Really?!!!!!!

 I can only hope that I'm mistaken about this. In the hope that proper Mastermind might be restarting on Monday I went to check the BBC2 schedule for Monday coming. At 7:30 we have . . . Celebrity Mastermind. Oh Gawd. But then according to the schedule they are repeating the first episode of the series that is just supposed to have finished. Because it has Chesney Hawkes and Danny Robbins in it and I remember watching it. It's hardly surprising I remember it because it was only shown a few weeks ago! I hope that either I, or the iplayer, is mistaken. Come on Beeb - please, don't take the piss.

When Did that Happen?

 UK Gameshows is Back! We reported that the website had gone down in 2025. I have periodically checked my link. I'm not sure the last time that I checked, but it wasn't working then. I checked again tonight. . . and it is! Best thing that has happened in 2026 so far! (even if it happened before the end of 2025)

University Challenge 2026 Quarter Final - Darwin, Cambridge v. Sheffield

The Teams

Darwin, Cambridge

Lewis Strachan

Ruth Ni Mhuircheartaigh

Louis Cameron (capt.)

Jonathan White

Sheffield

Rhys Lewis

Abdelrahman Elsisi

Jacob Price (capt.)

Isobel Dobbie

Okay folks, so it’s another quarter final. No bus fare home in this one, but that’ll come soon enough. With the first starter I recognised the given name we needed was Gustave on the reference to Caillebotte. Isobel Dobbie seemed to have the same revelation as she opened the scoring for Sheffield. Two bonuses on Elizabeth Barrett ‘Gravy’ Browning followed. Jacob Price recognised two principal divisions of Austria Hungary for the next starter. Dilma Rousseff brought two more bonuses. Nobody knew that the Jaen in Spain produces mainly a lot of olive oil. The next starter on celluloid went begging as well, but while Sheffield lost five I took my lap of honour for knowing it while the going was good. Louis Cameron knew that the Books of Chronicles take their name from a Greek word for time, to open Darwin’s account. Mathematical transformations brought one bonus. So to the picture starter and Isobel Dobbie identified the logo of the International Criminal Court. Three special ICC tribunal logos brought Sheffield a full house. This meant that as we approached the ten minute mark they led by 60 – 10.

Louis Cameron recognised Keats’ Belle Dame Sans Merci for the next starter. Actors who have played the same role in different films that are not part of a franchise brought them one bonus. Ideally they could really have done with a full house at this point to get the scoreboard really moving. Louis Cameron, clearly undaunted, took the next starter on the term Inherent Vice. (As opposed to the TV series with Don Johnson which was often incoherent vice.) Prominent sexologists (innuendo overload imminent) brought just a single bonus again. Jacob Price recognised a description of Baku. Pairs of bowlers who bowled unchanged throughout a whole test innings in the 21^st century saw Sheffield dispatch all three over the boundary rope for a full house. For the ensuing music starter the Sheffield skipper was first in to recognise the voice of Patti Smith. Other artists associated with Max’s Kansas City – nope, me neither – in the 70s and early 80s brought Sheffield no joy. Gawd alone knows what magnetic monopoles are when they’re at home but Jacob Price recognised them when he heard them described in the next starter. Shellac brought one bonus. Now, if you didn’t know about the Revie plan, then you had to wait until the very end of the next starter, and when Leeds United was finally mentioned Rhys Lewis won the buzzer race. Major settlements located close to the Tropic of Capricorn saw Sheffield take two bonuses, and they talked themselves out of the other. Abdelrahman Elsisi was a little unlucky that his early buzz on the next starter didn’t quite come off. He said ethics – but as the rest of the question showed, our survey (and Louis Cameron) said Medical Ethics. Quarter Days and Cross quarter days failed to provide Darwin with any points. There’s actually a park in the London Borough of Ealing where I grew up called Lammas Park. There you go. Almost twenty minutes gone and Sheffield looked comfortable with 130 – 50.

For the second picture starter Louis Cameron buzzed in having recognised a still from Citizen Kane. Other directorial debuts on the BFI’s list of The Greatest Films Of All Time Yes We Really Mean It This Time (Until The Next Time) at least brought them 2 bonuses. Jonathan White knew the Battle of Evesham for the next starter. The extinct language Auregnais failed to bring them more points. Nobody got the Holmes and Moriarty Problem for the next starter but Sheffield lost five. Lewis Strachan recognised various theories to do with dreaming – or did I dream it? – only to earn a set on creatures that can produce silk or silk like threads. One bonus put them one question away from a triple figure score. Abdelrahman Elsisi was first to recognise Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. The artist Joseph ‘Betta’ Beuys didn’t help the Sheffield cause but did at least serve to run the clock down a bit. Darwin came back with Louis Cameron first to leap on the term Veldt. Sarasate the Spanish violin virtuoso brought two bonuses and the gap was down to 20. Nobody knew the operculum. Gesundheit. Abdelrahman Elsisi was first to work out that there were 24 states of the USA in 1825. That more or less sealed the deal for Sheffield. Greek letters used in statistics brought pushed the Sheffield score further out of reach. The next starter went unanswered. That was it. Sheffield won by 155 to 115

There wasn’t that much to choose between the teams in terms of starters, but Darwin could only manage a 33.3% BCR while Sheffield posted 63%. That tells its own story.

