With five minutes to go in last night's episode [March 3 2025], the Bristol team trailed the Open University by 10 points. But after answering tricky questions on Shakespeare and the Polish artist Jan Matejko, the talented students pulled the game back to win 135-95.

The Bristol team was strong on questions about the Aeneid and bacterial reproduction but less confident on questions about George Eliot’s Middlemarch and family trees in Russian novels.

Amol Rajan, who presents the BBC show, commiserated with the Open University team, saying that it was a “ludicrously tight and really quite a stressful game”. 

The Bristol team laughed as he turned to them and joked: “Bristol you did make it rather stressful for yourselves didn’t you?”

The Bristol team is made up of MSci Biology student Ted Warner, Medicine student Bridie Rogers, Artificial Intelligence PhD student Kevin Flanagan (captain) and Organic Chemistry PhD student Olivia Watts. The team’s reserve player is MSci Biology student Nathaniel Joyce.

They had already thrashed Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and Exeter to reach the quarterfinals.

So strong were their performances in those episodes that, at the beginning of the quarterfinal match, Mr Rajan said: “Across their [Bristol's] two matches so far, their average score has been just shy of 310, and their opponents' average score a little less than 60.

“In round two they shut out entirely a capable team from Exeter for almost two-thirds of the game, taking every one of the first ten starters, and converting more than 70% of the bonuses that followed on topics ranging from plant biology to Chinese provinces.”

The team will compete in their second quarterfinal match in the coming weeks.