Hello, Goodbye
Notes on an Absence
In 2020, a podcast I loved stopped uploading episodes without explanation. Six years later, people on the subreddit for the podcast still complain about this, and to a certain degree I understand them.
This is a podcast I have listened to all the way through three times, and I have only ever listened to maybe three individual episodes of other podcasts more than once, so it was annoying to not have any more episodes. And annoying that there was no reason given for the ending.
I know that people are under no obligation to let internet strangers into their lives, no matter how parasocial the relationship is, even accounting for any financial benefits the creator may have gained from the relationship, but it did feel strange, as evidenced by the fact that people are still complaining about it on a subreddit six years later.
Now, I'm not comparing my University Challenge blog with 100 subscribers to the massively successful podcast Hello Internet, but to the outside observer, the same kind of ending will have seemed to be taking place.
The longer I wait to say anything, though, the harder it gets. But I don't want to ghost you all, so I will first of all reference a series of messages I sent to a friend in 2017 when I had been ghosting him for a while.
Okay, I’ll break down the stages of the non reply
- Stage 1, simple innocent lack of sharpness
- Stage 2, giving you a taste of your own medicine
- Stage 3, you had now sent so many that the idea of responding became something of an overwhelming task, not something you can achieve in a quick 5 minutes
- Stage 4, I was away and basically not sending anyone any messages, even my family over Christmas
- Stage 5, I was starting to enjoy the extent to which the tables had turned
- Stage 6, began to fear you
- Stage 7, kept trying to reply but you were sending in so much new stuff that I couldn’t keep up with the changes. You’ve now sent over 60 in a row.
- Stage 8, decided to pre-type a draft response so I wouldn’t miss anything out
The key stage here is 3 - the larger the gap, the more overwhelming the need to respond. This is a byproduct of the age of instantaneous communication. It can feel like we need to reply to people immediately, and then when we don't, the scale of the response needed starts to feel larger. If you go one day without a message, you don't need to acknowledge it; if you go one month, then it feels like you need to make up for it.
Let's Get Parasocial
How, then, does one make up for the fact that one hasn't reviewed the first sixteen episodes of University Challenge, having reviewed every episode of the previous ten years?
Well, I know I said that creators owe their audiences nothing in terms of innermost life details, but I'm going to share some anyway. I'm having a kid. Okay, that's just one detail, but it's a pretty big one.
Because of this, I had decided that I wasn't going to review University Challenge this year, but as I write this, it's eight weeks in and things feel strange (and yes, it took me another eight weeks to post this). I don't want to commit to catching up or reviewing every episode, but at the same time I don't want to just have disappeared without a trace.
I spent a few days last week making a Zine, and the creative juices I got flowing were delicious. I really enjoy writing and making things, and this blog was where I made a bunch of stuff for a long time. If you want to subscribe to my other writing, which I hope will continue even after my kid is born, you can do so here.
Joseph Kilvington
It was a newsletter, but I decided that I was disillusioned with the newsletter as a concept so pivoted to zines. Which for the moment will probably still have to be released in newsletter format (or you can ask me to send you the PDF and read/print it at your own leisure). But that's a discussion for another day. For now, let's rush through the series so far.
Stat Attack
Actually, we're not going to do that just yet. We are instead going to make this issue a full review of the first round. So 14 episodes in one. That gives me some more time to figure out how I'm going to do it, while not feeling the guilt at having not written anything, because I have, in fact, written this. You don't know that yet, of course, so if there are any among you who are furious at me for having not posted any reviews, you'll still be raging, but I'm going to have to accept that.
I've left this so long that we're almost at the end of the first round now, which is not what I intended. So, some stats.
No side has won with fewer than 165 points, which is the highest lowest winning score since, well, actually, it's only since 2025 when Edinburgh won with 175. And the previous year, Christ Church, Ox won with 180.
But before that, you have to go back to 2012 for such a high highest lowest winning score. This is perhaps not so surprising given that 2024 was the first series of murdered Faithful Amol Rajan's quizmastering. He upped the pace compared to Paxman, and that's reflected in the numbers. Last series it was Darwin who squeaked through with a HLWS of 135, and they then made a mockery of my prediction that they would lose in Round 2 by making it to the semi-finals.
