The Fame Game

For the past week or so, I have been obsessed with Chappell Roan's album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. It is full of incredibly catchy hooks and playful lyrics and is very addictive. I also listened to Brat by Charli XCX and it paled in comparison, just in case you thought I was playing to the crowd with my admittedly late-to-the-party hot take on Roan.

The past week has also seen a swathe of articles about how Roan resents the fame she has acquired as a result of this banger album. She describes this fame as having the "vibe of an abusive ex-husband", and talks about how people act like they have a right to her time and fail to respect her boundaries with creepy behaviour.

Backlash to the backlash

This complaining opened her up to criticism, as she is someone who has courted fame and is now seemingly rejecting those who are responsible for her being famous (and by extension, rich) in the first place.

But that's not really fair, is it? Regardless of who you are you should be able to have some boundaries. Football players are sometimes slagged off for 'not being able to take' the abuse which gets hurled at them from the stands, but its not normal for someone to go to work and get yelled at by strangers.

Social media unfairly gets the blame for a lot of things these days, but on this one I think the finger is correctly pointed. People as mildly famous as YouTubers with a few thousand subscribers are subjected to online abuse (albeit on a smaller scale than Roan and Premier League footballers). This abuse is sent partly because the abuser doesn't view the abused as an actual person. They are merely an Internet persona, not a thinking, feeling person who may read those posts.

Parasocialites

When this view translates to the real world, as can happen in instances where people are super-famous, you get things like a fan grabbing and kissing Roan in a bar. These are not people, they are avatars through which the viewer is free to do anything they please. Characters in a video game.

One of the lower-level examples of this are some of the tweets you read about University Challenge contestants. Most tweets on the hashtag are lovely, encouraging and celebratory, about the enjoyment of the show. But every week there are a few which single out contestants (more often than not the non-male contestants) for abuse or creepiness.

The podcaster Blindboy (whose recent episode prompted me to give Chappell Roan a proper listen) gets around the problem of fame by wearing a bag on his head for any public appearance so that people don't recognise him without it. But this isn't a solution for most people.

It would be better if people remembered that fame doesn't reduce the wearer to a caricatured cardboard cutout, free to be moved around as they please for whatever purpose they see fit.

So with that in mind, let's get onto the episode which featured eight very real human people from the Universities of Reading and Exeter.

Reading were making their first appearance since a run to the final in 2022. Their captain that year, Michael Hutchinson, was on Only Connect last week with Fatima Sheriff, a member of the Imperial team who beat Reading (the third member of the OC team was Michael Kohn, who had reached the UC semis with Imperial the year before).

If you want to watch the episode before reading the review you can do so at this link.

Here's your first starter for ten.

Exeter's Mouelhi is quickest off the mark on the opening starter with violence, winning them a bonus set on Scotland. It always amuses me how much Scotland seems like a foreign country to the English teams. Like, it is, but its also right there. Its connected to England at the top, Hadrian's wall and all that.

To be fair to them they manage two out of three bonuses (and the third one on the Great Glen was pretty tough), but they answer them in the way you would answer a question about Norway, if that makes sense.

The second starter also goes to Mouelhi, as does the third, and the fourth, and the... no, that was where the run ended. But still, four starters in a row to kick things off is pretty incredible. It is not the all-time record, as confirmed by statman Jack McB, but it doesn't happen very often.

This streak gives Exeter a lead of 95 points before Finkelstein finally gets Reading off the mark. He takes a second consecutive starter, and I'm already thinking about what I'm going to write if he takes four-in-a-row like Mouelhi, but Moorcroft hits back for Exeter to put a halt to these musings. Four-in-a-row-in-a-row might have been the opening sentence.

We Gonna Rock Down

The music starter on Electric Avenue goes to Exeter's Rock, and they clean up with a hat-trick of bonuses on British synth and new-wave. Reading look like they are building some momentum, but Moorcroft stops them again with condensation, winning Exeter a bonus set on Euclid's elements, a book about maths which describes a cylinder as:

"a figure created by carrying a rectangular parallelogram around and restoring it to its original position, while keeping one side of the parallelogram about the right angle fixed"

Which I can't wrap my head around at all. Does wrapping my head around an idea also create a cylinder somehow? I don't know.

Finkelstein grabs another starter, and Reading close back to within 40 points, but this would be the end of their resistance as Exeter ended the show with a 100-0 run.

Reading 100 - 240 Exeter

A close-ish match, before Exeter ran away with it in the last five minutes. They posted a decent score, and could make the quarter-finals so long as they avoid one of the big hitters like Bristol and Imperial in the second round.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you next week for Birkbeck vs Darwin.