty lawyer who was in the patent office at the time incorporated a key idea of Gray’s into Bell’s application and ensured it went forward first. None of which is to even mention Antonio Meucci, who, it is claimed, invented a telephone system to communicate with his bedridden wife from his workshop. He filed a patent caveat in 1871 but was unable to afford the full patent, and so he lost out to Bell.

Then, conversely there’s the case of George Selden. Selden wasn’t even an inventor. He was a lawyer, and a smart one at that. In the late 1870s he applied for a patent for an automobile. Until Henry Ford came along he was pretty successful in extracting licensing fees from automobile manufacturers in the USA. Henry Ford took him on in the courts where is successful appeal made the Selden patent useless – there was only a year left on it anyway.

As for Thomas Edison, well, we probably all know of his 1,093 US patents. What we don’t know is how many of these related to things that were not actually invented by Edison himself, but assistants in Menlo Park. Not that Edison himself was a great businessman himself anyway.

John Logie Baird? Never made a packet from television, but then the television system he invented was mechanical and a bit of a dead end in the evolution of telly. Even Philo Farnsworth, the man with the best claim to being the father of the completely electronic television system used for much of the 20^th century had to fight tooth and nail to get his just dues from RCA.

Well, coming back to our old friend Marlon Loomis, the founder of Loomis Day was a certain Richard Birch. Richard Birch, who passed away in 2005, was a librarian with a fine track record of creating minor holidays – possibly his greatest triumph being National Trivia Day. And if that particular celebration day doesn’t light your candle, may I respectfully suggest that you may be reading the wrong blog.

Neanderthal or Not?

I don’t have red hair. In these days I don’t have much hair of any other colour for that matter. When I was first born I had black curls but these soon disappeared and eventually were replaced by hair of my natural light brown colour. However, when I first grew a beard, now that was red. It’s white now and I am considering a new career as a department store Santa.

Some time ago I read a remarkably ill-informed article that confidently asserted that red hair was a genetic inheritance from Neanderthals. Now I’m reliably informed that this is, in civil service parlance, a consignment of geriatric shoe repairers i.e. a load of old cobblers. The genes responsible for red hair in homo sapiens are not the same genes that produced red hair in Neanderthals.

Not to worry though. After UC on Monday night I watched the latest edition of BBC2’s Humans. According to this, pretty much everyone of western descent outside of sub Saharan Africa do have about 2 percent Neanderthal genetic material. Well, not native Americans and South American Indians. No, like many people ultimately of Asian derivation they have a small percentage of Denisovan genes. Basically, the Denisovans were another species of human, like the Neanderthals and pretty much contemporary with them. Little fossil evidence of Denisovans has yet been found, but the genetic evidence is pretty much irrefutable.

I’m not an expert on any of this, I hasten to add.

So, prior to discovering that my red beard was not significant, and pretty much all of us have either Neanderthal and/or Denisovan genes, why was I so interested in the fact that it seemed that I was (a tiny) part Neanderthal? I’m not sure, to be honest, but this might have something to do with it. In Oaklands Junior school in the early 70s, my three best friends had a) a Nigerian father and a Jamaican mother – b) A Dad from Pakistan and a mum from Sweden - c) A Turkish father and a Mum from Italy. I used to really envy their exotic heritage, while all I could offer was a Scottish grandfather. I used to go on about him, you’d better believe it. Even though he died before I was born and I never even visited Scotland until my Mastermind final in 2007 when I was forty three.

Not, you understand, that I’m trying to imply for one minute that Scots have more Neanderthal DNA than anyone else. Even if some people do persist in depicting stereotype Scots with flaming red hair – I’m looking at you, Groundskeeper Willy!

University Challenge 2026 - First Round - Bath v. Southampton

The Teams

Bath

Lewis Blakeborough

Sajjan Johal

Joni Wildman (capt.)

Luca Romagnoli

Southampton

Cormac Stephenson

Zain Mahmood

Florence Williams (capt.)

Ben Hermanns-Kermode

After two high scoring contests which may well see all four teams involved playing in at least one other match, what was Monday night’s third heat going to bring us?

