'Agonising!' The University Challenge final, reviewed by last year's winner

It was always going to be tense. The first non-Oxbridge final since 2013 was a match between two teams who had already demonstrated their quick-buzzing quizzing nous. Nothing was guaranteed, but it was safe to assume that this would be a virtuosic duet.

To reach the final, the cosmopolitan St Edmund Hall quartet of Pisharody, Bresson, Leo and Fry comfortably beat York and the Cambridge colleges Clare and Emmanuel before showing signs of fallibility in their second quarter-final, when their slow start against Bristol saw them win by just 20 points. Their semi-final against Darwin College, Cambridge was billed as a titanic battle between the series’ best buzzers – Leo v Golfinos – a clash from which Oxford emerged narrowly victorious.

Edinburgh’s Booth, Malusà, Fitz-James and Campbell Hewson, on the other hand, took the scenic route to the final. They beat Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, UCL and Manchester, then lost to Durham in their second quarter-final. They managed to redeem themselves first against Bristol, in their third quarter-final, then when they faced Durham again in the semi-final, winning 180-110.

The final began inauspiciously for Edinburgh when they immediately dropped to -5 on a starter on Morris dancing, with St Edmund Hall’s Fry giving the correct answer. The second starter went to Leo, whose team increased their lead by getting all three of the accompanying bonuses. No one managed the third starter, but Edinburgh’s Malusà got the fourth one, bringing his team back into positive figures. From there, things became truly nail-biting: look away for a second and you’d miss something big.

Both picture rounds were enjoyably quirky, especially the rather novel one where Shakespeare and Venn diagrams – excuse the pun – intersected. However, the music round, though inventive – three songs per question, each involving a colour, were played, and teams had to give the country whose horizontal tricolour flag those colours composed – was a bad fit for such a tense final, slowing down the action at a crucial stage.

And this match was anything but slow. A frenzy of questions on subjects as varied as Iron Maiden and Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams saw St Edmund Hall start strongly, fall behind, catch up then regain the smallest of leads. The end was as agonising as it was exciting: Edinburgh’s victory was achieved with the very last starter – a creative one linking Roman numerals and Liverpool – and cemented by two bonuses from an interrupted set on the Empress Theodora. The interruption, of course, came from the gong: Edinburgh won by 155 points to 140.

This was the best kind of match, one where you can’t let your concentration lapse for a second, where the pressure of an eroding lead or opportunity to overtake encourages you to try that risky buzz – and where even the viewers feel a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration in the closing minutes. It was refreshing to see a non-Oxbridge final and a non-Oxbridge winner, and the series couldn’t have ended on a more exciting note. Let’s hope the next one is just as dramatic as this.