To Manchester again

Before Round Two, we carried on with our pub-based training routine, losing heavily in each of the three weeks we went. Losing at the Prince of Wales had worked very well before the Warwick game, and was fast becoming an important part of our preparations. Feeling confident, we headed up to Manchester for a second time. Journeys on non-smoking trains were always an ordeal for UCL Polancec, but this time I shared that ordeal when the terrifying announcement was made that no hot drinks were available. I got steadily more anxious as we headed north, and by the time we reached Manchester, my caffeine levels were dangerously low. Luckily we were not playing until the following morning.

We stocked up excessively on carbohydrates with the complementary Travel Inn breakfast, and for a while I was worried I’d fall asleep during the game. Luckily, adrenaline picked me up a bit, and after the usual poncing about in make-up and getting our clothes approved, we headed in to the studio. To our slight consternation we were on the other side to where we had been in our previous game, giving us a whole different view of the studio, and a bell sound instead of a honk when we buzzed. Fortunately, we were not badly affected by this, and settled down to face our second-round opponents, the University of East Anglia. They’d been disarmingly friendly in the green room beforehand, but we all knew that once we were on set, we’d no longer see human beings across the studio floor – just enemies.

Frantic buzzing

Once again we lost the little warm-up pre-match, but this didn’t daunt us. The quiz started off noticeably more cerebrally than the previous round, with a question about Wittgenstein. Ivan got us going with that one. UEA then psyched me out a bit when they buzzed in ridiculously early on a question about actresses who had played Miss Marple, and we were taking nothing for granted. We traded answers fairly evenly, and by the first picture round the scores were close.

Luckily the picture round was geography again, as we were required to identify an island from a picture of the southern half of it. It was Manhattan, and I buzzed in for it before anyone else. We then had to identify three districts of Manhattan which were highlighted. For the first one, Pete listened to all our suggestions before ignoring them and saying Soho, which was the right answer.

The first round had seemed to be over in about 45 seconds, but this one, to me at least, seemed like it lasted for hours and hours. I never felt like we were pulling away very much, but after about a day and half filming was interrupted for technical reasons. We were leading 175-75, and I allowed myself to feel a little bit confident. Once filming resumed, we were on to the second picture round, for which we had to name pasta shapes. Ivan buzzed in to identify farfalle. During the bonuses, Oli knew one of the answers but Pete didn’t entirely believe him. On the broadcast Oli could clearly be heard angrily whispering “It’s radiatori. It’s radiatori – I’m not joking, it’s radiatori”. Luckily Pete finally accepted this, and it was the right answer.

Win number two

By now we had passed 200 points, but I was still hugely relieved when the gong went. Up until pretty near the end I’d though UEA could come back at us but we’d managed another convincing win. I’d had a very good round, getting seven starter questions right and equalling Polancec for buzzing speed this time. Our final question before the gong asked for the least-dense planet in the solar system – everyone knew it was Saturn but I got on the buzzer first, and we had 245 points to UEA’s 105. Paxman told UEA that they had never really got going, to which the team of mature students pleaded slower reflexes on the buzzer – shouldn’t enter a buzzer-based quiz then, should they?

We hit the town to celebrate reaching the quarter-finals. UCL had achieved that feat several times before, but had never got any further. Could we break the jinx?

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