Amol Watch

When he’s not trying to be a) too matey with the teams or b) Jeremy Paxman and just gets on with it, Amol does a fine job. Last night was such an occasion.

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

In some languages the chess bishop is called the elephant.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

On its establishment in 2009 the principal aim of the MoEDA experiment at CERN was to search for which hypothetical particles known bya two-word alliterative name? The second of Maxwell’s equations states mathematically that these particles cannot exist, but (thankfully Jacob Price buzzed in at this point. Dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum.)

New TV Quiz/Game show review - The Floor

Way back in the mists of time (last year) I wrote about Rob Brydon’s Destination X. As I recall I rather enjoyed the show, even though there really was next to no quiz content within it. A couple of weeks ago he launched the first instalment of the ITV version of a show that has been a hit stateside and in other countries. This is The Floor.

I may have elements of this wrong, so don’t take everything I say as gospel, but as I understand it, the show works like this. 81 players occupied spaces on a 9x9 grid. Each player had their own nominated specialist subject. The player who starts can choose the players in any square adjacent to theirs to play against. So if, for the sake of argument, the player chooses to play against Bob who has nominated early Etruscan Pottery as his subject, then the two square off in a head to head on Early Etruscan pottery. The head to heads are short rounds. Basically the two players are both given 60 seconds on their clocks. In turns thy are asked questions about – what did we say? Oh yes, early Etruscan Pottery. A correct answer moves the question to the other player. When the time runs out on one of the players, the other wins. Whoever wins takes over the other player’s square as well as their own, and I believe that the opponent’s specialist subject becomes their’s. Whoever loses leaves with nothing.

Now, on paper at least this format is not without interest. After all, with a little effort we can all be good on our own specialist subject. But a wide range of them? I can see strategic thinking being involved but sooner or later contestants are going to need to show decent knowledge of a potentially wide range of topics. I like that. For that matter I like Rob Brydon, one of Port Talbot’s finest. So having got all of that in its favour, I think that I should own up to a salient fact. I watched all of the first show. I haven’t watched it since. Partly this was because I forgot that it was on. But that in itself tells its own story. Because when you get right down to it a show like this should have gripped me. But it didn’t grip me enough to make an appointment with myself to watch the next show.

It’s hard to be absolutely cut and dried about why this doesn’t quite deliver for me, but I’d say it boils down to a couple of things. If you’ve been with me for a while you know that I much prefer shows where the questions – chat ratio is slanted much more towards the former. I haven’t sat down to work out just how much of the show’s length is given up to questions being asked and answered, but in all honesty it didn’t seem like a lot to me.

Also, on the show I watched it seemed to me that at least a couple of the contestants had only a brief passing acquaintance with their specialist subjects. Now I will admit that I don’t know just how the allocation of specialist subjects worked on the show – whether it was totally up to the contestants themselves, or whether they were given a selection of subjects to choose from, or whether it was dictated to them – you will do this subject. But if they had a free hand to choose their own subjects, well, some of them weren’t that impressive to be perfectly honest. As for the moolah, well it is possible to pick up £5000 bonuses as you go along. The grand prize is £50,000. Ok, that’s certainly not to be sniffed at, but it isn’t riches beyond the dreams of avarice, is it? Not when you compare it to other shows of the genre.

Well, there we are. I may watch again. But then again I may not.

Half and Half

So, the big question is – am I in a glass half full, or a glass half empty kind of mood, writing this? Let’s have a look at the glass half empty view. We got to the club on Thursday night to find that the question master was doing 8 themed rounds. Each team would have two jokers, to play before the start of whichever 2 rounds they chose, Now, this sort of thing is not my cup of tea really, for reasons I’ll explain shortly. Now let’s look at the glass half full point of view. It wasn’t as bad as I feared.

So, what’s wrong with themed and/or gimmicked quizzes? Well, although it is perfectly possible to make a very good quiz that is themed and/or uses gimmicks like jokers, it is difficult. It requires skill, patience and a capacity for taking pains with it, even if it means ripping up a round and starting again because it just doesn’t quite work. In my experience it is only very good question masters ( and most of these that I have known have also been good quizzers) who can pull this off.

Now, as I have said before, on a personal level I like all of the regular quiz setters in the club. But I’m afraid that I think that, with the exception of Dan, Adam and Jess, they are none of them much better than okay. That’s harsh and it maybe sounds mean-spirited. All of us who set the quiz for the club do it for nothing more than a couple of drinks and a desire to give people an evening’s entertainment. Well, there’s a scene in the film of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical “Biloxi Blues” where Matthew Broderick’s character - supposedly based on Simon himself – is made to read out his journal by other members of his training platoon, and he doesn’t want to read out what he has written about his friend Eugene, because he expresses the suspicion that he might be gay. (Look, the film is set during World War II) When he is reluctant to read it out, Eugene tells him, and I’m paraphrasing here – if he compromises on what he feels then he becomes a candidate for mediocrity. So, although I don’t necessarily like myself for saying it, this is really what I feel. And that is, that you should master the craft of putting together a good, basic general knowledge quiz on a regular basis before you try doing anything more complex.

