After returning from celebrations of Guy Fawkes' 'burning at the stake' (as David Walliams put it to Shakira on the Paul O'Grady Show) I caught the very entertaining Wonderland: I Won University Challenge documentary on the Beeb last night. Come the end credits I imagined I'd overheard the producers at their breakfast meeting:
Hey, let's do a doc on University Challenge winners. Just make sure we get loads of misfits to snigger at. You know, potty eccentrics, sad loners and underachievers. Oh, and don't forget the obligatory supernerd who thinks Homer's some sort of writer and who knows all about the Pubic Wars but hasn't a clue what a toothbrush is. Classic.
Whilst not all those who were featured appeared to be tinged with some regret about the effect their bulging brains have had on their lives they seemed to make up the majority of partici(smarty)pants, and the general thrust was that of a warning about the possible dangers of intellectual intelligence backed up by some fun quotes that punctuated throughout:
"An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools" - Ernest Hemingway
Not bad as far as excuses go I suppose. Unfortunately the captain of 2003's winning Birkbeck team, Tony Gillham, must have attended a Jester's Ball on the night before one appearance as he confessed to having necked 16 double rum and blacks. Or perhaps he'd taken Garfield Sobers as his inspiration. Whatever the case, it seemed not to impair his ability to captain Birkbeck to the finals and receive the winners' trophy from Zephaniah without dropping it. I remember watching that. Little did I know how much he'd sozzled his way there.
One of his team mates who also featured was Thor Halland, a slightly-less-eccentric-than-though-similar-in-appearance-to-Boris-Johnson type (well it's difficult to imagine a more eccentric one isn't it? Wiff Waff.) Thor was shown answering some laughably easy first-round questions on Pub Quiz (Gamesnegg-hosted) after which he mused about intelligent professional suit types looking down on weird intelligence. [What? You don't know that the Amstrad CPC 464 came out before the Sharp MZ 2500. I don't know.]
Later in the programme Thor was shown playing Pub Quiz again where one of the answers he hit and called out was The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Slightly less recognisable I'd say than The Cooper Temple Clause so perhaps he was approaching the quid there. He then had a couple of lines about various illegal drugs he'd taken in his early twenties in a bid to calm his brain down. LSD probably wasn't the wisest choice.
Using search-engine skills that another former contestant (see below) so clearly lacks I discovered that a year ago Thor had an entry in Wikipedia until a bunch of Wikipedians noted that he was 'staggeringly non-notable' and deleted him in Cybermen fashion. (There's one comment on that deletion thread regarding University Challenge contestants I found to be a little below the belt, so to speak. :lol
. Still, as long as all the serial killers and reality TV show tits have Wikipedia entries then all is in check. With a tip to irony Thor might appreciate an entry in the Content-Free Encyclopedia instead.Another former winner who was of particular note was Francis Lambert. Describing himself as 'moderately donnishly dotty' it seemed that not even earning himself a place in the Guinness Book of Records with the highest score on Mastermind could prevent him from lamenting the fact that he could have achieved more in his academic career. (No doubt Toxteth O'Grady would turn up his nose at such a viewpoint.)
The forlorn Francis seemed to take some solace when he wistfully informed us, "I am on Google, so there you are." Then the hilarity began as he proceeded to locate something about himself on the internet:
I'm typing in my name. I'm in the Google section ....
Protestant reformer, born .... not that ....
Open People Directory, what the fuck's that?
I used to be on this ... I seem to have vanished but there you are.
Moderately donnishly dotty indeedy.
If ever a TV programme was made that would make philistined folk bask smugly in their (un(der-brain))contented ignorance this is a fine contender.
Personally I think this lot should be looking on the bright side - at least they didn't squashed by a giant eclair.
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