2016/17, Episode 26 - Bristol vs Corpus Christi

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

Tonight’s episode was broadcast at 7.30, rather than the usual 8 o’clock. Had a helpful tweeter not informed me of this switch I would likely have missed the episode in Tesco, stocking up on quizzing snacks. The reason for this monumental travesty was that the jokers at the BBC wanted Winterwatch to steal UC’s prime slot. I mean, I think animals are pretty cool ‘n’ all, and even disregarding the fact that the show’s been nothing since the exit of my childhood hero Bill Oddie, ask yourself this simple question - could a badger tell you who discovered rubidium? Very likely not.

Returning this evening were eight people who could probably give it a decent go if you asked them - or at least a more accurate guess than the badger. Bristol won the first episode of the series then we had to wait months and months for their second round match. But you know what they say about buses and Bristol University appearances on The Challenge, though if you’ve been waiting half a year for a bus I’d advise you to walk.

The same goes for Corpus Christi too, who beat Jesus, Cam in week 2 then had to wait until two weeks ago to knock out reigning champions, Peterhouse. An extremely rudimentary and precarious statistical methodology I’ve developed over the past week places these teams as equal third favourites to claim the series title, so based on that there was nothing to split them going into this Quarter Final. However, while I’m not going to say the validity of my maths is quite as dodgy as everything dispensed from Sean Spicer’s mouth in the past few days, its not exactly 1.5 million percent accurate either.

Venkatesh kicks us off with a question on yoga, which Paxman says was too easy, but I had about as much hope of answering it as the badger from paragraph one, who I’m going to keep referencing as much as I can.

Bristol’s Rolleston, studying to teach history, gets the next history starter wrong, probably because he’d ditched the trusty history teacher tweed jacket that had served him so well in the first two matches. Nothing to worry about yet though, and his neighbour Jackson (like the character from Starter For 10, which I’m not going to stop nattering on about, regardless of how many times she appears, much like with the dumb badger) takes the next and it looks like we might have a match on our hands.

But it was not to be.

Bristol captain Clarke is harshly penalised by Paxo for answering ‘macaroni’ instead of ‘macaronic’, a penalty made all the more bizarre by the allowing of ‘elephantitis’ as opposed to ‘elephantiasis’ from Corpus later on, which some might say is less of a purely semantic mistake, given that ‘elephantitis’ would mean ‘inflammation of the elephant…’ And that wouldn’t really be fair, given how big they are already.

They never really recovered from this setback, battling on a wee bit until the halfway stage to keep the scores at 110-60, but after that Clarke seemed to lose interest completely, either actually falling asleep or checking her phone under the table for the remainder of the match. Her nonchalant attitude has gained her many fans thus far, but a snooze possibly wasn’t the best idea.

Her teammates couldn’t do much to help her, and the spotlight instead shifted to an incredible, destructive performance from Corpus. If my maths had them equal favourites before play commenced then the second half was yet another damning indictment of its usefulness.

Theirs was a different kind of ruthfulness to Monkman’s single-brained deconstruction of Balliol last week. All team members contributed both to the starters and effective discussion on the bonuses, with Venkatesh conducting his team with astute aplomb, plucking their correct answers from the sky, discarding the wrong ones to the scrapheap, and providing some inspired guesswork of his own on top of that.

“The national fruit of India? I feel like I should know this… I feel like its the mango”

Bristol manage to steal the last starter of the day, but that was all they could muster after the music round, and the team with the highest combined score going into the QFs had to settle for second best on this occasion, by quite some margin.

Corpus certainly aren’t infallible, mixing up the Bronte sisters, and somehow conspiring to answer Rosalind incorrectly on two separate questions, but on this evidence, they do look pretty darned formidable

Final Score: Bristol 70 - 250 Corpus Christi

We’ve reached the stage where I can no longer predict the next match from previous year’s wikipedia pages, so we’ll have two of Edinburgh, Warwick, Emmanuel and Birmingham in a week, when Winterwatch may or may not still be interfering with us, damn badgers.