A Starter for Guildhall School

This Summer, Guildhall students competed in the legendary BBC quiz show University Challenge for the very first time, with the School’s previous appearances limited to the format’s alumni specials. We sat down with teammates Sam Warburton (Horn 2026) and Dáire Toal (Electronic & Produced Music 2026) to talk that beret and that wrong answer, and to find out exactly what we are teaching them at Guildhall.

Forming the team

Sam: I live in a house where University Challenge is watched every single week and I always thought “wouldn’t it be cool to go on there?”. So when I saw an advert for try-outs at the Students’ Union, I was keen. I remember saying to people that there was absolutely no way I was going to make this team. I was surprised then when I was told I was one of the highest scorers in the written test! Once the team had been formed, we started rehearsing using the swanky Milton Court meeting pods (complete with air conditioning!). Tara, our captain, showed up to our first meeting in January with the official University Challenge book, which her family had given to her for Christmas because they heard she might be going on the show. Once we had the book, it was super easy...! 

Dáire: I decided to audition because I thought it would be really funny to do it. But then the questions were really hard, way harder than I thought they were going to be! I didn’t think we’d get to the TV stage. That’s the best thing. Once we did, it was mission accomplished, because I didn’t think we’d get as far as that.

The interview

Sam: We were invited for an interview in White City which was a really unique adventure. We had to do a practice quiz and I was not feeling particularly optimistic at this stage, because my performance was not especially good. Then we had an interview – they wanted to see our team dynamic and whether we had any kind of personality whatsoever. I went home thinking that’s the end of our journey. But it turns out that it wasn’t. Tara received a phone call a few weeks later and said “we’re on, let’s go!” It was so exciting, I could not believe it at all.

Dáire: We did well, and we were charming, charismatic and broadly knowledgeable enough to get on. It’s funny the way that you can try really hard to get knowledge in, but sometimes knowledge is coming from all over. And you’re pulling from the most bizarre places.

The filming

Dáire: Filming it felt like a bit of a fever dream. I decided to wear a pinstripe suit that I like. But when I got to Euston station that morning, the guys shouted “no you’re not allowed stripes! They’re bad for TV!” Mercifully, it turned out that it was horizontal stripes that aren’t allowed. But I had a very nervous train ride up! And I just like wearing a beret. You’ve got to dress up, you’ve got to look interesting, you’ve got to look striking. But it’s a hard thing to prepare for. It’s hard to decide what to wear to sum yourself up for your 15 minutes of fame. Once I walked onto the set, I began to feel sick. After a very slow start during the first 10 minutes, I remember thinking “oh this is going to be one of those famous ones where Guildhall score no points.” But once we started scoring more points, I remember looking over and we were on 90 and I thought, “oh this isn’t embarrassing anymore! If we get no more points for the rest of the show, then awesome.” And then it kept ratcheting up. We suddenly felt like we might actually do well. I noticed the editors used my face as reactions to questions a lot – I didn’t know I was so expressive!

Sam: I was very apprehensive going into it because I have quite a slow processing speed and I was really concerned that I was not going to be able to come up with anything quickly enough. When we arrived at Media City in Salford, we found out we would be competing against Darwin College, Cambridge. We were thinking “ah, right, OK.” When we walked into the studio it was so strange. Roger Tilling, who shouts out the names live in the studio, sits on a tall chair like an umpire in tennis. He has a full vantage point of the studio. And then we met host Amol Rajan and he was just a really friendly guy and was cracking jokes the whole time. He’s so quick to put you at ease. We had to practise pressing our buzzers because they are really hard to press. They’re kind of resistant and spongy. It’s really strange. They made us feel okay about making mistakes, even if it meant they would have to stop the filming. But it turned out that Amol was the person who made the most mistakes – and it happened right at the beginning of the episode during his intro. We had to start over – we heard the theme song again and had to introduce ourselves once more. It was so helpful to have that happen, because we no longer felt like we had to be perfect. 