Last night’s setter I have written about before. Starting with the negatives, Dan once nicknamed the setter Captain Slapdash and I can’t think of a more apt nickname. Why? Well, like me he’s been setting quizzes for the club for a long time now, and he’s been playing in the quiz for even longer than I have. So, over the years you hear certain questions again and again. You think you know what the answers are so when you use them yourself you can’t be bothered to check. In the sports round last night he asked ‘Who is the only track and field athlete to win gold medals in the same individual event in four consecutive Olympic Games? Now, you’ll probably have spotted the issue with this question. Because there are two athletes who have done this now. Yes, when I started quizzing the only one was Al Oerter who won the discus in 4 consecutive Olympic Games. But since then, Carl Lewis did the same in the Long Jump. It’s not hard to find this out but you have to check in the first place. It is not enough as a question master merely THINKING your answer is right. If you can’t, won’t or don’t accept this, then why are you making the quiz in the first place?

You know, when I started going to the quiz in the club 31 years ago, one of the things that used to really frustrate me – in fact it still does – is when a question master doesn’t pay enough attention to the phrasing of their question, and so doesn’t actually ask what they think they’re asking. Case in point – last night the second round on which we played our joker was ‘what came fourth?’. Except that it wasn’t. It was – which one is missing from this group of four? - Now, that’s okay, it’s just a small point. But one of the questions was - Which is missing from this list of America’s founding fathers? - This greatly annoys me. The Founding Fathers is, I believe a term applied to the signers of the US Declaration of Independence, and there were more than 4 of them! Now, from the list – Washington, John Adams, James Madison it was fairly clear that what he really meant was the first four US presidents, with the missing third president being Thomas Jefferson - but that isn’t what he asked for and I find it irritating

Which is a shame because with those couple of questions put to one side, he didn’t do a bad job of it at all. If you take the view that even in a themed round there should be as much variety as possible and something for everyone (and you should) then there was only one round where he fell short. This was the first one on Wales in the 21^st Century. Once what is essentially an ‘in the news’ question is more than a couple of years old you’re going to really struggle to recall the answers, and with one exception all of the teams had a low score on this round. In other rounds, though, the theme was not that much more than a rather general link which worked a lot better. For example, Wedding Anniversary Gifts was a round in which all of the answers contained a wedding anniversary gift even though that wasn’t what the question was actually about. This was nicely done – and we were kicking ourselves for not seeing that the answer to ‘what spans 9 provinces and 100 counties? – might be the Great Wall of China.

Continuing in glass half full vein, people do like ‘the captain’. He has a lot of charm as a question master and Dan has made the point that there is always a nice atmosphere at his quiz. And to be fair he did ask a number of questions that made you feel good for being able to dredge up an answer that you didn’t know if you still knew. For example, in the TV and film round all of the teams played their joker, but we were the only team to have a full house. I’m pretty sure that the question that did for the other teams was, “Who was played on TV by Mary Holland in the 50s and 60s?” It took a bit of thinking to dredge up Katie, the original Oxo Mum.

So you can’t complain too much if you end up being pleased with something you got right and something you could have got right but didn’t because you made the wrong call. And on that note it seems that the glass is definitely half full this time.

University Challenge 2026 Quarter Final - UCL v. Merton, Oxford

The Teams

UCL

Zak Lakota-Baldwin

Alice Lee

Michael Doherty (Capt)

Manny Campion-Dye

Merton, Oxford

Ciaran Duncan

Eveline Ong

Elliot Cosnett

Verity Fleetwood-Law

Off we go then, with neither team to be given their bus fare home at the end of this match, since it’s the quarters. Ciaran Duncan came in too early for the first starter allowing Alice Lee to identify Anthony and Cleopatra for the first starter. Bonuses on films whose titles contain a chemical element (the Unsinkable Molybdenum Brown?) brought them the best possible start with a full house. Alice Lee zigged with Dekker for the next starter when she should’ve zagged with Desmond allowing Elliot Cosnett to put his team into a positive score. Bonuses on John Marston’s The Malcontent  brought their own full house to level the scores. Eveline Ong recognised references to Gericault for the next starter and Hollywood film legends yielded the third consecutive full house of the show. None of us recognised Blackburn for the picture starter. I didn’t get the next starter about molecular modelling but Eveline Ong knew the answer was methane. I often find that. Bonus photographs of towns with Cathedrals but lacking city status – I thought they might show Guildford but didn’t – brought no points. Manny Campion-Dye came in remarkably early for the next starter to identify the words of Kant. Veterinary medicine brought a single bonus and this meant that UCL trailed at just after 10 minutes as Merton led 55-35.

For the next starter Michael Doherty was first to realise that South American country – and – ask permission from Amsterdam must mean Suriname. Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (I preferred Blondie’s) brought UCL the two bonuses they needed to draw level. Eveline Ong was very quick to recognise a description of the opera Elektra. Three plays with the word God in the title brought both of us just the one correct answer. Nobody knew the document legitimizing the rule of Richard III. Zak Lakota-Baldwin took his first starter recognising a description of viruses. Women honoured in the Pantheon in Paris brought a single bonus. It was back to opera and back to Eveline Ong for the music starter. She recognised Delibes’ Lakme. Other musical works with lyrics by Gille brought a single bonus. The match had developed into a bit of a dour old slugfest at this midway point. Now, I did know that Hans Christian Anderson was born in Odense and so did Alice Lee. Statistical mechanics announced Amol. No thanks, I replied, but he carried on anyway. UCL were quite happy about it and took a full house. Ciaran Duncan knew y-u-g-a (it’s fun to stay at the y-u-g-a) for the next starter. Poems of Shakespeare brought two bonuses. Manny Campion-Dye had a great early buzz to identify T.S.Eliot’s description of Tiresias. Japanese authors whose names included Kawa or Gawa brought nowt to any of us. Still, UCL had a narrow lead of 105-95 at just after 20 minutes.

