2016/17, Episode 7 - Balliol vs Imperial

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

Balliol College, Oxford has been the breeding ground of three former Prime Ministers of Great Britain (Messrs H. Asquith, H. Macmillan and E. Heath) and one near miss (a Mr B. Johnson), but this years Quizzing Quartet look far too happy and content to go into politics, so I think the chances of them increasing that number are pretty slim. The college can also count in its alumni a former President of Germany, but due to a distinct lack of German-ness I think there’s even less chance of that number being added to.

I don’t know what the relationship between University Challenge success and ‘numbers of future Prime Ministers who went there’ is, but Imperial can only claim a former Prime Minister of New Zealand and Rajiv Gandhi, a Prime Minister of India (though he did drop out, so I’m not sure if that even counts)

Balliol have a long standing feud with neighbouring college Trinity, who they have never met on the show, mainly due to the simple logistics of Trinity only having made one appearance since 1995, in a year Balliol didn’t qualify. This is unfortunate because the rivalry involves such mischievous antics as ‘singing songs across walls’ (of varying offensiveness) and ‘raids’, a marvellously ambiguous term which has in the past entailed the turfing of an entire Trinity common room by Balliol thugs, complete with daffodils (because elsewise whats the point?) and who wouldn’t want to watch a University Challenge episode in a forcibly grassified studio. A more lachrymose incident involved the pouring of detergent into another common room’s pond, killing all but one of the fish, which raises several questions. First - what kind of room has a pond in it? And second - what made that one fish so powerful to have survived?

I don’t know what help being descended from a line of notorious pranksters will bring to this Balliol team, but perhaps the reason they all look so pleased is that they had recently been involved in another piece of harmless banter along the lines of fish murder.

Imperial meanwhile have never been involved in the mass-killing of any kind of animal, so far as I’m aware, and even though Boris Johnson didn’t go there they have won the competition twice, in 1996 and 2001, and came within 15 points of being only the second team to ever retain the title in 2002.

Paxman claims that the last of these victories came in ‘twenty-oh-one’ despite no one else in the world referring to the years of the noughties in that manner. He then mentions Alexander Fleming (an Imperial alum) as the ‘inventor’ of penicillin, which I don’t think is strictly true, in the same way that Benjamin Franklin did not invent electricity, nor Newton gravity, but I’m not going to question him on it.

Anyway, back to this week’s match, and we have our first truly iconic piece of attire of the season, worn by Balliol captain Joey Goldman (above)- a shirt with dogs on it. Simple, but effective. I have no idea where he found these dogs, or how he got them onto his shirt, but you have to commend the man for the boldest clothing choice of the first seven episodes. And the most iconic face of the season so far goes to his opponent Nas Andriopoulos (below), who appears to have modelled himself on a Taxi Driver-era De Niro with a more modern haircut. But who would come out on top?

To begin with, well, neither really, as both teams had an extremely poor first half, with a number of penalties for being cocky little sods (if you buzz early and correctly, you’re rightly hailed a genius, if not - cocky little sod). At the halfway stage the scores were 60-40 in Balliol’s favour, a poor combined output for the two teams. But after the music round Balliol stormed away, leaving the poor shell shocked souls of Imperial in their blistering intellectual wake to go 50-0 between then and the second picture round, on robots in films, in which Hayden Christensen strangely didn’t make an appearance…

The Londoners would only gain 15 points in the entire, devastating second half, as Pope and Goldman, with four starter questions apiece led Balliol into the second round. I’m struggling to designate an MVP for this week, because though Pope did contribute three penalties with premature buzzing, which would obviously give his captain an advantage, one of his correct buzzes was Taylor Swift, which gives him an attractive bonus. Its a tough one.

Such was their dominance in the second half of the match that had they been able to produce the same form from the start their score would have been higher than anything seen for the whole of last years competition. Though of course that’s all hypothetical. And unfortunately for Imperial, I don’t think their score of 55 will be enough to see them back as a high-scoring loser, given that the average lowest highest scoring loser in the Paxman-era has been almost triple that.

Final Score: Balliol, Oxford 220 - 55 Imperial

So that was week seven, and Balliol College, Oxford beat Imperial College London and a dog-shirted man beat Robert DeNiro. No fish were killed in the making of this blog.  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.