Jeremy Paxman internet hosting University Challenge (Picture: BBC/ITV Studios/Joseph Scanlon)
It’s one of the daunting, perplexing and intellectually tough quiz reveals on television, with an erudite host champing on the bit to make mincemeat of the contestants.
No, we’re not talking about Only Connect however the grand-daddy of TV brain-melters – the traditional University Challenge.
First broadcast in 1962 with the dapper Bamber Gascoigne as its host, it vanished from our screens in 1987 solely to be revived in 1994 with Jeremy Paxman presiding.
The former Newsnight man’s impatient exasperation has been a TV fixture since, able to lowering the sharpest thoughts to quivering jelly.
Eric Monkman, Bobby Seagull and Gail Trimble are merely among the traditional contestants who’ve given just about pretty much as good as they’ve gotten.
But there have been a great deal of others who’ve limped away from the BBC studios licking their wounds.
How any groups scored no factors in any respect?
Given how tough among the questions are, you’d have thought the reply may very well be throughout the lots of.
Surprisingly, although, only one group is thought to have scored an enormous fats zero.
That ignominious dishonour belongs to the University of Reading, who have been trounced 240 factors to nothing by Keble College Oxford within the BBC present’s 2017 Christmas particular.
The group wasn’t made up of scholars, nonetheless, however of celebrities who had beforehand studied on the Berkshire establishment.
The group comprised of broadcaster Pippa Greenwood, Springwatch presenter Martin Hughes-Games, anthropologist Anna Machin and Sophie Walker, the then-leader of the Women’s Equality Party.
And they’d been doing fairly properly as much as that time, having coasted by their opening spherical earlier than narrowly beating the University of London within the semi-final.
Have any scholar groups scored zero?
No scholar groups have scored zero within the Jeremy Paxman period, although Exeter got here shut in 2009 when it completed 1 / 4 remaining with simply 15 factors.
The group that beat them went on to win the sequence, solely to have their victory erased when it emerged one among their members had completed their research whereas the sequence was filmed.
It’s believed a group from the University of Sussex fared even worse within the early Seventies, ending a Bamber Gascoigne-chaired version with a lowly 10.
There was additionally an version in 1975 {that a} University of Manchester group intentionally got down to sabotage by answering each query with the identify of a socialist revolutionary or iconic superstar.
The stunt – a protest in opposition to the perceived over-representation of Oxford and Cambridge schools – led to Manchester being banned from the competition for the following 4 years.
When is University Challenge on?
The present sequence of the present runs on Monday nights at 8:30pm, with Only Connect previous it at 8pm.
Earlier this yr Paxman mentioned he would proceed to current the present ‘as long as they’ll have me’ after revealing he had been recognized with Parkinson’s.
Warwick University have been topped champions of the final sequence following a tense remaining with Magdalene College, Cambridge in April.
Credit: Original article published here.You can learn this submit on My Celebrity Life.