Well, the first starter fell to Jodi Wildman of Bath who recognised several allusions to the cardinal compass direction West. Soren Kierkegaard yielded both of us just the one bonus. “Born in the year after Turner, which British artist – “ always looked to be pointing towards John Constable. To be honest both teams sat on their buzzer a bit and it wasn’t till his native Suffolk was mentioned that Florence Williams came in with the answer. The playable character classes in the 2014 D and D handbook were actually easier than they sounded and provided Southampton with a full house. Ben Hermanns-Kermode knew the German operation to rescue Mussolini – which only proved to be a stay of execution for him (Mussolini, not Ben Hermanns-Kermode). Jellies in the natural world brought two bonuses. So to an early picture starter and a warning sign in English, Greek and another language. It surely had to be from Cyprus. Ben Hermanns-Kermode thought so and was right. Bonuses on maps of islands with British overseas military bases brought two bonuses. Luca Romagnoli struck back knowing that the word finger could precede three other given words. Bath were able to answer two of the bonuses on cities that are important stops on the Trans Siberian Railway. This meant that the score stood at 65 – 35 to Southampton as we approached the 10 minute mark.

Now, the words ‘Saul’ and ‘my father’ meant that the speaker being quoted in the next starter had to be Jonathan. But was the question looking for him or David as the answer? Well, it was looking for the recipient and Luca Romagnoli was first in with the answer of David. A lovely UC set on the saying ‘all that glitters is not gold’ provided two bonuses and narrowed the gap to 10. As soon as Amol mentioned Metropolitan Cathedral Florence Williams was in with Liverpool for the next starter. Bonuses on works involving the use of the organ (wash your minds out with soap) only brought the one correct answer. Nurungji in Korean cuisine is a term involved in a particular way of cooking rice. There you go. Cormac Stephenson had that one. The Fischer-Tropsch process (gesundheit) amazingly brought me two correct answers – more than enough for a wheezy lap of honour around the Clark sofa. Southampton also took two although not the same ones. With the music starter Amol was extremely impressed that Cormac Stephenson recognised the stylings of Charlie XCX so quickly. More songs dedicated to the artists’ musical collaborators again brought two bonuses. The Mahavamsa is a notable work chronicling the traditions of Sri Lanka. Zain Mahmood had that one and all of the Southampton team had correctly answered at least one starter. Zoological loan words from Celtic languages sounded an interesting bonus set but only yielded one to Southampton. For the next starter three seemingly innocent words led Cormac Stephenson to give the correct answer of object oriented. Fair enough. Cricket records in 2024 brought the two bonuses necessary to extend Southampton’s lead to 100 points. The next starter asked for a city, and it could have been almost anywhere until the mention of the date 6^th August 1945. That made it obvious and allowed Ben Hermanns-Kermode in with Hiroshima. Nicknames of presidents of the USA followed, and they were probably wise not to include any for the present incumbent. Most of which are unbroadcastable. Southampton took two, missing out on Zachary Taylor. Sorry – but every time I hear the name Zachary I can’t help thinking of Dr. Smith from Lost in Space. So as the 20 minute mark loomed just ahead of us, Southampton had extended their lead as the score stood at 175 – 50.

Luca Romagnoli got Bath moving again, knowing that Argentina won the 2024 Copa America. A tough set on eponymous effects in Physics yielded just one bonus. For the second picture round we saw a map of the Elizabeth Line and Florence Williams was the first to identify it as such. Other winners of the RIBA Stirling prize brought just one bonus, but to be honest anything much more would have just been gilding for Southampton. No one knew about hyperons for the next starter – quelle surprise. Luca Romagnoli knew that if it mentions Aldeburgh then the answer is Benjamin Britten for the next starter. The bonuses on direct carving really weren’t very difficult but poor old Bath did not have a scooby. Nobody knew tawny as in owl and port for the next starter. Ben Hermanns-Kermode knew that George Weah had been president of Liberia. Black rivers brought a full house – and held out the tantalising possibility that Southampton might reach 300 by the gong. Florence Williams added 10 more to their score knowing that “construction” and “Galileo” has to be heading in the direction of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. The city of Bialystok (Max Bialystok?) added another full house in quick time. Nobody knew parallelogram was the answer to the next starter. Merciless Ben Hermanns-Kermode was in very quickly to identify the Shatt al Arab as the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates. There was time for Southampton to add a bonus on a surface feature of Venus, but no more, and the final score was 255 – 70 to Southampton.

For the record Bath managed a BCR of 40 while Southampton’s was 66. No way to sugarcoat this pill, I’m afraid, Southampton were better on both buzzer and bonuses. Hard lines to Bath, but remember, it’s only a game.

Amol Watch

Did you know that Amol’s favourite poem is Gray’s “Elegy. . . “? Not a bad choice, but I can’t help plumping for the sumptuous perfection of Keats’ Ode to Autumn.

Amol offered his encouragement to Bath at 16:53 – but for once it had little effect. Bath seemed to have fallen into the mindset that Southampton were going to beat them to the buzzer and as a result, for the most part they did.

