University Challenge

Your starter for ten...

British quiz show centering on teams of university students competing against one another. It's been running for so long and is so popular that it's become pretty much a part of the cultural landscape. In other words, it's a British institution about British institutions. It ran from 1962-87 on ITV under the stewardship of Bamber Gascoigne, and was revived on The BBC in 1994, hosted by famously acerbic news broadcaster Jeremy Paxman.

Each round is a contest between two teams of four students. Each team represents a different university, except in the cases of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London and Wales, which can enter multiple constituent colleges. The way in which questions are asked, though modified quite a bit during the ITV days, has now been settled as this: The host asks a starter question worth 10 points, for which the contestants buzz in. A correct answer gets the team the points and three bonus questions on a specific subject, worth five points apiece. An incorrect answer to a starter gets the question passed over to the other team, and an incorrect interruption to a starter loses the team five points and gets the question passed over. Aside from picture rounds (twice an episode) and music rounds (Once an Episode), that's pretty much it.

There is something slightly unusual about the way passing through to the next round works: in the first round, the four highest-scoring losing teams get through to playoffs against each other; the two winners that emerge from that round also pass through to the next round. Also, as of the 2009-2010 series, teams will have to win two matches to advance from the quarterfinals to the semifinals; if a team wins two matches, they get through, if they lose two, they're out, and if the lose one then win one they have to play another match to determine whether or not they get through.

The quiz is known primarily for two things: the extreme difficulty of the questions compared to most game shows, to the point where among many people, getting one right in an episode is a point of pride, and the rather irascible temperament of Jeremy Paxman as the host.

Tropes used in University Challenge include:
  • Catch Phrase: Paxman has many.
    • "Oh, do come on!", "Let's have an answer!", or "Let's have it, please!"
      • Original presenter Bamber Gascoigne's equivalent phrase was "I have to hurry you!"
    • "You may not confer, one of you may buzz!"
    • "We're going to take a picture (or music) round now..."
    • "Another starter question now..."
    • "Uh, yesss!"
    • "And at the gong..."
    • "And it's goodbye from me - goodbye!"
    • "I'm sorry - if you buzz, you must answer!"
    • "No, I'm afraid you lose five points..."
    • "Anyone want to buzz from [Team X]?"
    • "...'Nnnnno!" (Hard to represent in text; a dismissive 'no' after a team has spent a long time conferring before giving an incorrect answer)
    • And the most famous catch phrase of the show: "Here's your starter for 10..."
  • Character Tics: Gail Trimble was noted for smiling and flicking her hair every time she got a starter right (which was a lot), another contestant would take a drink of water every time he buzzed-in correctly, and the unfortunate Jacob Funnell got told off by Paxman for adopting a pose resembling Rodin's The Thinker whenever he was conferring.
  • Contestants Are Geniuses: The questions are really, really difficult. Of course, it appears that some contestants actually are geniuses, given how much they can get right.
  • Curb Stomp Battle: Corpus Christi, Oxford vs. the University of Exeter in 2009, although that officially doesn't count (see Downer Ending below). The same year, Manchester defeated Lincoln, Oxford.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Jeremy Paxman.
  • Downer Ending: Corpus Christi, Oxford won the 2008-09 contest under the leadership of the famously incredibly knowledgeable Gail Trimble, but were disqualified for fielding an ineligible player in the final. Said player apparently put down the date his course was going to end on the entry sheet, but none of the producers questioned the fact that it ended before the competition. Furthermore, the 2008 and 2004 winning teams had one ineligible player each, but no one got disqualified on either of those. This led to all sorts of controversy over the ambiguity of the rules and annoyance at the producers, with whom the responsibility to check these things lies. It wasn't a particularly happy ending for the Manchester team who were given the title instead, as one of them commented that they didn't really feel like they'd won.
  • Fan Nickname: "Bamber Gasmask" for Bamber Gascoigne.
  • Insufferable Genius: A surprisingly popular view of Gail Trimble. Also, George Woudhuysen, captain of the 2009-10 St. John's Oxford team was considered this by a lot of people, probably primarily due to his habit of nodding to his teammates when he got something right.
  • Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jeremy Paxman may be a tad on the belligerent side, but he's usually pretty good about consoling the teams who lose and is apparently a fairly welcoming guy in person.
  • Level Five Onix: Despite being supposedly the United Kingdom's top universities, Oxford and Cambridge teams can be anywhere from astoundingly knowledgeable to utterly hopeless. For years the lowest score achieved under Paxman was by New Hall, Cambridge (35 points), and since the 2009 Corpus Christi, Oxford vs. Exeter match doesn't count, the lowest under Paxman is Lincoln College, Oxford (30 points) against Manchester in 2009.
    • You say that... it was a semi-final
  • Long Runners: Just look at the dates above.
  • Market-Based Title: The format is a fairly straight import of the US College Bowl, but both of those words have particular meanings in the US that they don't have in the UK.
  • The Mean Brit: Yes, it's a British show, but Jeremy Paxman's famous grumpiness and snark in the direction of the contestants and sometimes the questions has to be mentioned on this page, and he's usually too excitable to really count as a Deadpan Snarker.
  • Nerds Are Sexy: The (in?)famous Gail Trimble was asked to pose for a lad's mag (she respectfully declined). The show has had quite a few good-looking contestants over the years, and more recently Alex Guttenplan of Emmanuel College Cambridge and Gilead Amit of Imperial College managed to become sex symbols with their exceptional skill.
  • Oxbridge: Always fairly prominent in the competition.
  • Parody Names: There have been many, many parodies of the show, and about 90% of them use the same parody name - "Universally Challenged".
  • Repeat What You Just Said: An amusing exchange from the 2007 Manchester vs. Wadham College Oxford match.

Jeremy Paxman: Which distribution emits a probability density function f(x) equals 1 over square root of 2π times e to the power of minus x squared divided by 2?[1]
Manchester Team Captain (deliberately): Could you repeat the question?
Paxman: NO!

(describing a picture of George W. Bush and his dog) The dog's the one on the right.
(to a team that had been messing up a bonus round on the theories of Marshall MacLuhan) You've confirmed what I thought: nobody reads this nonsense anymore.

  • Unexpectedly Obscure Answer: Not really unexpected, as the difficulty of these questions is basically the point. Occasionally, though, Paxman will comment that he doesn't know how the contestants are expected to know a certain answer.
  • Who Writes This Crap?: It has been noted that Paxman is often rather disparaging about certain questions (mainly the ones on popular culture, or those which require him to read out long explanations that he plainly doesn't understand himself). More recently, he's taken to mocking the two-wins-to-progress structure employed at the quarter-final stage.
  • Writer Revolt: More like contestant revolt. In 1975, a Manchester team including David Aaronovitch protested at the ruling allowing multiple Oxbridge colleges to enter the same competition (each can field up to five teams) by answering every question with the name of a revolutionary figure ("Trotsky", "Karl Marx", "Lenin", or "Che Guevara") in the hope of rendering the show unbroadcastable.
    • There was also the incident where a New Hall, Cambridge contestant protested that the question should have been worded "what is it for?", not "what is it?" as the literal answer to the latter is "an oak leaf", whereas the question writer's intended answer was what the oak leaf sign signified.
    • Questioning of the given answer has occurred at least a couple more times besides.
    • The Manchester team mentioned above failed in stopping the show being broadcast, and said edition went down in history as one of the more memorable moments. They did, however, succeed in getting their University effectively banned from the show for at least a decade.
  1. ↑ The answer is the (standard) normal, or Gaussian, distribution.
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