Who wanted it more? Well, Elliot Cosnett was first to buzz for what was surely the work of Durer. So it was. More etchings brought us both just the one bonus. Michael Doherty won the buzzer race to identify a minority language in Portugal. The ceremonial county of South Yorkshire brought just one bonus. Individual bonuses looked as if they would be crucial to the result in this match. Nobody knew about the FBI approach to offender profiling. Nope, me neither. Elliot Cosnett knew the Federalist Papers for the next starter. Baked goods made from choux pastry brought just a single bonus. Nothing to choose between the teams at this point. Elliot Cosnett took a flyer on the next starter and fortune favoured the brave as he identified rivers forming the border between China and North Korea. European history yielded a full house – was this going to be the decisive moment that separated the teams? No, for Michael Doherty knew that the first head of CERN was called Bloch. So a Bloch-head, in fact. Well, please yourselves. Zora Neale Hurston brought just the one bonus. Zak Lakota-Baldwin knew the Coltranes (Robbie and Roscoe?) for the next starter. Disguises in opera brought them the one bonus they needed to tie the score. Surely the next starter would win. The answer was Fleurs – as in du Mal – and it was given by Elliot Cosnett. GONG! Merton had won by 160-150.

Both teams managed the same number of starters. UCL managed a BCR of 48% while Merton managed 55.5%. That’s the tale of the tape, folks, it all came down to just two bonuses. A great match.

Amol Watch

I felt Amol was just a little arsey in this show. ‘Chester is absolutely nowhere near there!” he sniffed on the picture starter. After the picture bonuses he added ‘you’re quite right, your Geography is terrible’ and without a chuckle in his voice either. Amol, mate, you don’t need to try to be Jeremy Paxman.

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

The name Desmond is derived from words meaning from South Munster

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

In thermodynamics the words ‘canonical’ or ‘grand canonical’ may precede what 8 letter word to refer to a collection of many sets of particles that each represent a possible state of a physical system?  - it’s not the longest dumdum we’ve ever had, but flippin’ ‘eck! Dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum.

3 more Sleb Masterminds to go

 It is with a heavy heart that I noticed we still have 3 Celebrity Masterminds to go in the current series. There is no date on the BBC Mastermind website for the real show to start again. I hope that it will be in a fortnight, since the last sleb show is due to be shown on Wednesday 28th January. 

BBC did a similar thing with last year's series and I'm afraid that it pretty much killed the rest of round one for me. It didn't help that with one exception the scores were unremarkable. I mean, not as low as the celebrity scores but not high enough to get the juices flowing as it were. 

Well, there we are. Grin and bear it and hurry back the real show.

Yob Hone Men

Just because you know what you mean, it can be dangerous to assume that everyone, or even anyone else does. When I was a young child in the end of the 60s and the beginning of the 70s, we had a real life Steptoe and Son style rag and bone man who’d drive his horse and cart down our street once a week. Periodically he would cry out what I think must have been ‘Any Old Bone?”. But that’s not what I heard. No, the way that he shouted it sounded to me like “Yob hone!” So to me he became ‘the yob hone man’. I distinctly remember when my mum said something or other was knackered and needed to be thrown out I told my mother – you can give it to the yob hone man. After some discussion she worked out what I was talking about and put me right.

Well, one of my pet peeves in a quiz is where a question master asks a question in such a way that you have to try to work out exactly what he’s talking about before you answer it. For example, on Thursday night our question master asked – name all of the English managers in the Premier League When he read out the answers he did not include Liam Rosenior. When we protested he replied – Well, he wasn’t Chelsea’s manager when I wrote the quiz! How the hell were we supposed to know he meant name all the English managers in the Premier league up to 31^st December 2025, when he didn’t actually say so?

Two other questions on Thursday night brought out the pedant in me. How about this one? The Treaty that ended World War 1 was named after which French Palace? Now, you know that he meant Versailles, and so did we and that’s what we wrote down. But it’s annoying because that was only the treaty with Germany. The treaty with Austria was named after the Chateau de St. Germain en Laye. The Treaty with Hungary was named after the Trianon Chateau. And so it goes. Would it have hurt to specify the treaty with Germany? When I was handing out the LAMMY awards in December I said that I would like to give one to question masters who aren’t in my team, but they don’t deserve it. This sort of thing is one of the reasons why.

In the same quiz the question master asked “Who was the key figure behind the Russian Revolution?” Now again, you know he meant Lenin, and we wrote down Lenin. But really! For one thing there were two Russian Revolutions of 1917, and Lenin wasn’t even in Russia when it started, and knew bugger all about it before it did. It’s just a needlessly messy question, which betrays the question master’s lack of thoroughness in preparing his questions. Even if you do prepare carefully, now and again mistakes are going to creep in. But if you don’t prepare carefully I’d say it’s pretty much guaranteed.  

