Brandon Blackwell interview: 'I didn't win University Challenge because I was born clever'

The British public now knows Brandon Blackwell as the charismatic quizzing star of University Challenge. But we almost had Brandon: Mastermind champion. You see, it was Mastermind that first tempted the student from Jamaica, Queens, New York, to study at a British university.

“What originally happened was, I wanted to do Mastermind because that was the only British quiz show I’d ever heard of,” he explains over the phone from his US home. At the time, he was finishing a degree at NYU and dreaming of a trip across the Atlantic. “I wanted to get a Master’s, and aside from that I wanted to go to Britain for three to six months and train as a quizzer because Britain has the best quiz infrastructure.

“I went on the Mastermind site," he continues, "and it said you had to be a legal resident. The easiest way to do that without staying in Britain for five years and getting married was to do a Master’s, which I was planning to do anyway. So I had those two separate goals and they clicked.” He settled on Imperial, and in the course of his Mastermind research he stumbled across the show that was to make him a cult figure with British viewers. “It turns out that if you google ‘quiz show’ and ‘university’ and ‘Britain’ a show called University Challenge comes up. I put in an application for both, and it turned out that you can’t go on both shows at the same time so I thought, OK, I’ll study for University Challenge.”

Wouldn't Mastermind have been a walkover for him? He says not. "Here's the thing. When I started [practising] I was bad at both shows but I realised it was easier to get better at University Challenge and the reason for that is that the questions are mostly academic in nature. You just study all that stuff and you read about it. But British pop culture - there's no definite guide to what's in the cultural zeitgeist. The general knowledge would be tough."

What would his Mastermind specialist subjects have been? “The Nobel Prize. And Ethelred the Unready, just to throw things off a little.”

Brandon – he likes to go by his first name “for personal reasons, not for aesthetic ones like I’m Neymar or something” – was the undisputed star of the Imperial team, and the series. He had many fans but was accused of being arrogant, criticised both for scowling and laughing.

Yet on the phone from the New York home he shares with his mother and grandmother (the final was filmed last year, and his Master’s is done), the 26-year-old isn’t cocky in the slightest. He’s chatty and warm and keen to praise both his teammates and his Corpus Christi, Cambridge rivals, particularly their captain, Ian Wang. He thinks some of the misconceptions about him were cultural – he’s a New Yorker after all, and they’re not known for their lack of self-belief – and others were because of the TV format.

“You don’t hear us speak, aside from conferring with our teammates or giving answers – it’s a very high-intensity environment. I think everybody gets a worse rep than normal on television. And a lot of it was frustration in the earlier games – they see me get five starters and make a face and think, ‘Oh, he doesn’t want to be here,’ but actually I’m thinking, ‘I wish I had eight.’ People were construing my mannerisms as arrogance or smugness or me thinking the show’s below me – I think the two million questions I did in preparation will find that to be false.”

Preparation is everything with Brandon. He has been appearing on television quizzes since the age of 14, when he was on a High School version of the US hit show Jeopardy!, has appeared on the US version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (of the recently dramatised Charles Ingram case, he scoffs: "He was clearly cheating!") and all in all has won more than £300,000 in prize money – some of it to fund a medical procedure for his grandmother.

He is a member of the Quiz League of London and cheerfully claims that when he joined the adult circuit aged 20 "I spent five years going to every quiz I could to get experience, and being completely out of my depth. I'd go to pub quizzes by myself and come dead last. So I'm used to embarrassing myself."

Brandon's formidable general knowledge is not out of reach for the rest of us, he claims, because we all have the ability to improve our recall.

"That's what I've been doing the entire time. It's not because I was born clever and think I’m so great, it’s because I’ve worked very hard specifically on this skill. The main thing that I find when I talk to people who don’t quiz is that they call it ‘trivia’.

"That’s what makes it hard to remember: once you add a connotation that it’s not important. The easiest way to remember something is to find something interesting or important about it and that helps you internalise it. A lot of the stuff I happen upon is from 3am Wikipedia rabbit-hole binges.”

But it's not just general knowledge. The key to Imperial’s success was partly down to the way they played, he explains.

“When we got together, we realised we were four players with a lot of the same strengths, and would end up stepping on each other’s toes. So what we really focused on in our practices was teamwork and game play mechanics. So for example, when Paxman says, ‘Here’s your bonus on such and such,’ then this person will lead the conversation. Each of the four of us had confidence in the other three."

He adds: "I've put more time into studying the show than I probably have doing my Master's. I analysed the show down to an atomic level."

Another part of his prep was watching Jeremy Paxman on YouTube, after struggling to understand everything the presenter said. "I realised there were a few things I wasn't picking up because of his accent, so I ended up digging up old Newsnight episodes from 2004 and watching a couple of dozen. You can tell from the back and forth in a couple of episodes that I felt familiar with him, and that's because I'd watched them."

Brandon wants more representation on University Challenge – not just more black people like him, but more women (the final was an all-male affair) and more working class kids in "this traditional, posh competition". "I want people who aren't necessarily white and upper class and Oxbridge to watch the show and think, 'Oh, I can do that.'" Coming to Imperial was the first time he had left the US.

He was aware of being one of the very few black contestants on the show. "And I know that's something people are going to focus on whether they want to admit it or not. It was something my mom and grandma made me very aware of: the second you say something that makes you look cocky, people are going to say, 'He doesn't have any decorum, he doesn't have any etiquette, he doesn't belong there.'"

One of the reasons that the criticism has been water off a duck’s back is his first experience of television, on the Jeopardy! show. After his appearance, he excitedly scanned Facebook to see what people thought of his performance.

"For context, it's November 11 2008 - a week to the day after Barack Obama got elected president, so everybody's happy, Kumbaya, post-racial America. About 20 per cent of the comments were, 'Go, Brandon, you did well.'

"Another 20 per cent were, 'This guy's a jerk' or whatever. and 60 per cent were racially charged – a lot of n-words, saying I was ‘uppity’. At that point I was 14, super-happy about being on the show. And I was like, well, this kind of stinks.” Since then, he says, "I try not to take anything personally."

What next for Brandon? His own TV series? He sounds bashful: "Well, that would be for TV companies to decide." He plans to compete in other shows in future, though not British television ones as they require a visa and his has expired.

He has landed his first job - mindful of his privacy, he declines to say what it is - but the Covid-19 outbreak has led to the start date being postponed.

In the meantime, he’s filling his lockdown time, like the rest of us, by staying at home and quizzing.