No Spoilers

I went to a pub quiz yesterday, so just got around to watching this week's episode (side note, the pub quiz cost £3/person to enter. £15 entry for our team. Which felt frankly ridiculous. They did give me a free lime and soda to be fair, though it was made with lime juice rather than lime cordial, which was, again, odd). Why I feel the need to comment on this is the fact that I saw absolutely no spoilers for the episode.

Perhaps this may not sound all that remarkable to you, but it turns out that if you don't go on your Twitter account that is specifically for University Challenge, or click on the page on iPlayer, or Wikipedia, then it's quite easy to avoid spoilers for things that only happened yesterday.

When I try the Match of the Day Challenge, which is where you try and go through the whole of Saturday without knowing any of the football scores so that you can watch Match of the Day completely in the dark, it becomes a whole lockdown operation to avoid seeing things. You can't follow any of the automatic pathways on your phone - to BBC Sport, to Twitter, to WhatsApp - and stopping this requires a constant mental effort. Half the time we just pick up our phones and click on stuff without ever engaging the intentional part of our brain, so you can find yourself on the YouTube homepage, staring at a video entitled Arsenal 4-1 Leeds, with no recollection of how you ended up there.

We are so accustomed to having access to everything immediately that when we refrain from taking it something feels very strange. Its the same nagging feeling you get when you can't google the answer to a question someone has posed. The not-knowing makes you anxious, and picks away at your psyche. But what actually is the benefit of having all of the information at your fingertips? Its useful sometimes, sure, but do I really need to see the Everton-Tottenham score five times in the second half, or would I be better served looking once, at the end of the match? When you do stop and think about it, the answer is obvious, and I guess that's the point, that most of the time we don't think. We are in thrall to our thirst for tiny spikes of dopamine, and we know exactly how to get them, even if there is no way that we can ever satiate the desire fully.

So, with all this in mind, I'm going to end the review here, with no spoilers. If you want to complete the University Challenge Challenge, you can watch the episode here. I wasn't planning on doing this, and am very aware it might feel like an excuse to skive off the rest of this post, but that couldn't be further from the truth. The truth is that I am just as in thrall as the rest of you, only I am in thrall to the idea of being conceptual. A review of a TV episode which doesn't even touch on the episode in question? What a concept. Really, I have loads of time left today in which I could complete the review, but if I did then I'd be passing up the opportunity to be morbidly pretentious and self-indulgent, which is something I could never do. See you next week.