University Challenge 2026 Round 2 Manchester v Edinburgh

The Teams

Manchester

Ray Power

Kirsty Dickson

Kai Madgwick (Capt)

Rob Faulkner

Edinburgh

Parthav Easwar

Johnny Richards

Alicia Leonard (Capt)

Rayhana Amjad

Rayhana Amjad set the tone for the contest with a fast buzz to identify that various theories were all connected with Truth. Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on Earth. Well, that might be all Keats knew, but to be fair he did die very young. Funnily enough Keats featured in two of the bonuses on Coleridge that followed, of which Edinburgh managed 1. Johnny Richards recognised allusions to Jean Cocteau for the next starter. 2 bonuses were taken on the First International. A starter on human neurones brought my baby elephant walk moment but not a lot else as nobody had all or nothing. Maybe they should have mentioned the Small Faces. Rayhana Amjad won the buzzer race to identify Polari for the Polari Award. Fantasy literature and the Fallout series of video games brought one more bonus. The Edinburgh surge continued when Johnny Richards identified the Royal Academy in the next starter.French philosopher Nicholas ‘Qui?’ Malebranche brought a brace of bonuses. So to the picture starter. We’ve had something very similar to this a few years ago, as Kai Madgwick opened his team’s account by identifying the flag of the British East India Company. Flags of other colonial or neo colonial companies brought a full house of  bonuses. So as we approached the 10 minute mark, despite having answered all bar one of the starters Edinburgh only led by 70 – 25.

As did I, Rayhana Amjad leapt into action when the name Robert Jordan was mentioned in the next starter and answered The Wheel of Time. Doubly eponymous experiments in Science saw me earn a lap of honour by the simple expedient of answering Michelson-Morley to all three until it was right. Edinburgh had that one as well. I’ll be honest, as soon as I heard a culinary word taken from Malay I said ketchup, pretty much at the same time that Johnny Richards did too. Shakespeare’s Henry VIII yielded just the one bonus. Now, I’m sorry, but if you’re going to use the word nucleotide in a starter, I ain’t going to be answering it. Whatever it was on about Johnny Richards had it with Methionine. Gesundheit. Fabrics named after cities and towns brought one bonus. Amol encouraged Manchester at this point but all it served to do was to make Kai Madgwick gamble and lose five on Hector’s wife. (Not Kiki the Cat or Zaza the Frog. Ask your grandparents.) Nobody knew this was Andromache.A wonderful quote about Indians being cursed with anthropologists remained untouched on the table. Johnny Richards knew about a world heritage site in Turin for the next starter. The Irish Defence Forces brought just one bonus, but what the hell. Edinburgh’s dominance on the buzzer at this stage of the contest meant this was like shooting fish in a barrel. At last Kai Madgwick’s theatrical buzzing style bore fruit as he buzzed very early recognising the work of Shostakovitch for the music starter. 3 pieces of jazz brought one bonus. Nobody knew Robert K. Merton for the next starter, but I used to enjoy his wife’s chat show on telly. Kai Madgwick knew Simpson’s Rule for the next starter. D’oh! Otto Preminger brought one bonus.But Kai Madgwick had found his range and took his third consecutive starter with American Prairie style. Mary-Anthony Turnage brought one bonus. This meant that Edinburgh led by 135 – 65 at 20 minutes.

Nobody knew about a painting by Veronese for the next starter. Right, a small digression. Dr. Andrea Clough, one of my lecturers at Uni, once told us, when encountering a reference to Jonah in a medieval work of literature – you think you know the story of Jonah but you don’t. Read the whole Book then come back to me. She was right, but that’s the reason I knew all about the gourd for the next starter. So did Rayhana Amjad. He wasn’t born when I was at Uni, so fair play to him for knowing it. Women depicted in paintings by Waterhouse saw Edinburgh take a rare full house. For the second picture starter Johnny Richards won the buzzer race to identify a famous statue of Laocoon and his sons. Other works of art in which this famous sculpture is depicted or referenced brought a single bonus, but when you’re 100 points in the lead, that’s not a huge concern to you. Nobody knew about the River Lagan for the next starter. Johnny Richards knew that there’s apricot jam in a sachertorte. Drought tolerant plants for UK gardens brought nowt for any of us. Kai Madgwick knew about the Amistad for the next starter – even though he seemed disbelieving that his answer was correct. Historic figures whose hearts are buried in a separate location from their bodies made me think of Chopin – I’ve been in the Warsaw Church where he left his heart. He was the third answer. Manchester had him and Livingston but missed out on Robert the Bruce. Rayhana Amjad knew George Saunders wrote Lincoln in the Bardo. I read it after the last time it featured in UC. Weird but good. (That’s Lincoln in the Bardo, not Rayhana Amjad.) Malory’s Morte d’Arthur provided no points. That was that , there was not time to complete the next starter. Edinburgh won comfortably by 195 - 80

For the record Manchester’s BCR was 53.3% while Edinburgh’s was 41.6%. An interesting statistic which proves that on this show it was bonuses for show, but starters for dough. Only Kai Madgwick was buzzing for Manchester, and he was being beaten in too many buzzer races. That’s how it goes.

