#paxman

When the 49th series of The Challenge ended in April, I wasn’t sure if there would be a 50th - at least not on its usual timeline - what with the lockdown surely putting paid to the recording of a quiz show. And I wasn’t wrong about that, but the early matches had been squeezed in before everything shut down, and I believe there are plans to get the next lot of shows filmed at some point before the run of pre-recorded ones ends, because everything is now completely okay and there are no longer any risks associated with the virus (wait, hang on a second...)

I am aware that this post comes four weeks after the return of Paxman and his box of tricks, but I’m afraid you’re just going to have to deal with that (not that you will have been feeling any resentment anyway) and accept this bumper quartet as my peace offering. I also have some more exciting things to offer if you stick around to the end. 

Raising the curtains of the 50th series were Glasgow and Exeter, two sides with recent experience of raising curtains, having each opened one of the past two seasons. 

Glasgow looked imperious in their first round match last year, but were upset by an exciting Courtauld team in the second round, while Exeter haven’t made it past the first round since 2011. 

Paxman cracks out the phrase ‘pellucid fecundity’ in his introduction, which, according to the top definitions on Google means ‘the translucently clear ability to produce a large number of offspring’, which seems odd (I’ll go and check the secondary definitions later - I don’t have all day to spend inside a dictionary). 

He also claims that Dr Who is the most famous alumnus of Glasgow, and I was about to say ‘how can he be the most famous alumnus when no one knows that fact about him?’ (because surely that’s not a very well-known fact), but I suppose it would be the same with most other institutions. You don’t need to know that someone went to a Uni for them to be the most famous alumnus, do you? It just seems weird when its a timelord you’re talking about. 

Anyway, let’s not waste your time with the rules, here’s your first starter for ten (I always wonder if that should be a semi-colon before the ‘here’s’, so if any of you are grammarians, I’d be grateful for confirmation).

Nieves only needs to hear ‘fruit’ and ‘Prokofiev’ before buzzing early with ‘oranges’ to get the series underway. He’s so confident that he tries to give his answer before Roger Tilling has finished annoucing his name, but he gets there in the end, and they took one bonus on brutalist architecture, before Nieves undid some of his good work with a Neg on the next Starter. 

This gave Exeter an opportunity, and they duly took the lead with a hat-trick on the year 1963. But Williams returned the favour with a penalty of his own, and Glasgow pulled ahead, taking the picture round on Spanish-lanaguage descriptions of Spanish-speaking flags (the people of the country, not the flags. The flags can’t speak).

The Scottish side held their lead going into the music round, which, bizarrely, was almost entirely recycled from a quarter final match last year (reddit thread linked). I can only imagine this was an oversight, and I know they often use similar questions in the science and literature topics, but they’re never usually identical. 

Exeter, who won’t have been able to benefit from having seen the question before, given that it was broadcast after the recording of this show (although, theoretically, a contestant could have been in the audience for last year’s episode), took twenty points from the set, and went on a good run to close within five of the Scots.

Glasgow don’t like this though, and go on a little run of their own, stretching their lead out with a full set on words beginning with ‘spec’. There’s not enough time for Exeter to mount a second comeback after this, and at the gong Glasgow were fifty-five clear on two hundred.

Final Score: Glasgow 200 - 145 Exeter

February 9th, 2019: Gemma Styles, sister of Harry Styles, shared a post on Instagram this week in support of GirlvsCancer, a brand of t-shirts designed by cancer survivor Lauren Mahon the sale of which goes to support four cancer charities. In the Instagram post, Gemma is wearing a special edition t-shirt with the logo “Keep your cool” which was designed in dedication to the late Rachel Bland, a journalist and a presenter with BBC Radio 5 Live and BBC North West Tonight, and to the crew at Paxman Scalp Cooling, who helped Rachael keep her hair during treatment. Indeed, Paxman Scalp Cooling has engineered a cooling cap that can be worn by patients undergoing chemotherapy to prevent hair loss.

