My very own controversy

Captain Caroline pointed me towards this story in the Daily Mail about our latest University Challenge match:

Angry viewers have accused Jeremy Paxman of showing favouritism towards Oxbridge teams on BBC2 quiz University Challenge.

Fans of the show have complained that Paxman, who himself went to St Catherine’s College at Cambridge, has been giving the Oxbridge teams an easy ride and openly giving them more encouragement that their less lofty rivals.

This week’s show sparked controversy after the Newsnight presenter was accused off letting off Oxford’s Somerville College for a seemingly incorrect answer.

But when University of Durham also got an answer slightly wrong there was no such leeway.

The Somerville question was about digital radio. They gave the answer “dabs”, when the answer should have been “DAB” (pronounced “dab”). Fine – it’s close enough, and I don’t have any complaints.

Our question was about Romeo and Juliet – we were asked to name the girl with who he was infatuated at the beginning of the play. Rosaline was on the tip of my tongue, but we couldn’t think of it. So we answered, through Caroline, “Rosalind”. Which is wrong. There is a different character in a different play (As You Like It) called Rosalind. He was perfectly right to mark us down.

We won with twice their score. If it was close, or if we thought we were being treated unfairly, we could have asked for them to check the answers. But it was fine with us.

I think – and this is clearly just my opinion – that any bias is so subtle that it is practically non-existant. In fact, I’d have said it was almost the contrary. When certain universities that one might not expect to do terribly well (that is, they’re not Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester, Durham, Edinburgh, OU) actually do, he’s very supportive. There’s one I can think of from this series, certainly, but I can’t really say which. We found him to be scrupulously fair – if the answer was wrong, it was wrong.

Incidentally, this is series 13 of the Paxman era. So far, six series have been won by Oxbridge colleges, six by other unis (says Sean Blanchflower). Can’t say fairer than that.

And I’ve hunted down the “BBC Message Board” that started the whole thing (the Mail journo obviously has far too much time on his hands if he reads the Point of View message boards…): Uni Challenge – *is* JP biased after all? (BBC Points of View).