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Our University Challenge team is through to the finals after taking on Royal Holloway.
The team scored an impressive 160 points in the semi-final round on Monday 15 May, seeing them progress through to the series finals.
We take a look back at their journey.
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The team
Our team members are Harry Scully, Chloe Margaux, Alex Radcliffe, Bea Bennett and reserve Tom Haines-Matos. The team mascot takes the shape of Badger the Cathedral cat.
They originally came together after responding to Facebook posts and a series of tests to make it on to their respective college teams before taking part in an inter-college competition.
Final year sociology student, Chloe was selected as one of the highest individual scorers, despite being knocked out in the first round playing for her Josephine Butler College team.
Following their selection, they had an intense two-month period of preparation before their first round of filming, with the first task to choose their captain. As neither Bea nor Chloe wanted the role, a coin-flip resulted in Alex, who has since gone on to complete his Masters in maths, taking on the role and bringing with him the experience of being reserve the previous year.
The team spent time together watching previous episodes and studying books of past questions from the show, getting to know each others' strengths, filling the gaps in their collective knowledge, and as final year English student from Hild Bede, Bea explains, 'getting our heads into the style of questions they ask and being able to make split second decisions on whether to buzz early.'
Harry, also from Hild Bede studying physics and chemistry, made excellent use of flash cards especially as he was tasked with addressing the team's weakness on anatomy and the human body, whilst Bea found a set of playing cards featuring all of the UK prime ministers.
They all describe the joy of being able to dredge up nuggets of niche information or things they'd studied at school but never imagined would be useful, and equally the frustration of wading through hundreds of psychological experiments and never being asked a single related question.
It's clear that the five students, who hadn't met before, have built a strong friendship and as Chloe explains about the time they spent across at the BBC in Manchester, 'it was really like a friendship holiday with some quizzing on the side'.
Monday 24 April 2023, 9pm (BST): Quarter-finals
After winning their first quarter-final match but being narrowly beaten in another, University Challenge's round-robin format pitted Durham against UCL in a must-win game.
A nail-biting finish saw Harry, Bea, Alex, Chloe and Tom win with just 10 points to spare and a couple of minutes on the clock.
Monday 15 May 2023, 8.30pm (BST): Semi-finals
After claiming victory in the quarter-finals, all eyes were fixed on the semi-finals, with Durham vs. Royal Holloway. The team performed superbly, sailing through to the finals with an impressive 160 points.
Monday 29 May 2023: Finals
Who our team faces in the finals will be decided on Monday 22 May in a match between the University of Bristol and University of Southampton. Unusually this is the first final (and also semi-finals) since the 2006-07 series that have not featured any Oxbridge teams. The final round will also mark an end to iconic host Jeremy Paxman's tenure, with successor Amol Rajan set to take over from Autumn 2023.
Durham last won University Challenge in 2000 with a team comprising John Stewart, Nick Allan, Nick Ledger and Colin Telfer. But whatever the outcome on Monday 29 May, we are immensely proud of Harry, Bea, Alex, Chloe and Tom and will be watching with bated breath.
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Watch on the BBC
- Watch Durham in their quarter-finals
- Watch the semi-final round
- Tune in to the final on Monday 29 May on BBC 2 or catch-up on BBC iPlayer
