2022/23, Episode 2 - Open vs Newcastle

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

I took a load of notes when I was watching this episode on Monday, with the hope that whenever I got round to writing the review they would be of great assistance. However, the greater the distance between the note-taking and the note-using, the less useful the notes become - especially when the notes are of the calibre ‘taking notes to be more professional with my fancy new website. This is one of the notes’.

None of my notes are about the two teams who were competing on this episode, meaning that I’ll have to do my research (research here should really be in air quotes since all I mean by that is that I am going to look up the historic performances of the two teams on Blanchflower) now anyway. Starting to think there wasn’t any point to my note taking at all.

Open reached the final in 1997, and won the trophy in 1999, but in the twenty three years since then they have only made four appearances, failing to make it beyond the second round in any of those. When they won in 1999 there was a bit of a hullabaloo about their older students effectively ‘cheating’ because two of their members had been on other quiz shows beforehand. This stemmed from an off-the-cuff remark from Paxman which then snowballed into a vague conspiracy theory about a plan to waste time while conferring. This article written by Sue Mitchell, a member of the winning team, sums up the whole imbroglio quite nicely - I’d recommend reading for those interested in diving headlong into University Challenge lore.

As far as I’m aware, Newcastle haven’t been involved in any similar imbroglios, though perhaps they wouldn’t mind that if it meant they would win a title. This is their twelfth appearance of the Paxman era and they’ve made the at least the quarter-finals on six of the previous eleven occasions, with their best run, to the semi finals, coming on their last tilt in 2017/18.

Anyway, that’s enough about imbroglios, let’s get on with this - here’s your first starter for ten…

Paxman kicks things off by telling us that the rules are unchanged and unchangeable, which is an incredibly metal way of telling us its business as usual. But it is good to know that the rules can’t be altered. I was very upset when they changed the scoring system in F1 to 25 points for a win, going so far as to make a Facebook page called something like ‘The new 25-18-15-12-10-8-6-4-2-1 scoring system in F1 is stupid. Like if you agree’. And yes, I did include every single one of the numbers. So who knows how I’d react if they made it a starter for nine, or replaced the buzzers with interpretive dance.

The opening starter goes to Newcastle, and they take two bonuses on composers. Open Myles then opens Open’s account with the first of six he would take in the match (by the end of the match I was writing ‘yet again’ next to his name in my notes because it felt like he was getting them all). Two bonuses on the Nobel Prize for Medicine followed, with Baker rightly pointing out that there was no vaccine for malaria. (There actually is now - I just googled to check and saw that the WHO approved one in October 2021, but this would have been after the episode was recorded, so Baker had been correct at the time, meaning that they were able to give the right answer, which was yellow fever)

Another from Myles gave Open the lead, but Newcastle quickly hit back with the first picture round, on museum groups. The Geordies were then able to go on a good run and opened up a sixty point lead.

Ten of these points came from a starter on the pike species of fish. I answered this really quickly and with incredible certainty despite not really knowing why. I thought about it some more, and reckoned I had managed to link the Latin name of the fish, which contained the word Aesop, with pike, because of some half-remembered story in a book of Aesop’s fables. I had planned to do some digging into this fact to confirm the logic of it, and then write a bit about the random nature of information recall (the story in question being The River Fish and the Sea Fish). But I just rewatched that question and Paxman doesn’t say Aesop at all, he says Esox, so it turns out that I’d totally fluked my answer, and would have been incredibly lucky if I’d buzzed in with it.

The music round was on Beyonce’s Lemonade album, and the songs she sampled thereon. I do like that album a lot, but I think I would have fared better if the questions had been about her newest album, which my gf is obsessed with and which she played on repeat for an entire weekend recently.

Another for Myles got Open going again, and they took two bonuses on the European Cup, although skipper MacGregor was kicking himself at missing Leeds United as the answer to the third. He made up for this later on with a football-based starter, buzzing in quickest with the knowledge that Senegal had beaten Egypt in the final of the African Cup of Nations.

But Newcastle quickly hit back and extended their lead further - they were in the groove at this point, while Open looked beaten. They get bonuses on platonic solids, which included a reference to a Klein bottle, a plushie version of which was famously used as a mascot by Bobby Seagull’s Emmanuel team of 2016/17 as well as subsequent Emma teams. I’ve written in my notes to ‘do a bit about platonic solids and platonic friends’, but I’m not sure what on earth I was hoping that would look like, so I’m going to give it a miss. If anyone is really desperate to see what they’re missing, send me a message and I’ll try to workshop something for next week.

A few more in quick succession for Myles brings Open into three digits, but his teammates aren’t giving him much help on the buzzer, and they are unable to capitalise on the bonuses when he does get the starters, dooming their chances from the get go.

Final Score: Newcastle 195 - 115 Open

The curse continues for Open, who haven’t made it past the second round in their past five appearances now. Paxman says they might come back as high scoring losers, but they won’t, I’m afraid. But congratulations to Newcastle, who looked stronger as the episode went on and will be very tough opponents in the second round if they can carry that confidence through.