Every once in a while, being Jeremy Paxman really pays off: this week’s semi-finals of University Challenge, in which the furiously intense Eric Monkman finally saw off the outrageously engaging Bobby Seagull, was one such moment. “I will say only that you guys – all of you, of whatever gender – are very, very clever,” said Paxo, regretfully bringing the epic contest – a Batman v Superman-level engagement, according to Twitter – to a close.
Monkman and Seagull had their first on-air clash in November last year, though were tweeting one another gracious compliments while the show was being broadcast (it’s filmed some months in advance). They carried on their public-forum bromance as each appeared against other teams, so that by the time they met again for the semi-final, they were University Challenge’s It Couple. But the main thing about them both is that they are very, very clever. If Sandi Toksvig had said it, it would have had more loveliness; Stephen Fry would have delivered it with a trace of unreadable irony (wait, what – are they clever? They are, right?). To hear Paxman, a study in scorn, audibly impressed, however, is like the sun coming out on the entire nation.
Monkman, a Canadian economics student, had the look of an introvert, coaxed into the spotlight by his love of knowledge. Seagull, meanwhile, is sheer extrovert. “I struggle when there aren’t people around,” he told me on the phone. “The thing that scares me the most is the sound of silence.” Monkman immediately became the fans’ favourite at the moment of victory, but the truth is that they were pretty much equally irresistible, for their facial expressions (Monkman) and zesty gesticulations (Seagull) as much as for the sheer volume of their expertise.
The pleasure of watching competition play out on a person’s face – the desperate struggle for the answer, the mad joy when it’s caught – is something you only get in a few situations: quizzes, maybe Bake Off. In all other sports, the players are too far away. Even in less exciting University Challenge years, without the Monkman/Seagull frenemy dynamic, contestants become icons, precisely because they’re not trying to charm: they’re just trying to remember who provided the vocals for a song that probably came out before their parents were born. (This example, of course, comes from the magnificently eccentric gurning of Oscar Powell, who contributed to a Peterhouse, Cambridge victory in last year’s final by a margin you might call effortless if you hadn’t been able to see every scintilla of effort working its way through Powell’s facial muscles like a tortured caterpillar).
But the appeal of University Challenge, and the TV quiz in general, is only partly that empathic swell: there’s also a fair amount of awe. Cutting the quizmaster off is the holy grail – the year before last, Ted Loveday leapt in with “hapax legomenon”, the Greek term for “said only once”, before Paxman had reached his full stop; then someone on Twitter got this made into a cushion, Loveday’s face on one side, hapax legomenon on the other: it had to be memorialised, even though there is nothing on either side of that cushion that makes you want to sit down.
Loveday was always keen to stress how much quizzing was like any other sport, that skill was nothing without reflexes. I was once the subject of a University Challenge question – which mode of transport did the journalist so-and-so once describe as “the endpoint of Cartesian perfection?” – and, from my sofa, I still wasn’t fast enough for Jeremy (it’s a bicycle (the contestant said Concorde (this is the worst humble brag ever, but somehow, in a quiz context, bragging doesn’t matter (although, granted, I wasn’t in the quiz so bragging still does matter (sod it! I was a question on University Challenge!))))).
Next week, two good friends... pic.twitter.com/BJN1qQn5ch
— Eric Monkman (@e_monkman) March 20, 2017
But particular admiration is reserved for the quizzer who can answer before the question has been asked – Seagull’s face, when he said “cultural hegemony” when Paxman had only got to the “Antonio” of the Italian Marxist Gramsci, spurred the BBC to tweet: “Is this the happiest University Challenge contestant ever?”, to which the answer is, of course, yes, until the next person to get a thing right. Quizzing is very culturally relatable: OK, some people know what it is to score a goal, but everybody has been in a pub, once, and felt the mad dopamine rush of putting their hands on the name Shola Ama, against all human odds.
“It’s a peculiar British thing,” Seagull says. “Eric’s back in Canada, and he says they don’t quite understand quizzing there. Whereas in the UK, we have pub quizzes, work quizzes. University Challenge is the pinnacle of quiz shows, but there are so many.” Indeed: broadcasting being what it is, there’s always some bright button trying to fancy up the format – a quiz with celebrities, with more celebrities, with celebrities who are pretty, a quiz with questions that aren’t hard but have a lot of money attached, which makes everything 10 times harder. And yet the most successful are still those in which the questions are tough and the contestants are tougher – University Challenge or, for the country’s nerd-ultras, Brain of Britain.
But Monkman versus Seagull was about more than the answers: they had this unlikely friendship, and Monkman liked to tweet pictures of them in bro-hugs looking like pen pals or released prisoners of war. The real charm of the ultimate quizzer is that he or she is extraordinary without the usual warrior-fanfare that comes with it. Monkman knows quite literally everything; Seagull is a polymath and lay philosopher who was a trader at Lehmann’s before leaving to become a maths teacher-evangelist, because he decided that that would be more socially valuable. Almost because Google has rendered the human memory obsolete, the quest of a rare elite for perfect recall seems to me to be even more noble, and to gather nobler people to it.
