Friday 28-11-2025 - 14:16

 

This term, the Students’ Union has been searching for its next team of budding brainboxes to appear on the long-running BBC Two quiz show; University Challenge. 
97 students took part, completing 177 exam papers, and answering 3,540 of the toughest quiz questions on campus. 

 

 

The 2026 Lancaster University Challenge Team 
After several rounds of intense competitive quizzing, we are delighted to confirm our next prospective team hoping to represent Lancaster on the televised show. 
Leading the team as Captain is final year MPhys with Astrophysics student, Charlie Proudfoot, from Pendle College. Joining Charlie will be Finn Montgomery (second-year BSc Natural Sciences, Lonsdale), Ben Wilson (first-year BA History, Cartmel) and Owen O’Connor (final year MPhys Physics, Fylde). Supporting the team in reserve is James Feeney (first-year BSc Computer Science, County). 

Team Captain, Charlie, said: “We're all excited to be moving onto the next steps! I think we've got a good spread of knowledge, and it's been a pleasure to meet everybody else on the team.  
“The selection process was really fun - the entrance quiz I did covered a lot of different topics and specialist subjects which was already a good challenge, but I think I enjoyed the live round even more. We had quite a lot of people spectating, and it ended up being close, so that was exciting.  
“I did this initially just to challenge myself and see how far I could get, but it's amazing to be representing the University in the real thing and I can't wait to get going with the auditions!” 

 

How Was the Team Selected? 
Lancaster’s prospective University Challenge team is selected in two stages. Firstly, all students were invited to take part in individual entry tests. There were four tests on offer each comprising 40 challenging questions from the specialist areas of Arts & Cultures, History & Geography, Maths & Technology or Biological & Medical Sciences.  
To qualify for the final stage, students needed to be one of the top two highest scorers on any of these papers. With almost 100 students taking part, taking one of these top two scores is a formidable achievement in what were some fiendishly difficult quiz papers. 

You can get a sense for the challenging nature of these tests and the achievement of our finalists with these summary statistics (all scores are out of a possible 40):  

	Median score	Mean score	Qualifying score
Arts & Cultures	11	10.53	24
Maths & Technology	12	11.71	22
History & Geography	10.5	11.21	20
Biological & Medical Sciences	8	8.43	18

 

The Marathon 
It means a huge amount to us that so many students took the time out of their busy schedules to give these tests a go. We are particularly impressed by the students who embarked on what is now called the University Challenge Marathon - sitting all four test papers across two evenings. In recognition of their efforts, we’d like to name those students as:  

Lancaster University Challenge Marathon Roll of Honour 2025 
Charlie Thomas, Cuotian Li, Daniel Hodgson, Eddie Neighbour, Finn Montgomery, Jasmine Hewson, Jonathon Phillips, Joseph Graham, Kai Moorhouse, Louis Peckham, Natalie Labrique, Rebecca Glover, Shea Brennan, and Thomas Healy 

Congratulations and thank you to each of them for their monumental achievement! 
 

The Final Live Round 
To conclude our selection process, the eight qualifying students were invited to a live final where they competed individually on the buzzer to answer as many questions as possible in 25 minutes.  

With challenging topics covering everything from fish sauce to Sir Christopher Wren, our finalists confidently batted away dozens of questions. After a tense final tie-break for fourth place, our next University Challenge team was finally selected. 
The team will now be supported to apply to the televised show and will attend an audition to secure their place. If successful, they will appear on our TVs from summer 2026, and we are wishing them all the best of luck. 
We’d also like to thank the many staff volunteers from across the University who gave their time to write and prepare interesting questions for this year’s selection process. 

 

To close this year’s selection, Students’ Union President, Rory O’Ceallaigh, said: “Thank you to everyone who put themselves forward for our rigorous selection process to find Lancaster University's next team for University Challenge. For all involved I hope the experience stretched your knowledge, and, even more importantly, was fun! 

“Congratulations especially to Ben, Charlie, Finn, James, and Owen for successfully making it through the process and I wish them luck in the next stages towards the real deal on TV!” 
 
We would like to thank Callum Slater, former LUSU VP Union Development and current member of University staff. None of this would have happened without his passion and hard work. 
We would also like to thank the University Graduation Team for loaning us gowns and Emily, Rory and Leah for doing silly things in them.