BBC University Challenge legend who got impossible questions right lands huge role

A contestant who appeared on University Challenge earlier this year has now landed a job on the show. Harrison Whitaker captained a team of his classmates from Cambridge’s Darwin College, and it was as a result of his cultural knowledge that his group got through to the semi-finals.

Even show hosts were astonished by his peformance, with Amol Rajan gushing that he was “absolutely on fire”. Now Harrison is set to make a reappearance on University Challenge, behind the scenes this time, as he writes questions for the upcoming series. Harrison shared his excitement about his new job with the Times, saying: “It’s thrilling — and a bit strange – to go from answering questions on one series to writing them for the next. I just hope that I can play some small part in future contestants and teams having as much fun on the show as I did with Darwin.”

Although it might seem like quite a quick turnaround, ITV bosses have explained that the episodes Harrison featured in were actually shot last April, but only aired in 2025.

Harrison’s team faced off against students from the University of Bristol in the quarter-finals, where he answered eight out of nine questions correctly to earn Darwin College 160 points. This meant they narrowly beat the Bristol team, who were awarded 150.

Some of the questions Harrison answered correctly covered subjects such as griots, 3D printing, The Crying of Lot 49, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Richard II, and a tie-breaker about Keats’s Ode to Autumn

The PhD student is from the US, and went to university in New York and Colombia before going on to pursue a doctorate in film and screen studies at Cambridge.

Some of his specialty subjects include critical theory, counterculture theory, and the construction of gender.

While his team sadly did not make it through the University Challenge semi-final victorious, their performance was enjoyed by audiences who doubled over in fits of laughter at one of their answers to a musical question.

When asked to name a song about an area in the US and the singer who wrote it based on a map of the country and photo of the artist, one of Harrison’s teammates said: “This is so wrong – is it Chattanooga Choo Choo?”

Even show host Amol Rajan was left chucking as he responded that the right answer was Nutbush City Limits by Tina Turner.