Amol Watch

It was on 13 minutes and 30 seconds that Amol encouraged Manchester. Do you remember when Amol seemed to have Jedi like powers and his encouragement really galvanised teams? Seems like a long time ago now.

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

The Residences of the Royal House of Savoy is a UNESCO world heritage site in Turin.

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

What three word term is used to describe the principle that an action potential will only be fired if a certain threshold level of polarisation is achieved ? The action potential produced will be the same size each time the potential is met, regardless of the intensity of the stimulus. Dum de dumdum dum dum dum dum dumdum.

Interesting Fact

I was reading Bill Bryson’s excellent “Made in America” again this morning. All of Bill Bryson’s writing is excellent = I used to use extracts from Notes a Small Country when I was teaching English to demonstrate how to construct beautiful prose. Now, I have read this before, but I was struck by a fact he mentions that I just had not noticed before. Namely, that Colonel Harlan “Kentucky Fried Chicken” Sanders was not originally from Kentucky. He was from Indiana. Which is interesting in itself since (fictional) Indiana Jones (probably ) wasn’t from Indiana. Indiana is a nickname he took from the family dog. For that matter, Tennessee Williams wasn’t born in Tennessee. He was born in Mississippi.

Now with respect to the Colonel, if challenged on this I guess he would have said, “Ah say boy, ah never said ah was from Kentucky, ah say, ah say. Ah said that the chickens was!” I mean, I guess this because he passed away in 1980 so I can’t ask him. Well, only through a medium, anyway. I always imagine him having a Foghorn Leghorn voice like that, probably because of the image he adopted which was used so successfully in the branding of his company and its products. I guess that he took off the white suit when he went to bed, but he certainly seemed to be wearing it every time he was photographed.

Interestingly he was a genuine Kentucky Colonel. Being made a Kentucky Colonel doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the military. Essentially it is one of the highest honours that can be bestowed on an individual by the state of Kentucky. So while there are military colonels in Kentucky, Colonel Sanders did not hold that rank in the army. He was briefly a member of the other ranks in his teens in Cuba. Amazingly he lied about his age, served as a waggoner for a few months between he was found out and given an honourable discharge. There you go.So I guess, whatever else you might have said about him, you have to admit that he certainly wasn’t chicken.

I’m here all week, ladies and gents.

University Challenge 2026 - Round 2 - Churchill, Cambridge v Merton, Oxford

The Teams

Churchill College Cambridge

Ella McGovern

Matt Hasler

Sam Webber (Capt)

Shiv Seshan

Merton College Oxford

Ciaran Duncan

Evelyn Ong

Elliot Cosnett (Capt)

Verity Fleetwood-Law

I’ll be honest, I don’t really mind UC at Christmas, not like I’m really going off Sleb Mastermind. Part of that is because it doesn’t outstay its welcome, at least. Mastermind, take note.

So here we go then. With the first starter, I’ll be honest, when I heard it was Jean Paul Sartre describing a sculptor I thought Rodin. But when Amol started going on about elongated figures it had to be Giacometti. Nobody got it but Merton lost five. If you knew that William of Orange landed in Brixham then the first four letters were the answer to the next starter. Ella McGovern buzzed in and took first blood for Darwin. Now I take pride for knowing that the Barrons created electronic music for one of my favourite films, Forbidden Planet, which Churchill didn’t, and we both knew Stanley Kubrick for the last of the set on electronic film music. Elliot Cosnett took his first starter recognising a Tolkien quote about Beowulf. Philosopher/mathematician Putnam (David? Surely not.) brought two correct answers. Elliot Cosnett knew that there have been more popes called Pius since the reign of Napoleon I than you can shake a stick at for the next starter. Trust me, shaking a stick at a pope is a greatly overrated hobby. A full house on Thomas Middleton’s ever popular blockbuster A Game of Chess pushed Merton ahead. For the picture starter Ciaran Duncan recognised the work of George ‘Spotty’ Herbert. Other examples of concrete poetry (google it) provided nowt. If you came in too early on the next starter chances are you would lose five like Churchill. But Merton, hearing the name Sarajevo could be very certain the conflict described was the Bosnian War. Locations in some video game or other surprisingly gave me a full house. Merton managed one, and this meant that as the 10 minute mark loomed large in our collective windscreen they led by 65 – 10.

Elliot Cosnett knew Stephen Jay Gould’s The Hedgehog and the Fox for the next starter. Owen ‘Who’ Jones, architect and designer, brought two bonuses and Merton marched onwards. Siv Seshan stopped the rot for Churchill, winning the buzzer race to identify Crispin as one of two saints name checked in a famous speech in Henry V. Photographer and activist Nan Goldin brought a welcome brace of bonuses, at a time when Churchill were in danger of being muscled out of the match. Siv Seshan took his double with the next starter on the original kilogram. Pasta dishes whose names begin and end with the same letter  - al fabetti spaghetta, anyone? – yielded one correct answer. Nobody recognised a wee bit of Liszt for the music starter. Ciaran Duncan was in very quickly in for the next starter – he only needed one Pauline (probably Kael). Music bonuses on classical works written in memory of cultural figures brought one bonus. Elliot Cosnett knew that Hermes killed a tortoise (and a cow) in order to make the world’s first lyre. Those Greek gods, eh? The moon Europa brought two bonuses, and even the one they didn’t get was mentioned. Elliot Cosnett knew the two Erskines – Caldwell and Childers for the next starter. The German noble house of Thurn and Taxis (far more noble and more expensive than Thurn und Minicabs) brought another 2 bonuses. Again Siv Seshan buzzed to pull his team back from the brink with Active Galactic Nucleus (a support act for Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark in their 1981 tour, surely). 2 correct answers on the Chinese monk Faxian brought the score to 145 – to 65 to Merton just before the 20 minute mark.

