‘Full of agonising near-misses’ – the University Challenge final, reviewed by last year’s winner

Amol Rajan was harsh, Miriam Margolyes was thoroughly charming – and the teens watching will have been screaming at the screen. Last year’s Christ’s College captain lets rip on this year’s tense set-to A new chapter in the history of Anglo-Scottish rivalry has been written with the broadcast of this year’s University Challenge final. After 36 episodes featuring 28 institutions, only Edinburgh and Manchester were left standing (giving the northernmost average location of any final pair since Bamber Gascoigne hosted the show in the 1980s!). Given their equal average score across their previous matches, the final was set to be a tense and thrilling affair. It began cagily, as both teams waited until Amol Rajan had read the entirety of the first question before guessing, incorrectly, the dedicatee of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (in fact it was the French diplomat Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord). That dead question was a rare exception, though. Rajan had barely begun the next starter – on the largest time zone difference in a single land border – before Manchester captain Kai Madgwick buzzed in with the correct answer (China and Afghanistan). Edinburgh responded immediately; Rayhana Amjad named Indian theoretical physicist SN Bose as the author of a 1924 paper on light quanta, while the ever-dapper Johnny Richards identified a donkey as the animal star of 2022 film EO. An entertaining picture round – on flags criticised by the Good Flag, Bad Flag guide – yielded a starter but no bonuses for the Mancunians, who trailed by 30 points to 45. Continue reading...

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