Emeritus Professor of the History of the Church and St Cross Fellow Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch will be appearing on TV screens over the New Year break when he returns to quiz show University Challenge in the Alumni special.
The episode which will be aired on 29 December at 8:30pm on BBC2 shows Prof. MacCulloch competing for Churchill College, Cambridge where he obtained his first degree in 1972. This is not, however, the first time that Prof. MacCulloch has appeared on the show, having previously appeared for the same college nearly 50 years ago.
"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."
He was initially asked to return for the Christmas Alumni special in 2019, but his workload meant he was too busy to take 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”.
Prof. MacCulloch 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!”
Read more about the University Challege 2024 Christmas Special series line-up. including Oxford’s own Worcester College and the other 12 colleges competing here.
