Pandemic Postcards

If you've been following my reviews of the quarter-finals, you'll know that I've been mining my archives for funny Paxman quips about the 'labyrinthine' nature of the double-elimination double-qualification format. You'll also know that I haven't found as many as I thought I was going to. Memory plays tricks on us, which is also the theme of my replacement intro because the series I was looking back over was from 2019/20.

The first QF was on 3rd Feb 2020, and was entirely in the style of the novel Ducks, Newburyport.

The second QF was on 10th Feb 2020 and featured reigning Only Connect 3rd placer Ian Wang.

The third QF was on 17th Feb 2020 and there was still nothing strange going on.

And then something happened that meant I didn't write a review for a month... and then I returned with a 5-part special episode from the early days of the Covid pandemic.

What better thing to do, when forced to stay at home during the outbreak of a global virus that threatens not only millions of peoples lives but the very fabric of society as we know it, than catch up on watching and writing about the quiz show whose previous four episodes you had missed for various reasons, all of which seem frivolous following the outbreak of a global virus that threatens not only millions of peoples lives but the very fabric of society as we know it.

Also, I kept seeing that Twitter meme about Shakespeare having written King Lear during the plague quarantine and fancied getting involved.

When the next post was out we were in lockdown for the first time.

What is going on? When I wrote the last blog it was pretty clear that we were in a dire situation, but the inaction of the Government left it feeling like we were in some kind of limbo state, just waiting for the disaster to hit us. But then action was taken. Lockdown. 

We now know exactly what we have to do (was going to list the ‘Stay Home’ instructions here, but if you’re getting your lockdown lowdown from a University Challenge blog then frankly there’s no hope for you anyway), but it still feels really surreal.

And the week after that, I was learning what the word furlough meant and how to pronounce it.

Furlough is one of those words that makes you understand how infuriating it must be to learn English as a foriegn language. Its a fairly rare word, so many native speakers won’t have known which of the ‘ough’ sounds should follow the ‘furl’ (as in rough, cough, through, plough and though etc). Is it fur-loh, fur-low, fur-luff, fur-loff or fur-loo? For me it seemed right that furlough should be fur-low, to rhyme with cow, but then furloughed to rhyme with though.

Reading these back, the strangest thing is that they are from five years ago. It doesn't feel possible that so much time can have passed, but it must have.

It's also clear that the pre-recorded episodes of University Challenge were a great source of comfort to me at that time, punctuating the week in a way that nothing else was. It still does this for me, though with fewer global-virus-related implications.

Monday night is quiz night...

Here's your first starter for ten.

Warner kicks things off for Bristol with harpies, and they took a full set of bonuses on words featuring the sequence O-C-H. They started their previous match with a string of ten starters, ending with a pretty monstrous 290-35 win over Exeter.

This match wouldn't be entirely in their favour like that one, with Westermann opening Open's account with Judith Butler on the second starter.

Another for Warner keeps Bristol ahead, but no one recognises Anna Karenina's family tree on the first picture starter. Warner's third wins the picture bonuses and they take two, missing The Golovylov Family by Mikhail Soltykov-Shchedrin, which is so much harder than all the other family tree questions.

To give an idea of the scale of this increase in difficulty, see below the number of Goodreads reviews for the four books to which the questions referred.

• The Golovylov Family by Mikhail Soltykov-Shchedrin (3,066 ratings)
• Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev (95,521 ratings)
• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (357,311 ratings)
• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (888,332 ratings)

Now, this obviously isn't a perfect representation of how well-known a book is, but I think it gives a pretty good idea, and you'd have to be pretty well-versed in Russian literature to get the Golvylov question.

Anna Karenina has nearly 300 times as many ratings.

Did any of you get the Golovylov question? Let me know in the comments.

Back-to-back starters for Westermann keep Open within ten points, but they'd be in the lead if they could manage more than a single bonus every time.

No one gets the music starter, so Warner wins Bristol the bonuses with a replacement on the Sea of Azoz. A rapid buzz of 2014 from Payne gives Open another opportunity to close the gap and Westermann's fourth ties the game at 75-each. One more for Warner nudged Bristol in front, but a pair of picture bonuses swung things back towards Open who took the lead for the first time in the match

Unfortunately for them and for viewers hoping for a close finish, Bristol pulled away at this point, ending the match with a 50-0 run to put one foot in the semi-finals.

Open 95 - 135 Bristol

On Pointless, some Pointless answers are more Pointless than others. As in, there are some which wouldn't be Pointless if 101 people were asked rather than 100, and some which would still be Pointless is 1000 people were asked. That Golovylov question feels like it would fall into the second of these categories - would any of the teams on this year's University Challenge have got it right?

Doesn't matter for Bristol, who will now face one of Warwick, Darwin and Christ's for direct passage into the last four.

Open, meanwhile, have another chance against Imperial, UCL or Queen's, Belfast. See you next week. Subscribe if you're not already.