Matt Hasler knew that the only team from a landlocked country to win the America’s Cup came from Geneva. Fossils discovered by Mary Anning brought two bonuses. I didn’t get the Buckland one either – I thought it might have been someone like Gideon Mantell. For the second picture starter Verity Fleetwood-Law correctly identified a painting by Hans Holbein. When Amol announced the bonuses would all be portraits of Doctors by other artists, Dr. Gachet sprang irresistibly to mind. Indeed, that was the only one either of us identified. A series of clues pointing to Charles I saw the splendid Merton skipper add another starter to his collection. Usage of the Hangul alphabet in languages other than Korean promised but little yet Merton again took a brace, and let’s be honest, it ended any real doubt that we might have had about the outcome of the match. Nobody knew Chanakya for the next starter. Nobody knew Oswald Avery (Tex’s brother?) for the next starter. For that matter nobody recognised a couple of lines from Keats’ Ode to Psyche for the next starter either. At last Ciaran Duncan took the next starter recognising the Concrete Jungle as the first example of the Heist movie. I do like a heist movie, me. Yom Tov, 6 major festival dates in the Jewish calendar, brought nowt. Siv Seshan knew that the second hand on an analogue clock passes through 6 degrees every second. I liked that question. One bonus was taken from a gettable set on Cicero. Fair play to Siv Seshan, he was still bussing away gamely at this point and took the next starter recognising that two Scottish 13^th century kings and two successive 19^th century Tsars were all called Alexander. Sarah Siddons added just one bonus to their score. That was that. Merton won by 180 to 115.

For the record Churchill achieved a BCR of 48% while Merton’s was 52%. Fairly even there, but there just wasn’t enough buzzing throughout the Churchill team to munt a realistic challenge.

Amol Watch

Nothing to see here. Go on with your lives, citizens.

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

The original kilogram was made from platinum and iridium

Baby Elephant Walk Moment

Nope, noting bored the pants off me this week. Don’t worry. There will be another soporific science question along shortly

Happy New Year - but what about 2025?

Well, we all know what the 8^th January is, don’t we? Apart from my son Mike’s 38^th birthday, that is. First Thursday of the New Year? No? Alright, I’ll tell you. First Thursday night quiz in January is my quiz of the evets of the previous year.

Some years there’s so much has happened that the quiz practically writes itself and you’re beating off the good questions with a stick. Others, like 2025, are a little less productive. Still, even thought I can’t go giving away all the contents of the quiz, I will share with you possibly my favourite –

Anthony Coulson, general manager at the McVitie's chocolate refinery and bakery in Stockport – made what revelation in 2025?

The answer?

Well, he revealed that the side of the chocolate digestive with the chocolate is actually meant to be the bottom of the biscuit.

Learning from age and Experience

I often say that I’m teetotal because I don’t drink tea. Yeah, not exactly Oscar Wilde, I know. As it happens I don’t actually drink alcohol either. When you get right down to it I don’t really like the taste of either of them. However, I do have a particular fondness for Brooke Bond PG Tips that has nothing to do with the taste of the actual tea.

From the 60s right through into the 1990s, Brooke Bond used to issue collectors’ cards with their packets of tea. In the early 70s I think they made successive sets on The Race Into Space – Prehistoric Animals – the History of Aviation and a couple of others. I think that each set consisted of about 50 cards. Each card was of a comparable size to those you might get in a packet of cigarettes in days gone by, and each one had a rather lovely illustration on the front and a write up about it on the other side. You could buy an album in which to stick them. In fact, why would you collect the cards without the album? I’ve written in the past about the so-called collector gene and I guess this would have been one of its earliest manifestations within me.

The albums themselves were about A5 sized and landscape oriented. The covers were thin card but for all that they were rather lovely things. Even without the cards they were nicely illustrated and full of juicy information.

Of course, there was a problem to any would be collectors of the cards. Getting hold of all 50 of them to complete the set was difficult. There seemed to be always 1 or 2 you just never got, however many packets of tea you bullied your mum into buying. The Race into Space set was my older brother’s particular favourite. Prehistoric Animals, the next set, was mine. Now, complicating matters was the fact that I have a brother a year older, and another one 18 months younger and as far as I recall, all 3 of us collected the cards. My mum and my nan, in whose house we grew up, were no slouches when it came to tea consumption, but even they found it hard to drink enough to feed our card collecting habit.

I was two short of a full set of The Race Into Space. Neil was one card sort, the one showing Yuri Gagarin in his Vostok. I was one card short of a full set of Prehistoric Animals. It was one of the earlier cards in the set from the eras before the dinosaurs appeared. I never got it.

I think that I should add that Brooke Bond PG Tips did advertise that you could send off to them to buy the cards that you were missing. Whether it was the hassle or the expense, my mother was not keen on doing this for us, and she used what I look back on as an unusually cunning tactic, telling us that buying the cards you needed was cheating and it would only be a valid complete collection if you found all of the cards in tea packets.  Now, there was a woman who understood all about the collector’s gene, which is all the more remarkable considering that she did not possess such a gene herself.

