Teddy Hall’s University Challenge team take on Clare College in second-round match

8 Dec 2018

The Teddy Hall University Challenge team doing some last-minute revision ahead of filming
The Teddy Hall team doing some last-minute revision ahead of filming, watched over by their chough (the bird in the College crest) mascot

Tune in to BBC 2 this Monday (10 December) at 8:30pm to see the Teddy Hall team compete against Clare College, Cambridge for a place in the quarter-finals of this year’s University Challenge.

The team of four St Edmund Hall undergraduates – captain Freddy Leo (2016, History), Marceline Bresson (2017, Economics and Management), Lizzie Fry (2015, Geography) and Agastya Pisharody (2017, Materials Science) – put in an impressive first-round appearance, beating the University of York with a score of 240 to 105 points. That episode was broadcast over three months ago, back in September, so it has been a long wait to see if the team can progress further!

Captain Freddy Leo shared his thoughts with us about the publicity following the show: “In my experience, the response our first match received from friends, family, and the SEH crowd at large was unanimously positive – it was nice to see how enthusiastic everyone was about it. Responses on Twitter and in media like the Daily Mail were perhaps somewhat more ambiguous, featuring numerous jokes at our expense and also some pretty nasty comments. I myself didn’t mind those directed at me too much – after all, none of the people commenting have ever met me. But I fully understand how someone would be hurt by thoughtless or mean-spirited responses, and I do worry that for some people that might make the whole experience less fun and appealing or even discourage them from trying out for the show at all.”

On the second-round match, Freddy said, “We were all scared out of our wits before the game against Clare, whom we already knew to be strong and well-balanced. We’d watched the previous match together in the green room, and they were really zipping away through the questions, leaving us behind in the dust. So we knew we’d be up against a tough opponent before the filming began. I won’t give away the outcome, but I can say that viewers are in for a really exciting and all-round well-played match!”

Find out more about the Teddy Hall team members in our article about the first-round match.

Update: 11 December 2018

Congratulations to Agastya, Marceline, Freddy and Lizzie on winning this match against Clare College by 245 points to 105, which means they now progress to the quarter-finals (which will be broadcast at some point in the new year)! You can watch this episode on BBC iPlayer or YouTube.

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