The Poisoned Chalice of an Appearance on UC at Christmas

My mother-in-law has many excellent qualities. However a lively interest in quizzes is not one of them. She’s currently staying with us although she’s off back to Spain before New Year. When we watched the first of this year’s University Challenge at Christmas, as JP went through the very lengthy introduction to the team members, listing all of their admittedly very impressive achievements, Jen offered the opinion that they ought to be too good for the show. – Au contraire – I replied, or words to that effect. – You’ll be surprised how much they get wrong and how many times they don’t seem to understand the question. –

To be fair, she was, too.

I’m not trying to denigrate the great and the good who appear on the show. Far from it. You could argue that anyone accepting an invitation onto UC at Christmas is really on a hiding to nothing – and indeed JP often alludes to this in his opening or closing remarks. Think about it. In the student series, the teams have all gone through some sort of selection process – I’m sure it differs between institutions – and then had to earn selection as a team for the series. Yes, every series in the first round there tends to be at least one team who have a bit of a ‘mare, but for the most part they are competitive and do themselves and their reputations no harm by appearing on the show.

When I first started watching UC at Christmas more than ten years ago it wasn’t unusual for some of the teams to be given a ‘ringer’ that is, a champion quizzer in their line-up. Funnily enough the teams that benefitted from these selections tended to do conspicuously well. I always hoped that if Goldsmiths ever got invited on I might be that champion. Well, sadly that policy seemed to end a good ten years or so ago, and when Goldies were on a couple of years back they were a Clark free zone.

Well, there we are. I’m enjoying the current series, and trying to keep my mean comments (Can’t believe you don’t know that – how can you not know that – you stoopiiiidddd! – etc.) to a minimum. (Not succeeding very well, but at least I’m trying.)