However, I can't be too harsh on myself, because the chances of Darwin making the semis with a winning score of 135 was incredibly low. Only 5 of the 45 teams who have made it through with a winning score of 45 or less have made the semis.
SOAS thumped Edinburgh in the final match of Round One, meaning that St John's, Cam, LSE, Queen's, Belfast and Bristol are confirmed as the high-scoring losers.
In recent years, the repechage has not been a death knell, with one of the repechage winners making the semis in every year from 2020 to 2024 and also 2026, which is a pretty rollicking stat I think.
Work It
When I made the decision to not do this blog this year, it was with the idea that I would have far less time to dedicate to it. But my baby isn't here yet, so have I just been making excuses? We are also moving house at the moment, but that only really started in earnest about a month ago.
I've been giving it large, too, about how I'm sure I'll still have time to do all of the things I usually do once I become a parent (and it's only mostly been in jest. I understand I'll be busy, yeah, but little babies are asleep a bunch, so surely I'll be able to go for a run, right? Kind of seems like people are exaggerating the grind). I've also been mocking the amount of work people ascribe to moving house - all you have to do is put stuff in boxes, isn't it?
The past few weeks, however, have knocked the stuffing out of my bravado. I've been driving back and forth from the Highlands to the North East of England, looking at houses, bidding on houses, having an offer rejected, having an offer accepted, speaking to solicitors, getting home reports which eventually come back showing many issues, so we withdrew the offer and decided to rent somewhere instead. All of this after getting a puncture on one of the journeys, which then involved a 14-hour odyssey on the back of five separate tow trucks to get back down south. So maybe things aren't as simple as I thought. Maybe I'll be wrong about having a kid too. Maybe that will involve a decent amount of hard graft.
So I think I've probably made the right decision in stopping the blog. It still feels strange though, because I've been at this for ten years.
370 episodes of University Challenge have been subject to my discerning observations, and in a way it feels like I should have more to show for a decade of work. If I'd been making YouTube videos for ten years, I'd surely have a few thousand subscribers. If I'd been making TikToks or Instagram Reels. But that's not what I did. I decided to write reviews of a quiz show on Tumblr at a time when the written word was clearly a declining medium. I niched down too hard, possibly, and then made no effort (other than periodic posts on Reddit over the past year or so) to target the actual niche community for whom I was writing. Which is not to say that had I done that I would have been rolling in it, but it probably explains the relative lack of success. I do think there would have been more subscribers if I'd started the email list during the heyday of Twitter, when people would actually see my posts and click the links. By the time I realised that Twitter was dead and buried, the ship had sailed and any following I had built there was worth far less than it had been.
Where are we, then? Do I feel like this has been time wasted, because I'm not a rich influencer? I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a part of me that felt like that, but I also know that things don't just get handed to you. You don't automatically become a success because you do something 370 times. You have to actually try and make it a success, beyond the doing of the thing. There is no build it and they will come. Am I a better writer than I was when I started this? Probably. I've certainly had the practice, and reading some of the early stuff I can see some things which could be improved. But that's still the same now. I am too wordy and could do with an extra edit when I post stuff like this.
But it also paid me the first money I ever made for my writing, so I will always be grateful to the people who took a leap on my Patreon, and I am definitely proud of the stuff I wrote over there, where I took the extra time to give it another editing pass.
I'll stop before I get too sappy, but there have been great times too. I learned how to make a website, how to make an eBook, and interacted with a load of lovely people. I just never figured out how to go viral. And my problem, as I said earlier, is that I thought going viral was a thing that just happened. And sometimes it is, sometimes it's the right post at the right time, but that's not the kind of virality that comes from a review of University Challenge (unless I'd posted something incredibly divisive and probably hateful).
That's the kind of virality that comes from a video of a dog pulling a funny face. The kind of going viral I should have been going for if I wanted to build a big following is more considered, more zeitgeisty, more meme-y. And I never thought about doing stuff like that. Not that I thought I was more highbrow, more serious, above that kind of thing. It just didn't occur to me. I thought that you just posted about University Challenge and then eventually every single University Challenge fan would find and like the blog.
So maybe I'll be back at some point, if it turns out I've got more time on my hands when I'm a father, but maybe this is the end. I didn't want to leave without saying something, and now it's too late to actually do the mega review of the first round, so I'm going to have to suck it up and post what I have.
With that in mind, it's goodnight from me.
Member discussion