Now, don’t misunderstand me, I still find dinosaurs and prehistoric and other extinct animals to be pretty interesting. Not as much as I did 55 years ago, but then that just goes with the territory. But I can’t say that in normal circumstances I would have experienced a desire to own an old card album from my childhood. Which makes me think.

I hung onto my Prehistoric Animals card album for quite a few years. In fact it is quite possible that it finally went in the great clear out of ’86. Basically, I left home to go to Uni in the Autumn of 1983. I came back for the holidays, but it was never my permanent home again. By the time I finished my degree in the summer of 1986, I was 21, a dad, soon to be a husband, and moving to Port Talbot. So it was a case of take anything I wanted to take to Wales, then what was left was chucked after my brothers had had pick of anything they wanted. But I can honestly say that I didn’t really think about it again until last week. If you’re a Facebook regular like me, maybe you’ll too have experienced the way that it often peppers you with adverts when you’re catching up, and one of these was for a PG Tips album from the 70s, complete with cards. Intrigued I made a search on ebay, and nearly, very nearly bought a complete album and cards set. Well, age and experience are amongst the best teachers I have ever known, and so I did what I’ve learned to do whenever I have a sudden collector’s urge like this. I went off the website and put it to the back of my mind, with the intention of coming back to it in a few days to see if the buying urge was anything like as strong.

Thankfully when I did come back to it, the urge was a lot less strong, in fact, non-existent. I really didn’t want it. I didn’t know what I’d do with it, where I’d put it and whether I’d even ever look at it again – probably not. You see, when you get right down to it, I wouldn’t be buying it for me. Not for the 61 year old me, anyway. I would have been buying it for the 7 year old me, and essentially, buying the whole set for that one card I never got when I was a kid. And the ironic thing is, there’s no way I can give it to that kid – because however much I might deny it, I’m not the same kid as I was back then.

Had I given in to that initial, misleading, siren-like compulsion, then the danger is that I’d start buying up other things I missed out on in my childhood. These include the friends of Major Matt Mason. I had the good major for my 7^th birthday, but the only accessories I ever had for him were the space sled and the ‘jet pack’. I remember writing about it in a ‘what I did at the weekend’ paragraph at school, and Miss Hall, my teacher, correcting it, and adding a ‘ge’ to the word sled. I had a mini rebellion against this, but Miss Hall, of whom I was very fond, would not accept that sled is an acceptable alternative to sledge. Which maybe was what led to the first tantrum I ever had about having something which I felt was so obviously correct marked incorrect. It wasn’t the last. Now, I’ll be honest. Even now, when I can look back on a career of more than 3 and a half decades of teaching, I find it difficult to understand why she wouldn’t accept my arguments that

a)   Space Sled is what it was specifically called on the packaging – and –

b)   Sled is a perfectly valid word anyway.

Mind you, if I was upset then, I was livid 5 years later. It was my first year at the comprehensive. Our English teacher asked us to write a story. The point, the title or the broad sweep of the narrative escape me now. However I do recall that in my story a ne’er do well was telling his accomplice to stop my hero from escaping. I wrote this small piece of dialogue.

“Get ‘im!” he shouted.”

The teacher put a big red circle around the apostrophe and the letter I, and wrote “Get him!” across the top of it. I was furious. To me, the apostrophe made it clear that I was fully aware of the missing ‘h’ and had left it out deliberately, as a phonetic rendition of how a ne’er do well would speak. Far from being an error it was, in fact, the sort of precocious display of using punctuation for stylistic effect that should have earned a little recognition, or possibly even a round of applause. I totally understand why I got so worked up about it then. I don’t understand quite so well why I still feel worked up about it today.

Still, for all that I guess that learning that even the people who you think should know that much better than you do actually occasionally don’t is ultimately a valuable life lesson. I think I’ve shared this last story with you before but what the hell, it’s a nice one to finish on. I had a student teacher once taking my class on the Scottish play when I was observing him. He was a good guy, and I have no doubt that he went on to have a very successful teaching career. However on the lesson in question, he fell foul of some of Shakespeare’s use of rather archaic terms – in this case the word ‘barque’, meaning ship. The witches in the Scottish play at one point cast an evil spell to inflict harm upon the husband of a woman who refused to share chestnuts with them. At the end of the spell they say

“Tho’ his barque may not be lost

Yet it shall be tempest-toss’d.” Which means, more or less, though we can’t sink his ship, we will make his life miserable with continual storms.

After our hero the student has given it a good old reading a hand shoots up in the front.

“What does that mean, Sir?” the pupil asks. She is not trying to catch him out.

“What?” he replies.

“His barque may not be lost, sir.” Now, I can see from the sudden panic in his eyes that he does not know. How he handles this will be interesting. Will he a) be really smart and tell the kids to look in a dictionary- or – b) be sensible enough to  look in the notes on the other side of the page – or c) gamble and bullshit?

He goes for option C

“Well – his barque may not be lost – means they can’t kill the ship’s dog.”

For the rest of his time with us he swore blind he was just joking. But I saw his eyes. I know the truth.