SINCE it first hit the screens in 1962, University Challenge has been a platform for the nation's brightest, and sometimes weirdest, academics, to flex their intellectual muscles.
With a reputation for having questions matched only by Mastermind, the student game show has sparked rivalry at times fiercer than the Oxford-Cambridge boat race.
Tonight, a team from the University of Liverpool will do battle in the second round of the 2006 tournament's semi-finals, the furthest any team from the city has ever reached.
Team captain Egyptologist Liz Jones described their rise through the ranks, after "creaming" Hull in the first round with 275 points to 70. "It's been so much fun," she said.
"I think it's such a big thing because University Challenge is seen as having such difficult questions, you can show off a bit if you've been on it. It's also got a bit of a cult status to it because there's nothing else like it on television."
The team, chosen after a gruelling series of qualifying rounds at Liverpool, includes two Merseyside-born contestants.
Hispanic studies undergraduate Adam McNamara-Jones, 21, from Liverpool, is currently on a year out in Spain, and microbial ecology PhD student Steve Bromley, 28, from Wirral, is also away in South America.
The fourth team member, Andrew Scaife, 26, in his final year of a BA in architecture, hails from Bradford.
