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The Fountain | Autumn 2014 | Issue 19
Trinity University Challenge
By Claire Hall (2011)
University Challenge has had a number of memorable moments – from the energetic buzzer technique of Warwick’s Daisy Christodoulou, to the softly-spoken confidence of Emmanuel College’s Alex Guttenplan, to the impressively comprehensive answers of Gail Trimble of Corpus Christi Oxford (later a Research Fellow of Trinity, e2009). The students who do best on the show seem to inspire fervid and sometimes irrational support or dislike in viewers. Ralph Morley, captain of the winning Trinity team of the 2013/14 series, knows how this feels. At the time of writing, my own 2014/15-series team’s first episode is just about to air, and it was with some trepidation that I caught up with Ralph and with Robin Bhattacharyya, captain of the winning team of 1995. ‘Twitter makes all the difference,’ says Ralph, who received a lot of attention on social media during broadcasts of his episodes. ‘People can be sitting there watching in real time, and if they admire or disapprove of something you do, they can comment instantly. I wonder sometimes if they forget that the contestants are real people.’ Robin’s experience was somewhat different. The 1995 series was the first after a seven-year hiatus, and the switchover of presenters from Bamber Gascoigne to Jeremy Paxman resulted in a new and unfamiliar feel, he says. While he was recognised around Cambridge for some time after the final was shown, in an age before social media and before University Challenge had re-established itself as a national institution, the significance of winning seemed, ‘well…it was just a bit of fun, really. We didn’t know what to expect before we went on, or what to make of it when we did win.’ Did they celebrate winning? The teams seem to have had similar experiences – the producers ask contestants not to divulge their victory in case the newspapers pick it up. For both of them,
the final rounds were filmed during term time. Robin says that there was a small party at the studios on the night of the final, but after that he and his team settled straight back into normal Cambridge life. Ralph had an exam the day after the final was filmed. The filming schedule has changed over the years. At the start of Paxman’s tenure, the first-round matches were filmed over the summer and broadcasting started in September. By the time the teams went back to the studios in Manchester for the second and further rounds, they had seen a few of the first-round matches on television. These days, the filming is done in short blocks over March and April, meaning that for Ralph the final was filmed a full year before it was shown. Wasn’t that weird, knowing you’d won for a year without being able to tell anyone? ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘but I suppose you sort of forget about it after a while. Not forget as such, but you know, life moves on.’ Yet Ralph was recognised widely as soon as the series began – everywhere from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence to the McDonalds in Cambridge. ‘That was the weirdest one,’ he laughs. ‘A few of the team were there, and a bloke in the queue came up sheepishly and asked if he could have a photo with me.’ Robin says his one and only experience of signing an autograph came a few days after the final was broadcast. What about the other members of the team – do they stay in touch? Robin’s team, Sean Blanchflower, Kwasi Kwarteng, and Erik Gray, met up in 2002 for a reunion special. ‘It was really nice playing together as a team again – the same, in that we were all our usual competitive selves, but different
because, well, because we’d already done it once, so we could take it less seriously this time around.’ He stays in regular contact with Sean, who was in the same year doing the same subject. I ask him if they knew each other before. ‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘we were supervision partners for a while.’
People can be sitting there watching in real time, and if they admire or disapprove of something you do, they can comment instantly. I wonder sometimes if they forget that the contestants are real people. Ralph’s team, too, had a mixture of people who knew each other and people who didn’t – Ralph, Richard Freeland, and Matthew Ridley were all in the same year, but none of them had ever met Filip Drnovsek-Zorko, in the year above. ‘It was quite strange at the first practice,’ says Ralph, ‘and I suppose I felt it was important that we got to know each other as people as well as getting to know what our strengths and weaknesses were when it came to quiz questions.’ How did they select the teams? Ralph says that his was quite a simple process – the producers had sent a questionpack to the JCR president, which got passed on to him, as he had been selected for the previous year’s team (who didn’t make it to the televised stages). He ran a couple of rounds of trials – I remember them well, Ralph