Fruit Machine Chat

made my day- the I know it all on University Challenge didnt know that one of her team was ineligible for the team, so this handed the title to Manchester.

Apparently the ring er/piece in question only answered 3 questions in the whole show.


I know we could argue that without those 3 qs they wouldnt get the bonus qs after, but,

All that knowledge and not one of them had an ounce of common sense to read the rules.

and when the camera moved into him for his 3 answers the commentator should have said 'Dickhead 0xford' , but then the BBC are oblivious of any wrongdoing anywhere.

steveseagull wrote: All that knowledge and not one of them had an ounce of common sense

apposite. maybe unfair but undeniably apposite.

steveseagull wrote:All that knowledge and not one of them had an ounce of common sense

which is an accurate reflection of university staff in general.

If they really wanted to be fair, they would rerun the whole series. After all, the second best team may have been knocked out by Corpus en route to the final.

The rule is silly - it is only the inordinate length of the competition that leads to members of the initial team having time to graduate, have 2.4 children and die before they finally get to the final. It discriminates against final year students.

It discriminates against anybody who doesn't go to University as well.

It discriminates against anybody who doesn't go to University as well.

Brilliant!!!

roberto la vigna wrote:If they really wanted to be fair, they would rerun the whole series. After all, the second best team may have been knocked out by Corpus en route to the final.

The rule is silly - it is only the inordinate length of the competition that leads to members of the initial team having time to graduate, have 2.4 children and die before they finally get to the final. It discriminates against final year students.

I quite agree with the first point.

As to the second, I can kind of see the rationale for the rule - they want viewers at home, who have little sense of the distinction between live and pre-recorded material, to be confident that the players on screen are still studying as at the date of broadcast.

But they've clearly enforced it very laxly in the past and, as has been discussed elsewhere on the 'net, the precise terms of the rule alleged to have been broken are pretty elusive to pin down. All in all I initially thought the BBC had played things by the book but I now think that the decision looks pretty debatable. All very sad for Corpus as Gail Trimble was certainly the best player of the last 10-15 years on there - an almost perfect fit between her knowledge and the kind of stuff the programme asks IMHO - bet she'd be rubbish on, say, FFQ though. ;-)

From what i understand, the programme used to be filmed in the Autumn then final rounds in the Spring. This meant all contestants would not have graduated until after the filming.
Someone from the great BBC blue sky thinking department changed that a couple of years ago to preliminary round filming in the Spring and the business end being shot in the Autumn. Nobody realised that some of the contestants would have finished their courses by then.

Hmmmm, such a decision has post grad middle management ineptitude written all over it.

I wouldn't see a problem with simply saying they must be bonafide students at the time of the registration for the show. What happens after that irrelevant. It's not as if they'll gain any advantage by not being a student by the time of the later rounds or the broadcast.

Having said that, HAHAHA GUTTED. Manchester was a better team. Perhaps a rule saying no individual player may answer consecutive starter questions.

Undergrads only.

That would've stopped the 40-yr-old ringer from Durham a few years ago too.