Has there ever been a more hotly anticipated final? And not just for #Monkmania’s last hurrah, but for the meeting of two teams whose near-omniscience over the course of the series has been genuinely startling – even for University Challenge.
In the light-blue corner, Wolfson College, Cambridge had grounds for optimism going into the final, having previously beaten Balliol in a close quarter-final. (Due to the quarter-finals system, which host Jeremy Paxman never tires of calling “Byzantine”, each team plays for best of three.) Captain Eric Monkman probably needs no introduction, having generated such ardent levels of admiration that fans have reportedly stalked him in the street, and declared to love him more than their own children. Not only has Monkman’s devoted fandom propelled him on to appearances on BBC’s The One Show and Radio 4’s Profile, but he’s also been forced to admit to the press that he doesn’t consider himself an object of desire. No pressure, then…
In the dark blue corner, Balliol College, Oxford had coasted to the final with absurd ease. Barring their earlier loss to Wolfson, they won all their previous matches by impressive margins, seemingly never needing to hear the second half of a question. Captain Joey Goldman has perfected the art of correctly answering a question before Paxman has even begun to ask it. Goldman has come under fire for throwing “serious sass” whenever he gets a question wrong – the Telegraph have ruthlessly nicknamed him “Harry Potter, the angry years” – but he seems to me a thoroughly decent guy whose brain just happens to work 16 times faster than the rest of us.
In the end, a formidable Balliol triumphed over Wolfson with a comfortable 190 points to 140. It was a nail-bitingly close match, with Balliol only pulling ahead in the final five minutes. While Wolfson were aided by the inimitable Monkman’s breadth of knowledge, Balliol perhaps had the stronger team overall – captain Goldman’s impressive performance was equalled by that of his exemplary wingman in astrophysics student Benjamin Pope.
It was Pope who took first blood for Balliol, with a well-timed answer on Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. Balliol took the full set of bonuses, before Monkman fought back with a starter question on the Magic Flute. Wolfson’s Chaudhri built on this early success with an excellent buzz on quarks in Finnegans Wake, giving Wolfson the lead.
Ten minutes in, Wolfson retained the lead at 65-40, before two incorrect buzzes in a row from Monkman allowed Balliol’s Potts to take a starter. The bonuses on cosmology gave Balliol the lead – which Pope capitalised on with another fantastic buzz on the Poincaré conjecture.
Wolfson weren’t giving up yet, with Chaudhri spotting the distinctive tones of Bertrand Russell from a snippet of his 1948 Reith Lecture, and singlehandedly picking up the bonuses on fellow Reith lecturers, bringing the scores level.
At the halfway mark, Wolfson pulled ahead, but were dealt a tough set of bonuses on obscure languages and ISO codes. A few incorrect interruptions from Monkman, coupled with an incredible four starters in a row from Goldman, cemented Balliol’s lead, and at the gong they had sailed to a secure win by 50 points.
It may be that Monkman’s several incorrect buzzes lost Wolfson the final – for which the nation will doubtless be in mourning. But Balliol have put in consistently faultless performances, and it was a very deserved win for them.
The only blot on the evening’s copybook was that this was, once again, a match played between eight men – is University Challenge the only BBC panel show without a female quota? That said, I’m sure I’m not the only one to have been irritated by the cringingly hypocritical media coverage of female contestants of late. It’s hardly surprising that teams still struggle to recruit more women to audition when the tabloid press simultaneously bash the programme for gender ratios, while issuing panting copy about contestants such as Corpus Christi’s Emma Johnson. If I see another headline containing the bafflingly obsolete epithet “brains AND beauty!” I shall scream.
But these thoughts were laid aside when, in a departure from University Challenge tradition, the trophy was presented, not in the studio, but in the wood-panelled interiors of Cambridge’s Gonville and Caius College – by none other than Stephen Hawking. Both Balliol and Wolfson should feel proud of their immensely knowledgeable performances – even if, as they toasted their success over fireside glasses of port, Professor Hawking quipped that “I have said in the past that it is not clear whether intelligence has any long-term survival value – bacteria multiply and flourish without it.”