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

An unetymological letter p was added to the spelling of ptarmigan by erroneous analogy with unrelated words from Greek. In all seriousness I had wondered why that p is there.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

The Fischer-Tropsch process is a series of catalysed chemical reactions used to produce hydrocarbon molecules, such as which class of fully saturated hydrocarbons with general formula CnH2n+2. Please spell your answer. (Ironically, I had this right, mainly through dim memories of UC questions in previous years – alkanes often rear their complicated heads. So I’m not so dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum)

Mastermind 2026 Heat 3

Well, after last week’s pyrotechnics the odds did seem to favour a rather more bread and butter edition last night which is pretty much what we got.

First up was vicar Elis Mathews. The last time a vicar won a series was as long ago as 1996 when the series was won by the Reverend Richard Sturch, a very nice, quietly spoken gentleman whom I had the pleasure to meet at the Champion of Champions mini-season in 2010. I’m sure Elis Matthews is just as nice, although I don’t believe that we have ever met. Elis was answering on my least favourite of last night’s subjects, Piero della Francesca so being able to guess the answers to two of his questions put me in a good mood from the start. Elis scored 11 and looked extremely secure under the garryowen (look it up). Good start.

By way of contrast Eulalie Burrows was answering on my ‘banker’ subject – Doctor Who: The Jodie Whitaker Years. Answering very well too, scoring 11 and no passes. Me? I scored five. Well, as I explained in my preview post, this really wasn’t my favourite era of the show. I noticed that the questions were almost entirely about plot points and details from within the individual episodes. It’s a shame considering what you could have asked about production details, but there you are.

You have to feel for Ellen Salkeld. For one thing, the King she picked to answer on , Edward III was one of those stubborn old devils who persistently went on kinging for over fifty years, way past his usefulness if truth be told. For another, she’d had to watch the two previous contenders deliver excellent rounds. For a third thing, she was not going badly at all until she was stopped by a question that she seemed to know that she knew, but whose answer refused to leap from the tip of her tongue. This plunged her into a pass spiral from which she never really recovered. Five? Well, it’s not a disaster by any means. But Ellen looked very crestfallen as she sat back in her chair.

It was left to Kumaran Sivathillainathan to finish the first half with his round on Short Stories of Roald Dahl. As I predicted, memories of Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected from years ago brought me a couple of points. This meant I’d scored on each round, and ended with a pleasing aggregate of 12. Which is not that impressive considering that Kumaran too managed 11 from just his own round. Like Elis and Eulalie he also managed to avoid passing as well.

Little remained for Ellen Salkeld as she returned to the chair, save producing the best GK round that she could. I think that this is just what she did. In these days 8 is perfectly respectable. As regards the specialist round, well, she’s not the first person to be momentarily undone by the chair and I’ve no doubt that she won’t be the last. Well done for recovering in the GK.

So to the first entrant in our three-horse race. The best advice I can give anyone sitting down in the chair to start their GK round is to clear your head, trust the answers that pop into your head and concentrate on them one question at a time. Once a question’s gone, whether you got it or not, let it go. Concentrate on the next. This was pretty much what Elis did. So although he didn’t produce a double figure score, I’d say he pretty much wrung all that he could out of the round to set a competitive target of 20.

Too competitive for Eulalie, I’m afraid. She gave it her best shot, but, unlike during her specialist round she never looked comfortable in the chair and never managed to get enough momentum to power her towards the target. She scored 7 for 18.

Which just left Kumaran Sivathillainathan. This was a very interesting round. With 18 scored and over half a dozen questions left to go you’d have thought he was going to do it. I did. Yet those pesky questions just wouldn’t fall for him. He managed one more to put him on the brink of at least earning a tie break, but it just wasn’t enough. He scored a respectable 8 but ended a point short with 19.

Yes, I know some will point to the fact that we did not have any double figure GK rounds in his show and then point out that last week’s runner up, Dennis Wang scored 25, five more points than this week’s winner. Well, Dennis isn’t necessarily out of it yet. But that’s tournament play. That’s Mastermind. So many congratulations Elis, and best of luck in the semis.

The Details

Elis Matthews	Piero Della Francesca	11	0	9	0	20	0
Eulalie Burrows	Doctor Who: The Jodie Whitaker Years	11	0	7	3	18	3
Ellen Salkeld	Edward III	5	4	8	0	13	4
Kumaran Sivathillainathan	The short stories of Roald Dahl	11	0	8	0	19	0