Are the University Challenge rules fair? Have your say here

At least three other teams who have won University Challenge since 2000 have fielded ineligible players in the final, The Times has discovered.

The revelations follow the BBC’s decision on Monday to withdraw the title from this year’s winner, Corpus Christi College, Oxford, because one of its team members had graduated from the university halfway through the series.

Two members of the Imperial College team that won in 2001 were on one-year master’s courses and so had graduated by the time that the final was filmed. Siegfried Hodgson, another member of that team, said yesterday: “We were completely upfront about this with the production team and there was never any suggestion we broke any rules.”

The Times has also discovered that the winning teams from 2004 and last year also fielded contestants who, according to the production company’s rules, were ineligible.

Charles Markland, a member of the 2008 winning team from Christ Church, Oxford, was a student at Balliol by the time that the final was filmed, after switching colleges to start a DPhil in chemistry. Freya McClements, the captain of the 2004 winning team from Magdalen College, Oxford, also appears to have left her college by the time that the final was filmed, and was registered as a student at the University of Dublin.

Mr Hodgson said: “I was on the winning team in 2001 — filmed in June and October 2000 — and two of our team were on one-year MSc courses and thus were not students when the last three rounds were filmed.”

He said that Gavin Estcourt, Imperial College’s captain, was a banker in the City and his team-mate Alexander Campbell was a journalist with Flight International magazine by the time that the final rounds were filmed in October 2000.

Granada Media, which produces the programme for the BBC, said that it would not be stripping the winners of their trophies. It would not say whether the rules would now be changed to allow contestants who were students at the start of filming to complete a series.

A spokeswoman said: “We can only act on information we have been given. The University Challenge rules state that team members should all be students of the university or college for the duration of the recording of the series. These issues were not brought to our attention.”

Bamber Gascoigne, who was replaced as the host of the show by Jeremy Paxman when the show restarted in 1994, told The Times: “Frankly, I’m not surprised that there have been similar cases in the past. The whole thing is madness. I can’t imagine they would retrospectively strip teams of their titles, but I really couldn’t say.”

Gascoigne said earlier that the rules should be changed so that those who were students when the show started should be allowed to compete until the end. He told BBC Radio 4: “Are you saying that third-year students who are not planning to do later education are therefore disqualified from University Challenge? The whole point of University Challenge is the team that comes on at the start is the team that goes on.

“This whole system which has been allowed to happen is totally contrary to the rules and the nature of University Challenge.”

Edmund Dickinson, the president of the Oxford University Quiz Society, said: “At the quiz society we have known a number of teams who have sent final-year students into the competition in the past. This seems inconsistent from the BBC.”

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