It’s a return to the Prince of Wales after a long absence for me, Stu and Oli tonight, and surely the omens are good as it’s just over four years since we first turned up here, and just under four years since we filmed our first round of University Challenge. As always, I turn up late, but I redeem myself slightly by knowing that the artist originally known as Richard Melville Hall is the high prince of middle class coffee table music, Moby.

After the first two rounds, we’re in third place. We do quite spectacularly badly on the beer round, though, struggling to two correct answers out of six. We somehow manage to care about the tie break anyway, arguing far more furiously than is possibly justifiable over how many episodes of Frasier there were. We are close to the answer but some other bastards get the beer.

I like the third round the best, because it includes some questions about Formula One. I believe my knowledge of it is unsurpassed - in an episode of Mastermind I happened to watch a few weeks ago, it was someone’s specialist subject and I outscored them by five points. The first Pole on pole (nice question) was Robert Kubica, and the Singapore Grand Prix this year will be unusual because it will be run at night, thanks to another hare-brained scheme from midget Machiavelli of motorsport, Bernie Ecclestone. Sadly, Formula One questions are rare at the Prince of Wales, while cricket questions are unpleasantly common.

We think we’re in third place at the start of round four, but we have probably miscounted because when the final scores are read out, we’re in the horrors of fourth place, the legendary “just outside the money”. It’s an inauspicious return to Highgate. We’ll hope for better things next week.

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