By Leah Hoyle, Second Year English

The episode aired 18th August at 8:30 on BBC Two and kicked off Bristol’s entrance into the 2025/26 University Challenge series with a massive 65-point victory.

The victorious Bristolian team was comprised of captain Hugo Goodwill (Meng Aerospace Engineering), Lewys Jenkins (BSc Mathematics), Lois Connolly (BA Liberal Arts) and Nathaniel Joyce (MSci Biology). The cohort came together to answer a range of questions, on subjects varying from dried lentils to instruments for land surveying.

Host of the show, Amol Rajan, noted as the show opened that the ‘two universities on opposite sides of the Severn Estuary find themselves on opposite sides.’ Bristol did not come up against Cardiff last series. Instead, they found themselves winning versus Cambridge, Exeter and the Open University, scoring a place in the semi-finals.

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Team member Lewys Jenkins told Epigram how key the panel’s synergy was to the win – ‘I was really happy with our team dynamic in the episode. We were close going into it and it’s exciting to get to get closer to one another after filming.’

Jenkins explained how ‘we practiced conferring with each other by playing along to old episodes of University Challenge to prepare for the actual show’.

Maintaining a significant lead throughout the 30-minute show, Bristol ended with 185 points while Cardiff 115. Jenkins seemed confident about the questions but noted how some were pretty unpredictable – ‘I certainly wasn’t expecting to hear bonus sets on the chemistry of cheese or Premier League walkout music!’

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Rajan described Cardiff’s performance as being ‘such bad luck, you never quite got going,’ despite the team making humorous guesses to still answer ‘even though they were wrong’.

Comparatively, the host expressed that Bristol’s performance as ‘very, very strong. Well done Bristol… we shall certainly see you again.’  

University Challenge will be back on your screens this Monday at 8:30 where we will see an Oxbridge toss up between Trinity College, Cambridge and Linacre College, Oxford.

It is unsure when the next episode featuring University of Bristol will be, but qualification to the next round is guaranteed by the scale of the team’s victory.

Speaking on behalf of the whole Bristol team, Jenkins said ‘It feels absolutely amazing to have won on behalf of the University of Bristol! I’m really glad that our practice and teamwork paid off and that we delivered this result on behalf of the entire university community. It still feels a bit surreal to be honest!’

Featured image: BBC