Warwick defeated in Uni Challenge

Warwick have been knocked out of the 2009-2010 University Challenge competition.

The team, which comprised Robin Stevens (team captain), Matthew Smalley, Christopher Christmas and Ty Hayes were competing against Jesus College, Oxford and lost by only a very small margin; The final score was 170 points to Warwick against Jesus’ 200.

Meanwhile, the search to find the team for the 2010-2011 contest has been taking place on campus in the last few weeks and a line-up has now been found.

Team Captain will be James Tucker, a PhD student reading History and his team members will be Tom Hayes, doing a Physics PhD, Laveen Ladharem, a second year History student and James Wheatley, a first year Chemistry undergraduate. The team’s reserve will be David Kitson, who is studying Maths in his final year at Warwick.

James Hall, the Students’ Union Societies Officer, told the Boar that he has high hopes for the 2011 team.

“They’re obviously all incredibly clever to be able to go on the programme and, of course, they’re definitely capable of doing really well. I don’t want to put any pressure on them, though!”

The University has always done well in University Challenge and beat the University of Manchester to the title in 2007.

The competition is hugely prestigious and has been running since 1962, when Bamber Gascoigne hosted the programme; More recently, he has been succeeded by Jeremy Paxman, who now asks the questions.

Hall said that he was greatly pleased with the response to the auditions this year and is pleased to see the number of people keen to be involved with University Challenge. He told the Boar that, “There has been more interest than ever before and the turn out has been absolutely fantastic” and he wishes the team the best of luck for the upcoming filming, which takes place in studios in Manchester.