At eight o’clock one Sunday morning last March I was lying in the back of a people carrier, Gaja single-vineyard 1988 Barbaresco still coursing through my veins, trying to catch up on sleep while being driven from the far south west of England to its northern hub, Granada television studios in Manchester.
The previous night’s dinner – with just the 10 wines – had been the culmination of the wine weekend at Gidleigh Park hotel in Devon which spawned the Classic Supertuscans from great vintages tasting notes last April. What lay ahead was the almost certain prospect of humiliation in front of several million of my fellow countrymen.
There are two programmes of totemic social significance in Britain. To appear on Desert Island Discs, choosing favourite records during a radio amble through your life, shows that you have arrived. To agree to appear on University Challenge, the television general knowledge quiz a bit like America’s College Bowl, demonstrates all too precisely that you are an idiot.
Until very recently in its 35–year history, University Challenge was just that: teams of spotty students, half-baked adults cocooned in the semi-reality of college life, competing against each other and astounding those of us watching at home with their knowledge of particle physics and eighth century Arab poets. More recently however the producers have started to recruit fully-formed, recognisable contestants who will have to carry the weight of a dismal performance throughout the rest of their working lives, professional teams representing, say, Oxford University Press and the British Library, last year’s finalists in University Challenge – The Professionals.
I was roped in when the Institute of Masters of Wine decided to risk all the breathalyser jokes and enter a team, and the MW who appointed himself captain dragooned me on to it. The first step is to answer a set of written questions at home. These were almost on a par with ‘Who wrote Pride and Prejudice?’, so not too great a hurdle. Which probably explained why quite so many would-be teams of four from various professions and institutions were assembled at LWT’s studios in London early this year and given a very much more difficult set of taped questions. Teams from the likes of The Barbican and Debrett’s had to sit round the boardroom table – well mingled please, no conferring – trying to ignore the stunning view of the City over the Thames while concentrating on a disembodied voice barking quite stupendously difficult questions at us every few seconds.
This was so chastening an experience that I hardly took any notice when we four were routinely quizzed immediately after the test, just in case we were to be invited to appear, about what our special subjects were (tasting wine), how had we put our team together (good question), how much we had practised (not at all), why we wanted to compete (uncertainty plus residual exhibitionism), and whether we were free on their various recording weekends.
The next thing I knew was being rung by a Granada producer who I’m sure was attracted by the fact that I had in my time been a television presenter so there was a chance that at least one per cent of the audience might recognise me. But surely my performance at the second written test had been terminally execrable? “Oh I don’t know. You got about a quarter of them right,” she said brightly.
And then there was the small problem of being in entirely the wrong part of the country the night before the recording in the wilds of Dartmoor up almost unnavigable country lanes. No problem! John the driver would find me and speed me up the M5 to Manchester. I was worried that John the driver would never find me and so ended up emailing directions to the worrying address [email protected].
As it happened, the star who had been in my car the day before had been the famously chain smoking Coronation Street diva Julie Goodyear, so John’s people carrier was festooned with little swinging Christmas trees gamely doing their best to cover up the evidence.
But the surreality only deepened when we eventually got to Manchester and the studios. Yes, Dale Winton is orange. And very tall. But now who’s this? Rolf Harris and Billy Connolly and – can it really be? – the Queen and Britney Spears, all sitting having lunch together in the Granada canteen. Yes, this was a lookalike show, being recorded at the same time as our episode of University Challenge. They all thought the Jeremy Paxman lookalike was particularly convincing. [Paxman is the notoriously savage presenter of UC.]
I was shown into a very cramped green room at more or less the same time as my team mates, who had converged from various parts of southern England, only to see more familiar faces. But surely this Jim Naughtie and Ed Stourton were not imposters? Oh crikey, we’re up against the presenters of the Today programme, the landmark daily BBC radio news show with the ever-reliable Caroline Quinn and obviously super-brainy political correspondent Ian Watson.
Well at least they, as guardians of the nation’s intellect, had more to lose than us four winos, and they were looking rather worried, I’m delighted to say, with lots of desperate leafing through the Sunday papers for last-minute tips and “Who’s the prime minister of Canada again?”
We were too nervous for late training. Besides there was a bit of a technical. Every one of us, English wine expert and captain Stephen Skelton plus Jasper Morris of Berry Bros and Nick Sowicz (who had played on the same college cricket team but hardly seen each other since) and I, had without any consultation turned up in a sky blue shirt – hardly perfect for UC’s frenetic blue abstract backdrop. It was easy for me to change as I had my Gidleigh Park gear with me but Stephen and Nick had to be lent shirts from the Granada wardrobe.
That sorted, we did a bit of conferring. Nick told us he’d worked out what tactics were needed to win. “Win?” The three of us rounded on him as one. We didn’t want to have to go through all this again. Wouldn’t a respectable second place be preferable? I would love to say that we had sufficient command of what went on to dictate our performance with this amount of precision but of course it was not like that.
added 21 jun: At one point they deliberately fed us a series of wine questions, but I can assure you that while they may have been loosely about wine, they were not wine questions as known to MW examiners. What they revealed was that we were shockingly ignorant about the Bible – although Stephen showed surprising and useful detailed knowledge of various Head Scouts, I turned out to know a little more about canals than I’d realised, and our tame scientist Nick also seems to be an expert on linguistics. Jasper laboured under the major disadvantage of never ever having seen the programme.
We got off to a terribly slow start, finally got the hang of it and were twice in the lead. But, phew, the journalists came back – not least by answering questions about tennis players and the God of our household Sir Alex Ferguson. I was just pipped on that one by Jim Naughtie – honest. I think the final scores were something like 145 to Today, 120 to us MWs, one of whom kept making the most terrible faces as she tried to get those brain cells working.
We spent most of the train journey home sipping Grosset Riesling from paper cups and going through all the answers we knew and would happily have shouted at the tv screen at home but just didn’t have quite the guts and reactions to press the buzzer for in the studio. It is of course that fear of making a fool of oneself, and incurring a withering Paxman putdown (a particular threat for his fellow members of the BBC news team, I would imagine), that puts those vital extra seconds between brain and finger.
So, our trip north is, thank goodness, not to be repeated for a second round. But we all have our name-strips as souvenirs. ROBINSON (Masters of Wine) is usefully exactly the same width as a lavatory.
