A Dream Come True

If one thing has remained a constant in my life it has been a love of the odd fact, of general knowledge and of quizzes. When I was six, I loved leafing through the World Book Encyclopedia which my parents had purchased for me - I even attempted reading it from A t0 Z and got as far as AC before running out of steam. One of my favourite pastimes was regaling all and sundry about the latest bit of interesting information I had come across - one story related by my parents was how I intimidated my dad's Phd supervisor by quizzing him relentlessly about US Presidents, which I had randomly become interested in. This love of quizzes, has found expression in the odd pub quiz here in Oxford, not to mention my two year involvement in quizzing in the University. And of course there is the small matter of a certain gameshow that I appeared in. But one of the ultimate dreams has always been to appear on University Challenge, which is one of the most prestigious gameshows in the UK and in the world. UC for those who have been living in a cave for the past half century, is a competition betweeen all the different Universities in the UK (and the seperate colleges in the case of Oxford and Cambridge) and has a reputation for having some of the most difficult and obscure questions imaginable. It is definitely one of the most prestigious gameshows in the UK, widely watched and with a long tradition, and it has always been a dream for me to get onto the show. On Tuesday, that dream came true.

I had been told at the interviews the week before that they would call either on Monday and Tuesday to tell us if we were going to be on the show. Even from the beginning, I knew that it was always going to be a difficult ask. On average, about 200 teams apply for the show and at the interview stage they said that they were choosing the top 28 teams from over 100, so that left us with a one in four chance that we could progress. I was definitely apprehensive after the 40 questions they set us in the qualifying round, which though tough, were pretty fair. There were the usual ones that left you going "I should have known that!", and others where you just went "That was piss easy!" - as they say in quizzing there are no easy or difficult questions, only ones you happen to know or don't know. I did have cause for immense frustration about one question though - it asked what was the largest of the Dodecanese Islands. It just so happened that I was reading a book about the Versailles peace conference called The Peacemakers, and I was at the chapter regarding Italy's territorial claims during the conference. After the test, I went back to my room, and found on the next page, just a few sentences from where Ihad previously stopped, the following words: "in return Italy agreed to give up the Dodecanese Islands, including Rhodes, which was the most important one". You guessed it - the answer to the UC question was of course Rhodes! How frustrating is that? But that is the way it is with quizzing, with such an unlimited pool to draw from, one can never tell what it going to come up.