Sadly, like a contestant on 'Pointless' last week, there was a brief caption at the end of tonights programme 'David Bostock 1948-2016' He was one of the SOAS team.

Yes, that took the edge off Only Connect for me. Took me a while to get into it.

Lol finally we know

I was so victimised by Monkman's eyebrows. Somebody help me.

SO CLOSE FOR SOAS if they hadn't had back-to-back interruption mistakes at the end they would have won (And wow Jezza was so rude to the poor lady)

So what will happen to SOAS team now? (RIP Mr. Bostock) Did the filming till the final already finish or were they allowed to make a substitution?

Paxman wasn't rude - nobody was called names or insulted. He just pointed out that he required both words for the answer. As it is, they lost because she got the goat, but missed the stoat. That one answer would have sealed it for them.

He regularly has to tell people to listen to the question. It was quite clesr that there were two parts and she was too eager to buzz on hearing the first part.

I must listen to the start of the programme again to see what subjects they were all studying. The BTU answer was obvious but seemed another case of not listening to the question.

I googled David Bostock and found that he died on Thursday last week and his funeral was yesterday. How sad for the family. He sounded a really interesting man.

I thought he was Ferengi.

Just need to say the Paxman got the answer wrong even though he had the answer in front of him - he said "argine" instead of "arginine" for the amino acid.

As has been said further up thread, David died last week, so, would imagine that he will be in any matches that have been filmed up until now.

I don't think they film each series in one go, I would imagine that all matches up to the conclusion of all the round 2 ones are filmed in the spring and then the quater finals onwards are filmed in the autumn, along with the Christmas series.

I do know, having watched the documentary on how they choose which Uni's go through to the main series a couple of years ago, before that years' series started, that each team has a fifth reserve team member, so I would imagine that if SOAS get beyond round 2, they will call on their fifth member.

It's the law...

One woman got the "Martina Navratilova" answer wrong (said something like marina), but paxman is so dumb and arrogant he niether listened nor cared.
I was mildly disapponted there's no such thing as a draw.
Flabbergasted that the winning answer was "molluscs"!

He was, and a really nice guy too. I sang in a choir with him for many years. We all thought he would spend a long and happy retirement studying what he was most interested in. He is much missed. RIP.

A good comeback from Brum.

Agree. They looked totally out of it after the first few minutes.

When the guy next to captain stopped interrupting and losing points they came back nicely. Belfast, otoh, completely faltered after the girl missed the Q about English Monarchs.

I was glad Belfast lost because I took a completely irrational dislike to the female team member on the basis she reminded me of Louise Mensch.

I don't think round 2 is as early as spring, I was at the recording of a couple of first round matches in 2007 (my housemate was the reserve for the Birmingham team) and that was mid June.

This series of University Challenge was recorded between February and April.

I always think that when someone wears a hat on a panel game like this that all the personality is in the hat

Don't they realise how ridiculous it looks?

(Anyway, it's disgraceful etiquette wearing a hat indoors. )

The same could be said of anyone who wears a hat (indoors) on any programme - especially pink berets!

Or yellow beanies like that bloke on the Prostate Cancer advert that seems to be on every five minutes.

Is it? Churches would seem to disagree with you for starters.

Only for women, men remove their hats in church, women can normally wear hats indoors.