2016/17, Episode 8 - Wadham vs Robinson

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

In the third all Oxbridge match of the first round we have two previous Quarter Finalists facing off in a repeat of a first round match from 2007. Wadham comprehensively trounced Robinson 295-40 nine years ago, with the losers posting the equal second lowest score of any match in the Paxman era. Such was Robinson’s humiliation that for the best part of a decade they stayed as far away from the big city and bright lights as is possible for a university college. I can only imagine the horror racing through the minds of their quartet, as upon their tentative return to the studio they spied the ominous hulks of their devilish vanquishers from a decade earlier.

But as Dumbledore once said,  “It takes a great deal of courage to stand up to your enemies, but a great deal more to stand up to your friends”, and if you’re to believe the wise Professor this means that Robinson won’t even have to deploy the maximum levels of bravery available to them in order to put up a fight against their one-time conquerors.

And just as that quote was part of a larger speech from the end of ‘The Philosopher’s Stone’ in which Albus contrived to arbitrarily award points to Neville Longbottom in order to gift the House Cup to Gryffindor I move onto another instance of perceived unfairness - the Oxbridge bias of University Challenge (a seamless segue, thank you)

I consider myself to have a reasonable grasp of how to use Google in the mission of finding answers to tricky questions, but I have thus far failed to find a satisfactory reason as to why Oxford and Cambridge Universities were ever allowed to enter multiple teams in the first place. Durham also has a collegiate system, for example, but they get just the one team, which flatly debunks the only logical point ever put forward. The reason generally given is that each of the colleges are distinct entities, because tutorials for each college are held separately from the rest.

But that, frankly, is a nonsense non-explanation. Lectures for each course are attended by students from all of the colleges. This is the same as for all Universities and all courses at all other Universities are then split down into tutorial groups too. The only difference is that outside Oxbridge you don’t live with your tutorial groups or under any kind of collegiate label. Another reason given, I think entirely seriously, was that each college has its own individual library…

The Manchester team of 1975 famously protested the bias by answering every question with either ‘Trotsky’, ‘Lenin’ or ‘Marx’, which, while in its own precious way was quite noble, surely must have been a most dreary half hour of viewing. This achieved nothing, as evidenced by the eleven Oxbridge entities competing in this years series. Perhaps a better protest would have been to, like their recent counterparts, win the series. I think the main reason that this is still the situation nowadays is the classic ‘its-always-been-this-way-so-why-would-you-change-it’ argument, rather than anything that actually makes logical sense.

So why, in this enlightened era when even the most corrupt of organisations in FIFA have been persuaded to initiate goal line technology has nothing been done to change this?

The explanation most commonly given is that were the two Universities to field a singular team they would both produce invincible monsters, and sweep aside all comers in what would surely become the most boringly predictable of spectacles. Splitting them into colleges makes the competition fairer to the other, less prestigious institutions, who would undoubtedly stand no chance against either Oxbridge ‘Superteam’.

This argument though, falls short on all counts. Oxbridge Universities may have won 54.5% of the 22 series since Jeremy Paxman became presenter, but when you consider that they have comprised 39.3% of all competitors that statistic doesn’t seem so impressive. If you let Novak Djokovic enter both himself and forty nine slightly weaker clones into Grand Slams (39.3% of 128, with the weakness to account for the fact a single Oxford/Cambridge entry would be more powerful than the Colleges) then he would have won more than the twelve he already has, and that would then have prevented less high-profile players (or Universities) from taking part. Manchester University, meanwhile, have won 18.2% of these series with only 2.5% of the entrants, though that comparison is probably a tad facetious.

As stated at the start of this post, this series features three Oxbridge matches in the first round alone, which guarantees them three teams in the second round (including one Cambridge team specifically, given the Cam-Cam match in week four) and eight chances in total for a team to make that stage. All other entrants only have one chance, so part of their success has to be attributed to the advantage they both already have before a question has even been asked.

But none of this has anything to do with the eight sprightly youths battling each other tonight. All they know is that they want to win, and that only half of them can. All four Wadham members have on a jumper of some sort - it have been cold in the lower half of the studio that week - and Holmes, with their Skrillex-esque hairstyle might well be the first University Challenge contestant to sport a nose ring. And also the first dubstep icon.

The match is quite close throughout, though it is Robinson who take the lead around the halfway stage and refuse to relinquish it, despite David Verghese’s best efforts with three incorrect interruptions. It appears that they will gain revenge for their savaging of 2007 and they hold off a late resurgence from Wadham to claim satisfactory redemption

Final Score: Robinson, Cam 155 - 95 Wadham, Ox

So that was week eight, and Robinson College, Cambridge beat Wadham College, Oxford though of course either way Oxbridge were going to have a team in the second round.  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.