2016/17 - Episode 4 - Peterhouse, Cam vs Queen's, Cam

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

The reigning Champion’s Peterhouse made their debut this week, in their bid to become only the third team (along with UC behemoths Magdalen, Oxford and Manchester) to retain the prestigious title. They were also bidding to retain the unofficial title bestowed upon them by Twitter - that of the most entertaining team. And regardless of how many Nobel Prizes they will win in their respective futures this could be the more difficult precedent to live up to. The looping eyebrow and puppy-embroidered knitwear of Captain Hannah Woods combined with the ‘your Nan confused at how Facetime works’ expressions of Oscar Powell make this a target that was always going to prove troublesome to hit.

However, in the first four words spoken by their first team member they show that they aren’t going to give it up lightly: “Ephraim Jacob Jacobus Levinson”. These are all parts of his name, believe it or not. Contrary to what you might think Ephraim is actually a real first name, from the Bible, no less, with 46 separate notable people who have their own Wikipedia articles (including one Nazi Hunter). And I can only presume his parents added the Jacobus to the Jacob because they thought he didn’t sound quite posh enough already.

Unlike his neighbour Sweetenham, who, looking like a 1960s banker with the voice of Tom Hiddlestone, needed no such boosts to his aristocratic exterior. Captain Voake, I am reliably informed, was the reserve to the winning quartet last year and watching them win, while she sat in the stands is the kind of rejected superhero story that become supervillain origin stories, like Syndrome in The Incredibles. The answer to her first starter question? Syndrome… So we better keep an eye on her to make sure she isn’t building any secret city-destroying robots.

Hoping to take the title away from them were Queen’s, another Cambridge college, making their first appearance since 2014. Historically they’ve reached two quarter finals, most recently in 2011, when they were knocked out by non other than Peterhouse, who that year lost in the semis.

But no matter the outcome, there will be another Cambridge team in the second round, as they continue their collective mission to extend their University’s record-breaking three victories in a row, having beaten an Oxford college in each of the Grand Finals.

This begs a question that has been raised an many occasions since the creation of the show - why are Oxford and Cambridge colleges permitted to enter as separate entities? Since 1963 Oxbridge are leading the rest of the country 25-20, and given that these colleges have on average around 500 students, compared to Manchester’s 40,000 for example, this would imply that were they a single institution the aggregate would be closer to 45-0.

But is that kind of simplistic reduction a fair assessment? The book Moneyball, on baseball statistics, adapted into a film starring Brad Pitt, is about building a team out of misfits and failures, who together, become a well-oiled machine capable of beating other teams with far more resources. Obviously your average University Challenge contestant isn’t a misfit or a failure, but I wonder if the Oxbridge colleges are simply better at optimizing their resources. If they agglomerated, creating what would surely be the best available resources, would they abandon their techniques for building the best teams, and plump, like the MLBs New York Yankees, for the people who can hit the most home runs.

Comparing baseball and University Challenge may seem stupid to you, and it absolutely is. So what’s my point? At this stage I’m not entirely sure, but what is the Challenge equivalent of a home run, and how would you go about assembling the optimum team from the options you have in front of you?

One possible method could be to look at the degrees of the winning teams over the years, which fortunately someone had already done for me…

This table would suggest that you’ll have the biggest chance of victory if you had a team of four historians. But it wouldn’t really, because then you’d have four people racing to buzz in and tell you who the third queen of Prussia was, and no one with the finer details of quarks nailed down. I’d need to do some more research, but the real most fearsome foursome would be some combination of the top few degrees. So is this how the Oxbridge colleges operate, and why they’ve won so many trophies with so few students to choose from?

Following this logic Queen’s would, as they try to topple the reigning champions, have students doing double-honour degrees in some combination of the above subjects. They have a mathematician, a physicist, and one of the fabled historians. So far so good. But this is where they fall apart. The fourth member is an engineer, which in itself isn’t good, but Lorenzo Venturini then adds, with the look of a mischievous ruler who enjoys having people executed, that he specialises in X-raying cheese. And he may well be the world’s leading expert in X-raying cheese, but that’s like being the world’s leading expert in X-raying cheese… Oh wait, I seem to have reached the most niche topic in the world, there’s nothing I can compare it to. What could you possibly be looking for Lorenzo? Cheeses don’t have bones!

Peterhouse meanwhile have two students who are “Reading English”, something most of us can do without having to go to Cambridge, one doing Linguistics and their own Engineer, though mercifully theirs is simply a Chemical one.

And it is the reigning champions who narrowly pip their Cambridgeshire compatriots by the margin of one starter question. They’d been romping away for most of the contest but Dr Cheesenstein pulled a few points back for Queen’s with two late ten pointers.

Queen’s, Cambridge 150 - 160 Peterhouse, Cambridge

So that was week four, and Peterhouse beat Queen’s which we could have (maybe???) predicted using my entirely rudimentary statistical analysis. Come back next week for a new edition of The University Challenge Review if you can handle another 900 words of complete nonsense. Please like and share if you enjoyed it, and as always, any feedback would be much appreciated.