A FORMER Richard Huish student is set to battle it out on University Challenge next week, representing SOAS University of London.

Tom Hasler, 22, from Bishop's Hull, Taunton, will appear on our screens as the captain of the University Challenge team for the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). 

The third-year BSc Development Economics student, who previously attended Castle School, tried out to appear on the BBC show in November 2023. He was selected as the captain of the university's team alongside three other permanent team members; Janet Delves, Ella Dorn and Cameron Lambert, plus one reserve Lola Finch.

Tom's first-round episode will be broadcast on BBC2 at 8.30pm on Monday, November 11, with his team facing opponents from St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

Speaking about the process, Tom said: "I saw try-outs for University Challenge advertised around my university's campus, and so I went along.

"This try-out consisted of a quiz comprised of previous University Challenge questions; whoever shouted out the answer first got the point, and the five highest-scoring individuals at the end of this quiz became the team.

"After we'd introduced ourselves to each other and given our details to the Students' Union, the first thing I did was to phone home to my parents to let them know the exciting news."

The student and his teammates attended "various pub quizzes" to practise their skills, but soon found that the type of questions "weren't quite what we were looking for".

Instead, the team began testing themselves on past questions aired on the show.

Tom added: "In January we had an interview at ITV studios' offices, where we were interviewed by some of the producers along with a prospective team from Goldsmiths.

"They asked us about team formation, any coaching we had received, how the captain and reserve were selected, what we had done to prepare - both individually and as a team - and what particular areas of knowledge interested us or would be our dream question.

"There was also a written quiz of forty questions, played to us as an audio recording, giving us seven seconds per question to answer."

A few weeks after the interview in January Tom received the news that they'd made it through to the televised rounds.

He said: "In March, we took the train up to Manchester for filming. After having lunch, and being very careful not to spill anything on our clothes, we went to the studios for a briefing before our actual filming began.

"One interesting thing that we had to do was to be powdered, so that our faces wouldn't have too much glare on the cameras.

"We were also prohibited, for technical reasons, from wearing anything white or with horizontal stripes - or anything branded or political, of course."

Tom added that producers had told him that most of the show's questions were "set by a freelance panel of academics", and then sorted for the different quiz rounds by the production team depending on the difficulty.

He added: "Walking into the studio was a surreal experience, having seen the set many times previously as a viewer."

After initial nerves, Tom said the show's host Amol Rajan quickly put the contestants "at ease". 

Following the match, Tom's team headed to the pub with their opponents to get to know them and hear how they'd prepared.