  The founder of GirlvsCancer Lauren Mahon was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 31. While the diagnosis was obviously a shock to Lauren, she maintained her positive attitude and got to work.  At one point during treatment, Lauren could no longer attend to her job, so as a mean to support herself and to bring attention to breast cancer in younger women, she started to design t-shirts that she named TIT-TEES. The t-shirts are an ironic twist to breast cancer with eggs, hearts, bananas, and melons designed on the breasts or with uplifting logos such as “Fierce as fuck” and “Hope is dope”. To launch her collection Lauren reached out to influencers including Gemma Styles who participated in the launching photoshoot (see pictures below).

  Lauren is selling her TIT-TEES and donating the proceeds to four cancer charities that are particularly geared to supporting young people diagnosed with cancer. Indeed, during treatment, she realized that there was little support for young women diagnosed with breast cancer. While support seems to be in place for older women diagnosed with the disease, it is not there for women in their 20s and 30s. The charities that Lauren supports with the sale of her TIT-TEES are:

Coppa Feel: this charity was founded by Kris Hallenga who was diagnosed with incurable breast cancer at age 23. Kris with her charity is encouraging self-exam in all women but in particular in young women. She brings her message and tutorials to schools, colleges, festivals and at other gatherings where young women are prominent, and of course online.

Trekstock: is a cancer charity specifically geared to support young adults with cancer. They work to provide practical support in modalities that are more light-hearted and understood by younger people. For example, they use social media like Facebook and gatherings/events to help people get back into the dating scene after a cancer diagnosis. They also help young people with cancer get back into exercising in a safe way. (Read here our article about Trekstock)

Future Dreams: this charity was founded by mother and daughter Sylvie and Danielle. They were both diagnosed with breast cancer when they were quite young and were both able to get better and healthy again. Unfortunately, breast cancer came back for Sylvie in 2008 and for Danielle in 2009. This is when the two women decided to found Future Dreams first for Danielle’s daughter Amy and then for all the women facing this disease so nobody would have to ever go through breast cancer alone. Sylvie and Danielle passed away 1 year apart in 2009 and 2010. Their charity continues on, though, and has raised since its inception more than 4.5 million for breast cancer support, awareness, and research.

Look Good Feel Better: this is the only international charity of this kind which provides beauty support to women with cancer. With their tutorials, makeup donated by companies like Chanel, Clinique, bareMinerals, and Revlon, and volunteers from the makeup industry this charity helps women with cancer feel beautiful again.

The TIT-TEES are really an expression of Lauren’s personality, they are beautiful and funny and are a powerful way to bring attention to breast cancer. The proceeds from their sale go to support charities that are doing amazing work to support young people with cancer and in particular breast cancer. To view all the designs available and purchase one for you, perhaps in support of someone you know with breast cancer, visit the shop at this link.

Pictures are shared from GirlvsCancer website and Gemma Styles Instagram. 

The class 43 High Speed Train was first developed in 1975, as a temporary stop-gap vehicle, intended to serve until the two new projects, Advanced passenger train experimental (APT-E) and advanced passenger train prototype (APT-P), came to fruition.

These units were to replace the class 55 deltic as the primary express passenger locomotive under British Rail. From the previous sets, it was obvious that to break the 100mph limit created by the immense weight of the predecessor, the axle load needed to be vastly reduced. The main problem with this plan came as reducing the weight of the locomotive also reduced the tractive effort, limiting the number of coaches that could be in formation. This was fixed by using two locomotives, in a push-pull configuration.

However, the British rail seniors decided that the class 43 was in fact suitable for the job, and as such scrapped the new projects, leaving the class 43 as the leader in high speed passenger trains.

The new train was capable of 148mph, although limited to 125mph by the mainline speed limits. This speed, and the fact that they entered service with Inter City, gave birth to the branding of the class as the "Intercity 125", and thus, a legacy was born.

In the coming decade, the diesel locomotives, along with their specially designed rolling stock, reached world wide fame, as the fastest trains in the world, and still to this day hold onto the claim of being the fastest diesel locomotives in the world.

The trainsets are formed with a power car at either end, and either five or nine coaches.

