University Challenge

How does it go? I can't do it without the music, the melody in my head.

But this is University Challenge.

So Tim Vickery representing the University of Hemel Hempstead, Rio de Janeiro campus.

Yeah, indeed.

The BBC does do an excellent job sometimes of eating its own feet.

And the BBC apparently spent some time editing out LGBTQ plus pride flags from contestants of University Challenge.

They were using little badges.

or buttons, if you're American.

Next, pride badges and a rainbow feather worn by contestants on a BBC quiz show in the UK have been digitally removed.

Three students appearing on University Challenge have labelled the censorship absurd and Orwellian, while the broadcaster reckons it's obliged to stick to rules on neutrality.

It comes just a few weeks after the BBC's Strictly Come Dancing, known internationally as Dancing with the Stars, blurred out a pro-transgender Protect the Dolls T-shirt.

Pride Daily.

Yes, thank you very much.

Do you know, in 15 years, there'll be a university challenge where somebody gets a Molly Sugden question right.

And whoever's hosting will say, how do you know about Molly Sugden? You're only 19.

And they'll say, I can't remember.

That's where Catherine Ryan's from, Sarnia.

Is it? I'm 99.9% sure it is, yes.

I tell you what, someone's doing very well on University Challenge in 15 years.

If you want to pick me up on my pronunciation, general diction or jungle noises, you can get in touch with john at absoluteradio.co.uk. It's Absolute Radio here where real music matters.

Acast.com.

the BBC have digitally removed pride pins from University Challenge contestants' clothes and blurred out a trans ally slogan on Strictly.

They call

it editorial impartiality.

I'm Peter Fincham, former controller of BBC One, ex-head of television at ITV and co-CEO of Expectation.

And this is Insiders, the TV podcast.

So, Peter, what's this story about the BBC editing out pride pins on University Challenge? So what we're hearing is

astrophysics student Samuel Collier and history student Emmeline Haig-Wright were shocked to find that their LGBTQ plus pride pins had been edited out of their University Challenge appearance earlier this year.

You

sort of single-handedly won University Challenge for Warwick and you could pretend that you didn't but the evidence is actually quite abundant and it's there on the internet.

You just kind of consistently answer everything on every subject.

So I just really love this idea of schools as gymnasiums for the mind.

But what if it is completely and utterly wrong? what if counter-intuitively the old ways are the best what if we have an ideal natural experiment in our country in our time that shows england is getting something very very right that scotland wales and northern ireland are getting wrong and that what england is getting right is that basically the education we need today and tomorrow looks quite similar to the one we had yesterday.

Allow me to introduce perhaps the most interesting, smart, original and influential thinker about education in Britain today.

Daisy Christodoulou grew up on a council estate in East London, won a scholarship to a top private school and in 2006 appeared to almost single-handedly Win University Challenge for Warwick University, which led to her being dubbed Britain's smartest student.

Today, she writes an influential substack, and she's the boss of an assessment company called No More Marking.

Yeah.

They had something, I think it was like university challenge was also filming there at the same time.

So there was two audiences that were waiting to go in and one was going in to do, um, watch university challenge.

And then the other ones, uh, were going in to watch Jeremy Carle and they had to go through a metal detector and then all of these like spotty students with their briefcases were ushered in to watch University Challenge and I was like I'd love it if they just mixed up those audiences one day get a real shock to the system

I loved all that stuff, though.

I loved Jerry Springer.