Campion Hall Fellow on University Challenge Christmas Special
Diarmaid MacCulloch, DD, FBA, FRHistS, FSA, Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford, Senior Research Fellow in Church History and Archivist at Campion Hall and prize-winning author, will be appearing on TV screens over the New Year break when he returns to quiz show University Challenge in the Alumni special.
The quiz show episode, which will be aired on 29 December at 8:30pm on BBC2, shows Diarmaid MacCulloch competing for Churchill College, Cambridge where he obtained his first degree in 1972. This is not, however, the first time that Diarmaid has appeared on the show, having previously appeared for the same college almost fifty years ago, as a postgrad student.
"In 1976, as a postgrad student, I captained Churchill's University Challenge Team, recording at the ITV studios in Manchester. We had a fun time as students do on tour, and we played four games, though we didn't win the whole series."
Diarmaid was initially asked to return for the Christmas Alumni special in 2019, but his workload prevented him from taking part.
“This year I added it to my list of things to do and said yes. So, they obligingly found three other Churchillians to complete the team, and we convened now in Salford's glossy Media City, very different from the Manchester studio days of such ITV staples as Coronation Street”.
Diarmaid was joined on his team by Spencer Kelly, a technology journalist and presenter, Dr Helen Czerski, a physicist, oceanographer, science writer and presenter and Prof. Catherine Green who heads the Nuffield Department of Medicine's Clinical Biomanufacturing Facility (CBF) at the University of Oxford.
When asked how the team did in the competition Prof MacCulloch replied:
“I can't tell you what happened, but you'll find out the week after Christmas. I promise you some cliff-hanging!”
You can read more about the University Challenge 2024 Christmas Special series line-up. including Oxford’s Worcester College and the other 12 Higher Education Institutions competing here.