Tuesday, 19 December 2023

University Challenge at Christmas

No, don’t panic, I’m not reviewing every edition of University Challenge at Christmas. No, but I did think that I might just mention last night’s show, being Amol’s first.

It isn’t easy finding exactly the right words to discuss an edition of the Christmas shows. After all, it’s Christmas. Nowadays the people invited to be members of teams of their own alma mater tend to be largely academics, writers and broadcast journalists. These are people perfectly secure in their own intelligence, who have nothing to prove to anyone. They were invited on the show, and probably get nothing from it other than the fun of it, so I feel a bit of a heel if I criticise.

The thing is though, on some shows you forget that possibly none of these people have a quiz background. Then when you forget that fact, you can be struck with how much they don’t know. This always threatens to lead me down a slippery slope to criticism. So I’ll simply say that I enjoyed last night’s show, albeit that the questions were to me noticeably easier than the regular show. Amol took to this like a duck to water as I think you’d expect, although I did think that he showed off just a little bit – for example when nobody knew a quote from Macbeth he started reciting more of it. Not going to win friends and influence people that way, Amol.

No comments: