2016/17 - Episode 3, Liverpool vs Warwick

As part of his historical retrospectives of both unis Paxman informs us that Carol Ann Duffy is an alumnus of Liverpool, while Ruth Jones went to Warwick, which settles who I’m going to be supporting. Being forced to memorise ‘In Mrs Tilschers Class’ and ‘Havisham’ in High School so that I could quote them while endlessly practicing critical essays very nearly broke my creative spirit. Had I been asked to ruminate on the higher meanings of the phrase ‘Whats Occurin’?’, however, I think I’d still be going today.

The Liverpool team have an average age of twenty nine, which seems reasonable, looking at their picture. But its when you realise that this isn’t due to the matronly Rowe on the right (I don’t know whether she dyed her hair to match her top, or if she dyed her top to match her hair; but either way they match) that things become interesting.

Sitting on the opposite side of his marooned teammate it is Nick Kurek, who is quite obviously a vampire. And with an age likely close to one hundred it is he who claims responsibility for the Liverpool foursome’s relative elderliness. Its no coincidence that he’s reading microbiology, a subject involving the study of blood…

I don’t know if the sci-fi channel have commissioned a Dracula vs Thor movie, but if I was inexplicably chosen to cast it, and inexplicably given only this episode of University Challenge to pick actors from then I’d have to go with Warwick’s resident viking Thomas Van to star opposite Kurek as the eponymous Lightning God. And he’s studying History, so he could help iron out any inaccuracies in the script.

To prove that my faith in him wasn’t misplaced Van storms in with the first starter question on Roald Dahl, who’s first language was, you guessed it, Norwegian. Okay, so that was a pretty tenuous link, but this is a show based around finding the tenuous links between things.

Van’s moment of glory doesn’t last very long though, as he is soon eclipsed by one of his teammates, Sophie Rudd, who nets a total of nine starter questions over the course of the match. This is approaching Loveday levels from the final two years ago, and certainly bodes well for Warwick going forward in the competition.

She totally carried the rest of her team, none of whom got more than two starters right, including Team Captain Hutchings, who presumably got the leading role based on his Countdown exploits (he was a series winner in 2013). If Rudd has an off day and the team needs saving he’ll have to hope that most of the questions come in the form of nine letter anagrams. He does have a nice t-shirt though.

Nine starters blows anything else we’ve seen from a single contestant out of the water, and I know its only the third episode, but it’ll be difficult to beat and may stand as the high score of the first round. The only thing stopping me from instantly declaring Warwick as series contenders at this early stage was the lack of any real opposition in Liverpool.

Semi finalists last year, this team, with the possible exception of their resident vampire, just didn’t give a crap. Captain Hopkin nominated Kurek on one question as if he just couldn’t be bothered listening to and relaying his teammates answer rather than the only correct reason for a nomination - when you don’t understand the bizarre words being spoken to you. Nicholls just looked bored whenever he got an answer, even when he answered ‘Thriller’. There’s room for a certain level of arrogant nonchalance in University Challenge, of course there is, but it has to be underpinned by the kind of quizzing nous displayed by Warwick’s Rudd, which, for Liverpool, it simply was not.

Kurek was, however, responsible for my favourite moment of the series so far. To preface this I’ll give an example of a quizzing blunder I made on the radio once in which I suggested that Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, had in his spare time discovered penicillin. That was a far less outlandish answer than the one given by everyone’s favourite Liverpudlian bloodsucker (besides Paul McCartney that is)

When asked which planet of the solar system had the same surface area as the Indian Ocean he buzzed in and hopefully chirped ‘Jupiter’. Needless to say he was wrong and Rudd chipped in to mop up the mess with a cheerful ‘Mercury’. But I want to qualify the magnitude of his incorrectness to you with some cold, hard maths. Jupiter has a surface area 121.9 times the size of Earth’s, which is in turn 10 times larger than Mercury’s. So he was only out by a factor of 1219, which is the equivalent of saying Luxembourg is the same size as the UK, but in Space.

I’d probably stick to turning into a bat, mate.

Final Score: Liverpool 95 - 235 Warwick

So that was week three, and Liverpool beat Warwick thanks to a virtuoso performance from Sophie Rudd and the fact they were playing a vampire who doesn’t understand the concept of size. Queens’ play Peterhouse in a Cambridge derby next time, and I hope you’ll come back for another edition of the University Challenge Review. Thanks for reading