Topics

- The worst thing anyone has ever done to get into university is steal dead bodies. In the 18th century, Scottish medical students had to resort to body-snatching in order to pay their tuition fees. Dissection was needed in order to study anatomy, but it was such a problem that they eventually had to forbid people from stealing dead bodies to sell them on. To this day, there are tunnels between the colleges and the Anatomy Theatre at the University of Edinburgh to the graveyards. Bodies were more expensive during winter because the colder weather kept the bodies longer. To help solve the problem, the Murder Act of 1752 allowed for the execution of murderers first and then for the corpses to be used for studying, but there were not enough people found guilty of murder to meet demand. Later, poor families were allowed to donate a dead person from the family if they couldn't afford the burial. After 1832, they were allowed to give the body away.

- Tangent: Guz knew a guy who got his sister to sit two of his A-level exams, because he knew he was going to flunk them. When his sister came for the exams, there were external invigilators, and the invigilator said to the girl: "Oh... Mohammed?" She aggressively replied: "Yeah?! What's your problem?" to which the invigilator said there wasn't one, and she got away with it.

- Tangent: The father of dissection, Andreas Vesalius, hid what he was up to by having a revolving table. At the University of Padua, he had a table where he did his dissection, and if someone came into the room he could flip it over and it would have a splayed dog on it. Before him, most of the research was done on animals, notably apes, meaning textbooks were full of mistakes. For example, it was thought humans had seven breastbone segments, but that's because they dissected apes. Vesalius made mistakes too, claiming that the clitoris did not exist in healthy women, which was even weirder given the fact that he was married.

- XL: At Oxford and Cambridge, the third university established in England was Northampton, also known as Nene College. Established in 1261, the university made the mistake of backing Simon de Montfort when he got cross with Henry III, and it was closed down in 1265. The university was revived in 2005, but the Privy Council had to repeal a royal decree of 1265, in order to re-establish the university. The university's Latin motto is "Ne Nesciamus", which is a pun on the River Nene, pronunciation of which is debated as to whether it is "Ne-ne" or "Nen". (Forfeit: Durham; Manchester)

- XL: Men went to various extremes to stop women from going to university. In England and Scotland there were cases of rats being let into lecture theatres. In Edinburgh, women had to contend with red paint being left on the seats. When the first seven women to attend Edinburgh in 1869, they were met with riots and 100 men tried to physically stop them from entering the exam hall. When the women did finally get in the lecture had to be delayed because someone had let a sheep lose in the building. All seven women passed, but the university refused to give them their degrees, with them not being awarded until 2019.

- XL Tangent: Sandi went to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, which didn't allow women until 1978. They had been talking about letting women in since 1969, and there is speculation that they took so long to let women in because the fellows felt they needed to improve the white-wine cellar before the women turned up. In 1979, they allowed men into Sandi's college for the first time, and the place stank within a week.

- The place to go to study the most up-to-date linguistics is anywhere where there are teenage girls around. Teenage girls are known as language disruptors, and are pioneers in language development. Women drive up to 90% of all linguistic change.

- Tangent: "Err" is an example of a disfluency marker, which is something that is not a real word, but adds something to a sentence. Joe says he says: "like" a lot, which drives both Sandi and Alan mad. Mark Liberman of the University of Pennsylvania transcribed 14,000 phone conversations and found that people tend to say "um" when they are choosing what to say, and they tend to say "err" when they are choosing how they want to say it. On the whole, people say "err" more than "um".

- The panel are asked to use some obscure words beginning with "U" in a sentence.

- Uglyography: Bad handwriting. The term was only ever used by 19th century poet laureate Robert Southey. George Talbot, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, was a tremendous expert on the Tudor period, but his handwriting was so bad no-one has ever managed to figure out what he wrote.

- Umble-cum-stumble: A Victorian word meaning to understand comprehensively.

- Uzzle: An archaic word for a blackbird.

- Ujerk: An Albanian word for watery pus that drains from a wound.

- Umbilicanism: Naval-gazing.

- Unheckled: To be shabbily or untidily dressed. In its modern sense, it comes from 19th century Dundee women, who worked as hecklers, preparing cloth. One heckler would read out the day's news, and everyone else would interrupt.

- Tangent: Alan was once heckled by people who just baaed like sheep. Jennifer Saunders once said that the worst heckle she ever had was somebody who just shouted: "We understand what you're trying to do." When Malcolm Hardee ran The Tunnel Club, if the audience didn't like the act and wanted Malcolm back on, they'd go: "Mmmalcolm." This evolved into the audience slowly going: "Mmmm...", and once seven or eight people were doing it and shouting: "Mmmalcolm!" the act knew it was over. Hearing the humming was the sign that the act was doomed. Joe has a friend who when they go to the theatre together and he gets bored, if there is a quiet bit in the play he'll just shout: "Line!"

- XL: Unasinous: A 17th century spin-off of unanimous, meaning people are united in stupidity.

