Daily Archives:December 21st, 2013

Making a fool of oneself on a grand scale

If you’re unfortunate enough not to have anything better to do at 19.45 on Boxing Day, you can watch me make a fool of myself in front of about 4 million people on BBC2.

Christmas University Challenge Gonville & Caius with Jeremy Paxman

I should point out that we were asked to take part in this by the producers; we didn’t volunteer ourselves as being particularly skilled at This Sort of Thing! There was also no selection process, such as often takes place in undergraduate teams, to weed out people like me at an early stage. I went along with it, I must confess, mostly because I was reasonably familiar with the old Television Centre in London but had never been inside the new Media City studios in Salford, and I thought this would be a fun way to see them…

Having said that, I was blessed with really excellent team mates, it was great fun, and overall, we didn’t disgrace ourselves.

More information on the Christmas series can be found here, and the University Challenge iPlayer page is here.

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser