2016/17, Episode 6 - Emmanuel, Cam vs Nottingham

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

Emmanuel College, Cambridge have made three appearances on University Challenge in the Paxman era. The first two of which were inauspicious, unremarkable, not progressing past the second round in either 2003 or 2007. And the third? Guttenplan.

“Hi, I’m Alex Guttenplan and I’m reading Wikipedia”, anyone who introduces themselves with a joke like that requires a certain underlying level of charming banter and the soft-spoken Natural Sciences student captured the hearts and minds of the nation as he captained his Emmanuel team to victory in the 2010 series.

Not many contestants have the gall to stand up in any way to the caustic abrasiveness of our mighty question-master, and it was with a swift retort to one of Paxo’s classic put-downs that first brought Guttenplan’s inimitable brand of cerebral confidence to the attention of viewers.

With an early buzz of ‘WB Yeats’ he won ten points for his team and Jeremy withered momentarily before spitting out, ‘Good guess’. Mere human beings would have been paralyzed into taking this with silence, but not Guttenplan. A wave of gasps swept the nation as he uttered the now-immortal words, ‘It wasn’t a guess’.

His defiance gave him the powerful respect of armchair quizzers from Dover to Dundee, and many politicians, who had found themselves unable to stand up to the Pax Machine. More surprising was that his shy, intelligent sensibilities turned him into a heartthrob. Emerging around the same time as Benedict Cumberbatch, who of course played a University Challenge captain in the film Starter for 10, the pair of them became the unlikeliest pair of pin ups the world had ever seen.

Something else he shares with the Sherlock actor, and in this case also with Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, Taylor Swift and One Direction, is the creation of a collective noun for his followers - with ‘Guttenfans’ joining ‘Beliebers’, ‘Katycats’, ‘Swifties’, ‘Directioners’ and ‘Cumberbitches’ in being added to the national lexicon. What I would give to see a University Challenge match feature Bieber, Swift et al…

So how did a man, described at various points as ‘bafflingly sexy’ and possessing a ‘dreamy lethargy’, get to be the smartest being on two legs? Having taught himself to read by the age of three, he was referred to as a quizzing prodigy by the age of eleven, which seems like a bizarre label to put on anyone, let alone a young child. And his secret? Procrastination on Wikipedia - so his introduction wasn’t entirely for the purposes of good humour. This is something Ted Loveday (AKA Mr H Legomenon) also cited in his victory dissection so perhaps if we all sat reading countless hours of user-edited internet encyclopedia we’d all win University Challenge.

Emmanuel’s opponent’s tonight, Nottingham University have made more appearances than their Cambridge counterparts, with ten, but have never made it past the QF (their best effort coming in 2000) and have no such commanding a character as Alexander Guttenplan in their history.

Emmanuel’s quartet, their first since Gutten-glory in 2010, decided that rather than the one mascot most teams customarily place between the captain and their middle-member, they needed three. I don’t know if this was because they felt they needed three times the luck that a normal team would need in order to emulate their Guttenfather, but a quick search of Twitter gives me their names, and they can be seen below. Manny the Lion, Kleiny the Bottle and Ellie the Duck.

Their captain Bobby Seagull has the least University Challenge name of all time, and with an incorrect buzz of ‘Little Miss Dorrit’ on the first question (one can only presume he mixed up Roger Hargreaves and Charles Dickens, an easy mistake to make) you begin to wonder if they should have filled the team with Barton-Singers and Nottingham storm off into an early lead.

But Bobby soon makes up for it and Emmanuel are back level in an extremely tight game. His opposite number Smith (a perfectly neutral name) completely guesses the answer to the music question on the Marriage of Figaro then he and his team have absolutely no clue about the subsequent bonuses, which is something I like to see. No one under the age of thirty should have a working knowledge of classical music.

Emmanuel have several amusing discussions over the bonus questions, asking ‘Who’s the lead guitarist in the Beatles?’ to each other a few too many times, and guessing ‘Silvio…?’ with a slight Italian lilt to a question on the first President of Italy.

Questions on Game of Thrones and Christopher Lee follow (though of course in a typically University Challeng-ian manner the Game of Thrones ones were only related to it in a very roundabout way) and Emmanuel managed to open up a substantial lead over Nottingham, who may return for the repechage, taking the win comfortably at the gong.

Final Score: Nottingham 135 - 175 Emmanuel

So that was week six, and Emmanuel College, Cambridge beat Nottingham University. Everything went according to Guttenplan (I’d apologise but I’m not really sorry) Come back next week for a new edition of The University Challenge Review if you can handle another 800 words of complete nonsense. Please like and share if you enjoyed it, and as always, any feedback would be much appreciated.