2016/17, Episode 12 - Queen's, Belfast vs Birmingham

If you haven’t already you can watch the episode here before reading the review:

I said at the start of last week’s review that the episode would have had a lot to do to stand up to the previous week’s. This was said with my tongue so far in my cheek that it was bursting out the other one, knowing what would come to pass as Wolfson College and their Twitter-Hero leader Eric Monkman fought SOAS with enough intellectual fireworks to light the mind’s sky for a fortnight. If you haven’t seen that match I’m going to put in another heavy recommendation to get it in front of your peepers.

Queen’s University, Belfast played the University of Birmingham tonight, and I’m not going to lie and say that the match was an all-time classic like Wolfson/SOAS, but it was no dud, so there’s still plenty to talk about. And even if there wasn’t I’d spew something onto my computer screen for you.

Queen’s have brought with them as mascot a gigantic plushy broccoli, and I am reliably informed that this is because all for team members are vegetarians. I don’t know why they chose a broccoli over potatoes or carrots (undoubtedly the greatest vegetable), but it may have something to do with the relative availability of soft cuddly orange sticks. Though come to think of it why is there someone out there making broccoli teddies? Hopefully no team of carnivores now decide to bring along a steak.

The probability that they also had a culinary mascot in 1981 is very low, but in that year they won the tournament, beating Edinburgh in the final. Alumni include Nobel Prize winning poet Seamus Heaney, who was a big fan of the rapper Eminem, saying he ‘sent a voltage around a generation’, and Liam Neeson, who is a big fan of beating people up, saying ‘I will kill you’.

Birmingham reached the quarter finals in 1995, but have failed to match that in seven subsequent appearances since. They don’t even have a mascot, let alone one in the shape of food.

They do, however, have two team members who are wearing such similar outfits and look enough alike that initially they confuse me in the same way Jon Snow and Robb Stark did on my first viewing of Game of Thrones. Someone should have told them to wear different coloured shirts. Its far easier to tell Queen’s apart because one of them is wearing a hat and one of them is female (I’m not sure which of those is the rarer occurrence on the show)

If Nicola Sturgeon watches University Challenge I have no doubt that she would have been screaming at the TV as the answer to the first starter was accepted despite Regan saying ‘Scottish Nationalist Party’ rather than ‘Scottish National Party’, though his answer would perhaps be slightly more apt nowadays.

Queen’s stretched out a comfortable lead going into the music round, and with Greenlees the only Brummie to get a starter at this point it wasn’t looking likely they’d manage to get anything out of the match. And following a pleasant quartet of clips from the late, great David Bowie Birmingham were sixty five points off the pace.

But like the Westerosi knight with whom they share a metaphor in an earlier paragraph their hopes were dramatically resurrected. Though in this case the practitioner was not a woman of red, but a man with Lees of Green. Birmingham captain George Greenlees surveyed his team at this stage and decided that he didn’t actually need them to win after all and set about dismantling his Northern Irish opponents single-handedly and single mindedly.

Equalling Warwick’s Sophie Rudd’s nine starter questions, but with a far lower overall score he emerges as the most effective player of the first round if you take into account the percentage of points he contributed. He also joined Alistair and Jonny Brownlee on the list of people whose name is a colour followed by the word ‘lees’ who are also astounding competitors in their chosen fields. It remains to be seen whether, were his sibling to be competing for the opposite team in a game of University Challenge and became deliriously dehydrated, he would abandon his own team, run over to their team and start answering questions for them instead. I like to think he would. He’s already carried his team into the second round.

Queen’s weak demise, in which they flopped like overcooked broccoli to a 140-15 second half, means that both SOAS and Jesus College, Cambridge are now guaranteed spots in the play-offs to reach the second round, having both scored 175 in their own defeats. This increases the chances of a SOAS-Wolfson repeat which is nothing but truly marvellous.

Final Score: Queen’s Belfast 105 - 155 Birmingham

Next week sees St Andrew’s take on Worcester College, Oxford. I hope you’ll come back for another edition of The University Challenge Review. Thanks for reading, its goodnight from me.