The timing of my first correct answer was crucial, because we’d sat there watching Darwin rack up points for about 10 minutes, thinking, “oh no, is this ever going to right itself?” So, I felt pretty good about that one. It’s funny watching the episode back and watching Darwin starting to run away with it, but then my first right answer comes and it feels like the situation is rescued.

In terms of the reaction from friends and family, they said they found the episode really enjoyable because of how well matched the teams were. So, I actually feel very, very lucky that we were put up against such a well-matched team because we were able to enjoy ourselves, and we made good television. I think that the main reaction from everyone was, “wow, that was so close. What a great episode."

That wrong answer

Dáire: My nightmare question was the bonus on the electronic music genre. I’ll literally never, ever get over that. It really annoyed me that I couldn’t remember DJ Shadow. And when I didn’t get that, I remember taking a drink of water and looking up and realising Amol was halfway through the next question and I thought “I can’t ask him to repeat that. But no one knows!” If I’d heard the Bristol part of the question, I probably would’ve said Massive Attack, but for the Electronic and Produced Music student to not get the trip hop round…It made me question something! It made me listen to Massive Attack again. When Amol said, “what are they teaching you on that course?”, I was thinking, “Amol don’t start with me!” That’s the difficult thing with a specialism as well. It’s often those things that you sweat because you know them more. Obviously, I should’ve known it, but there’s just so many things going on in your head, particularly when it’s the one question you’re supposed to know. But yeah, I’ll never, ever live it down. I can’t ever listen to DJ Shadow enough to get over the pain of that.

The screening

Dáire: I was at a friend’s barbeque in Ireland on the night it went out. Everyone just bundled in and I couldn’t watch it because I knew that Massive Attack question was coming. A lot of these people had never seen University Challenge before, so a lot of them were saying the questions were really hard. But I’ve had so many messages from people I haven’t seen in ages asking if it was me they saw and revealing that they tried to get on years ago. My Mum and Dad got texts from friends saying, “just seen this fella on the TV looks a lot like one of yours.” It’s been really lovely. You forget that the show is a very beloved institution. People really love watching it. It makes you realise the scale of the programme and how much people really enjoy it. It feels like people are delighted to see us as Guildhall the team, and as individuals, do ourselves proud and acquit ourselves well. Especially because with Cambridge there is a whole infrastructure – they have a tradition of competing. They are so prepared and they have generations of teams that are all building on that wisdom.

The future

Dáire: I hope that Guildhall can do it again next year because I really felt a sense that we were representing conservatoires, proving that conservatoires are legitimate universities and that University Challenge is not just for the usual suspects. Our team captain Tara is the only one who hasn’t since graduated, so only she remains. She was fantastic and so intelligent , and I hope she gets another go because she’s so young and she has so much in her head. It was a lovely way to round off my Guildhall experience. Guildhall was transformational for me. I would be in a very different position if I hadn’t gone. I’m so glad to have had two years there because a year goes by so quickly. But the people you meet and the knowledge you get that isn’t even from a classroom necessarily, but it might be from a conversation you have with someone or someone showing you a piece of music. It’s such an incredible environment to develop in. I’ll miss it enormously, but I hope that I now have connections and friendships that are going to last. At the moment, I’m back in Ireland, doing a lot of traditional singing and music, and learning more about the Irish language. I plan to come back to London when I tour with my band Defender at the end of the year, as well as doing some teaching between London and Belfast.

Sam: Guildhall has been exactly what I needed to set me up for the kind of career that I want. I especially think that having access to the specific Orchestral Artistry Masters programme has been extremely helpful for me because of the hands-on audition training you get from the London Symphony Orchestra, and the really focused orchestral environment, which is what I've always wanted. You gain professional experience from doing the course, which is really cool, and when it came to situations where I was auditioning or going into an orchestra in a professional capacity for the first time, I was relatively at ease. I knew what I was supposed to be doing and it felt very doable. Now I'm going to be freelancing on the orchestral scene in the UK and the experiences I've had of doing that so far have been very enjoyable. I'm hoping to get stuck in and get as much work as I can.