- XL: Uxoravalent: "Only able to have sex with people who aren't your wife". The opposite is "uxorovalent", where you are only able to have sex with someone who is your wife.

- XL: Ucalegon: A neighbour whose house has burnt down. The word comes from one of the elders of Troy, and his home was destroyed when the city was sacked by the Achaeans.

- The panel are now shown some slang phrases and are asked what they mean.

- XL: Urinal of the planets: Ireland. This is because it rains so often there.

- Is your rhubarb up?: A saying from 19th century music all, asking if you are interested in having sex.

- Uncock the claret: A nosebleed.

- Scandinavian students keep their neighbours up every night by screaming. Especially associated with Uppsala but occurring all over Sweden, the oldest is called the Flogsta Scream, and at 22:00 all the students open their windows and they scream as loud as possible for about ten minutes. It has been happening since the 1970s, and the students call is a much-needed safety valve.

- Tangent: In the 17th century, Uppsala banned all hen-dos.

- XL Tangent: The most famous alumnus of Uppsala University is Carl Linnaeus, the father of taxonomy. In order to marry he needed a proper career, so he became a doctor, and in order to get clients he used to go to coffeehouses and ask if any men had got gonorrhoea. In 1751, he proposed a flower clock where each flower had a fixed opening and closing time, but the flowers were not that reliable. Gregarious flowering is when a particular plant will flower, no matter where it is in the world, will flower all at the same time. They flower and die at the same time, and we do not know why.

- The panel all have glasses underneath their desks and are asked what thing beginning with "U" is in them. The answer is uranium. Uranium glass is about 2% uranium, but it can be as much as 25%. It was very popular between the 1880s and 1930s, but it fell out of favour because uranium was being used for the Manhattan Project. Some of the oldest uranium glass was found in a mosaic from 79 AD, in a Roman villa in Naples. There used to be a form of dinner service called Fiestaware, which also contained uranium. While normally safe, if plates cracked it could release radiation.

- Tangent: Uranium has so much energy in it, that one pound of it has as much energy as 500 tons of coal. Theoretically, a single gram would give you 19.6 billion calories if you were to consume it.

- XL: The best way to ruin an episode of University Challenge is to give deliberately frivolous answers. In 1975, the University of Manchester deliberately disrupted their appearance on the show, filling the audience with people who jeered and catcalled all the way through the episode, and then rather than giving any correct answers, they just gave flippant ones. For example they answered the question: "What's the name of the road from Kyoto to Tokyo?" with: "The Yellow Brick Road." They particularly liked answering questions with the names of revolutionary leaders, frequently just saying Lenin, Trotsky, Marx or Che Guevara. The team was told that if they didn't play properly the episode would not be broadcast. They did end up playing properly and scored just 40 points. The team argued that the questions were too skewed to the classics, and they were annoyed by the fact that Oxford and Cambridge were allowed to play as individual colleges.

- XL Tangent: When he was a contestant on "University Challenge", former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng caused a minor scandal because he repeatedly swore when he couldn't remember answers.

- XL Tangent: Sandi was a contestant on "Crackerjack", she had to answer three questions to win a pen. The final question was; "Can you name this famous Danish person?" Sandi could not. It was herself.

General Ignorance

- XL: The world's oldest university is in Fez, Morocco. The University of Qarawiyyin was established in 1963, but has been a centre of learning since the 8th century. Both men and women could attend to study religion, grammar, rhetoric, medicine, mathematics and astronomy. (Forfeit: Cambridge; Oxford)

- Irn-Bru comes from Kingston, Jamaica, where it was first mentioned in 1891. However, it was made by Scottish whisky merchants, who marketed it as a medical tonic. Irn-Bru does contain a little bit of iron in it, having an additive called iron hydroxide. The secret formula is known only to the former chairman, his daughter, and one other board member. (Forfeit: Scotland)

- Tangent: Irn-Bru have been noted for their adverts. One featured a cow that said: "When I'm a burger, I want to be washed down with Irn-Bru." This ad attracted 700 complaints. Another advert had a young woman in a bikini holding a can saying: "I never knew four-and-a-half inches could give so much pleasure." A third advert featured a newborn chick that read: "There's nothing better than Irn-Bru when you've just been laid."

- The equation for mass-energy equivalence was first created by several people. Einstein's work on mass-energy equivalence stems from the theories of over a dozen other scientists, including English physicist Oliver Heaviside and American physicist Friedrich Hasenohrl, but all of their equations applied to a specific situation. Einstein worked out these idea applied more generally.

- XL Tangent: Heaviside was one of Britain's greatest-ever scientists, and was self-taught. He improved transatlantic communications by getting the speed of messages down from one character in ten minutes to one character every minute. In the end however, he ended up just doing science on his own, in his bedroom, and replaced all of his furniture with granite blocks. He also just started wearing a kimono.

Scores

- Morgana Robinson: 6 points
- Joe Lycett: 5 points
- Guz Khan: 1 point
- Alan Davies: Score not given.