Originally the class 43's were powered by a paxman valenta 12RP200L 12 cylinder, developing 2250 horsepower. These engines earned themselves the nickname "screaming valenta's" owing to the powerful deep whine they made under heavy load.

Under the Life extension program laid out in 2005, the paxman valenta's were switched out for engines built by MTU.

Imperial played Strathclyde in the first round of the 2017-18 series, with Strathclyde coming out narrow winners in a low-scoring affair. They lost in the second round, having never made it past that stage, while Imperial have since gone on to claim their third title of the Paxman era in April’s Grand Final, thanks in large part to the exploits of Brandon, the man who wasn’t there to make friends. 

We are yet to find a protagonist to rival Brandon in this series, but there’s plenty of time left.

Strathclyde’s first three team members are from Glasgow, and Starr-Marshall lets us know that he’s not from Glasgow, before telling us he’s from London (which could have been achieved by simply saying he was from London, but I’m glad he had the confidence to try out the comedic bit, which went down a treat).

And it was he who kicked things off, identifying red as the colour linking the field of the flag of the Basque country and William Morris’ house, but they don’t know a lot about cliffs (to be fair who does), and Marrow beats them to the punch on the next Starter to level the scores.

Both teams seem to dilly on what seems to be a fairly obvious definition of an architect (someone who drafts your house) but Starr-Marshall eventually picks it up, and Strathclyde took control of the match with some more good buzzer work. 

Sometimes you don’t realise how hard a question is for the layman because you don’t know enough about a subject to know what it is you don’t know. But in the case of identification codes for plastics, and given that I work for a plastics recycling company, I was fairly confident of gauging the difficulty of a bonus set Strathclyde got on the subject. 

Two were pretty straightforward - HD for high density in HDPE and polypropylene for PP - but the third, for what does the T in PET stand (terephthalate) was really quite obscure, and I do wonder where one would pick up such knowledge organically (possibly a chemist would know, but even then I’m not so sure). Anyway, the point of all that was that it was a bloody hard question.

Welsh came in pretty quickly with OutKast for the music Starter, but the Scottish quartet squirmed somewhat throughout the bonuses on other Atlanta rap music, failing to even produce a guess. The Ludacris one wasn’t obvious, to be fair to them, though they should probably have recognised Migos imo.

They were now 110 points clear though, so it shouldn’t have made a difference to the result. At this stage it was clear to Imperial captain Kohn that his team had lost the match, but he was still desperate to accumulate as many points as possible in the hopes of a play-off place, giving ‘come on, let’s get going’ gestures to his teammates every time they got a starter right(I tried to get a better screenshot,but hopefully the blurred hand in the picture below conveys his urgency), and trying to answer the bonuses as quickly as possible. 

Even the play-offs looked like a distant hope at this point, but with more aggressive buzzing against a Strathclyde who could afford to be a bit more cautious, they shot their score upwards. A full set on the second picture round (including a nude portrait of a dude, balls and all) and a rapid hat-trick on film titles starting with ‘The Big’ brought them into high-scoring loser contention.

Strathclyde got a few more points just to be sure of victory, but Imperial were relentless in their pursuit of the most glorious possible defeat and by the gong had secured a score that should surely see them returning at least once (you have to go back to 2012 for 155 to not be guaranteed a spot).

Final Score: Imperial 155 - 190 Strathclyde

Very strong first half from Strathie, and a storming comeback from Imperial. If they can play like that from the start they’ll have a great chance of making it through the play-offs.

If you’ve managed to get to the bottom of these four posts then I’ve got to give you some huge credit (also, if the chronology of the posts isn’t right and you’ve read this first, I’ll still give you some credit. 

Anyway, I’m glad to be back writing and I hope you’re glad to be back reading. I have a Patreon that I’ll link below (incredible thanks to the two people who support it when I haven’t even had any perks yet), and starting now I’m going to be doing retrospective reviews of previous series (the ones available on YouTube) starting at the Quarter-Final Stage (so 13 eps per series), probably monthly-ish that will only be available to Patreon subscribers.

https://www.patreon.com/bePatron?u=16447756