The team from Balliol College Oxford have an exceptional challenge to face in the final of University Challenge on Monday: not the contemptuous sympathy for fallibility of host Jeremy Paxman, but the gritted teeth parting to snap out an answer even before the question is complete of Wolfson College Cambridge captain, the Canadian Eric Monkman.
In the semi-final against Emmanuel College, Cambridge, Monkman scored 120 of his team’s 170 points, answering 18 of all the 45 correctly answered questions, including almost half the 10-point starter questions.
Monkmania is rampant on Twitter, with followers expressing passion for a fine brain, retweeting posts such as “I love him more than my children”, or declaring “we now know God walks among men”.
On Instagram, one user triumphantly revealed that her boyfriend stalked Monkman in Bath, running after him in the street and asking for a selfie “because my girlfriend loves you”. “I really do,” she added, “he’s a hero and an inspiration.”
Monkman himself – who has been job hunting in Canada since he graduated with a masters in economics – is bemused by the fuss. He told the Telegraph: “I certainly don’t think of myself as any object of desire. I assume people are being ironic, not serious. I think they’re just trying to be funny.”
Bobby Seagull, a friend and admirer of Monkman despite being a member of the Emmanuel Cambridge team that lost in the semi-finals, tweeted that the final will be “unmissable”.
Until the rise of Monkmania, the Balliol captain Joey Goldman, studying philosophy and theology, had been regarded as probably the cleverest of this year’s clever clogs. He also had the nerve to answer back, muttering “whatever” when awarded Paxman’s sneer for getting a question on British actors wrong. A Twitter user reacted with incredulity and alarm: “Did Goldman just ANSWER BACK to Paxman?! RIP Goldman u r wiv da angles now.”
Balliol reached the finals by beating Edinburgh by 215 to 140, a performance Paxman described as “terrific”. Their college has made it to the finals twice before, in 1964 and 1974, but lost on both occasions.
As Monkman’s team charged up through the early rounds, and his fame grew, BBC Radio 4 ran a profile of Monkman, “a new hero”, celebrating him as a knowledgeable individual at a time when the public is apparently deeply suspicious of experts. His older sister Katie, a doctor like both their parents, said fondly of her brother, a Latin-speaking expert on ancient Egypt by the age of eight: “I wouldn’t describe him as crazy – eccentric maybe.”
Monkman told the Cambridge News: “People really seemed to have responded to my appearance in a way I didn’t expect, which was a huge surprise for me.”
- The final of University Challenge will be broadcast on BBC2 on Monday 10 April
