Here are a few edited extracts from the shows:

All the starters I got right

Paxman getting impatient

A series of unfortunate incidents

Ivan’s starters

Pete’s starters

Oli’s starters

The Comeback

End of the road
The long story which began more than three years ago was finally coming to an end, and we’d made it right to the final hurdle. Would we trip, or was national glory really in our grasp? I could hardly believe we’d made it as far as we had and spent most of [...]

Under pressure
We stared disaster in the face in this round. Manchester had done quite well in previous rounds - in both the first and second rounds they were the only team to score more than us. But their performances were largely a one man effort, whereas ours had come as a result of team-wide ability. [...]

Back to the Travel Inn
There was an inordinately long three month break before the final weekend of filming, and autumn was becoming winter when we headed up to Manchester for our third and final visit to Granada studios. And this would be our last trip - the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final would all be filmed [...]

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 [...]

Preparations
We did not take our responsibility as representatives of our university lightly. Training, discipline, dedication, and total mental focus would be required. With that in mind, we bought a copy of ‘Time Out’ and looked up pub quizzes, and on finding that the Prince of Wales in Highgate was reckoned to host the hardest quiz [...]

Ivan ‘Plank’ Polancec
A fellow reject from the abortive 2002 effort, Ivan’s surname became his nickname via a confused spell-checker. Ivan’s specialist subjects were cricket and popes, on both of which his knowledge was supreme. But take away this man’s tobacco and Rizlas and it only takes about 20 minutes for him to collapse into a [...]

November 2001. I enter UCL’s selection process to pick the team for legendary quiz show University Challenge. Despite having been at the university for 5 years and always having been excessively sure of my phenomenal recall of pointless trivia, this is the first time I’ve got around to entering. Unfortunately, after I get through the [...]