Fingers on buzzers - a team of University of Bath students is set to take part in the BBC TV quiz University Challenge, with their first-round episode airing next week.
Competing against students from universities across the UK in the televised competition, their first-round match against City St George’s University will air on BBC Two at 8:30pm on Monday, 17 August.
More than 100 universities typically apply to take part each year, with only a limited number progressing to the studio stages of the competition.
The University of Bath team for 2026 is:
William Turner, studying Architecture (4th year)
William Fudge, Biochemistry (1st year)
Henry Hill, Physics with Theoretical Physics (3rd year)
Molly Marshall, Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science (4th year)
Reserve member Joel Taylor, Mathematics (3rd year)
The team was put together through a competitive process run by the Students’ Union.
Team captain William Turner said: “It was brilliant experience to take part in University Challenge. Being on set, meeting Amol Rajan and hearing Roger Tilling’s iconic voice read out our names was slightly surreal. We got to meet and spend time with a few of the other teams, who were really lovely, too.”
This year’s team is the second successive Bath team to qualify for the filmed stages of the competition. Henry Hill added: “Compared to some of the other Universities that compete, we have a small but growing quizzing tradition at Bath and we think we gave a good account of ourselves. Thanks to the efforts of last year’s team and work we’ve put in, we now have an official quizzing society, which we hope will be built upon by other Bath students in the coming years.”
As part of their preparation, the team revised a broad spectrum of subjects that regularly feature in the programme, including history, literature, geography, politics, music and the arts, and got together several times a week to run through a book of the show’s previous questions.
Henry Hill encourages other Bath students to take part in next year’s selection process. He said: “My housemate told me I seem to know a lot of random trivia and to go to the selection event. I had no expectations at any stage, and was surprised to make it onto the team, then for us to get through the rounds of selection, and to finally make it onto the show.
“It’s really fun and such a memorable thing to do – you don’t have to be a TV quiz fanatic, and anyone with even a slight interest should give it a go next semester.”
The process of finding a new team will begin in the autumn. Bath students interested in taking part can contact the team on Instagram via @bath.uniquizzing.