Retweet if you want #Monkman's team to win the #UniversityChallenge final tonight!#TeamMonkman#MyHero pic.twitter.com/0RBdtleQXM
— Hacker T Dog (@CBBC_Hacker) April 10, 2017
A Canadian economics student at Cambridge University is a sensation in Britain, after leading his college’s team to a nail-biting second place finish on a popular quiz show.
With his itchy buzzer finger and a voice so intense one newspaper described it as “a sergeant major roaring instructions to deaf recruits in a high wind,” Eric Monkman, 29, from Oakville, Ont., captain of the team from Wolfson College, Cambridge, quickly became a cult hero among viewers of University Challenge, a popular long-running quiz show hosted by the famously combative broadcaster Jeremy Paxman.
“I am surprised that so many people think I am angry,” he told Cambridge News.
“I am generally not an angry person, and my mannerisms are a result of intense concentration, not anger. I like to bring this concentration to every activity I participate in that requires it, whether it is taking a note at my old job or playing on a televised quiz show.”
His fame burst through into the mainstream after he defeated an Oxford team in the playoff rounds, captained by his English friend Bobby Seagull, a dapper, privately educated Londoner, and the pair were courted by media as a charming odd couple.
But Monkman lost in the final this week, ending his run on British television, and inspiring demands that he somehow be given a show of his own.
Much of his popularity is for his physical appearance, with his intense facial expressions from under an awkward fringe of bangs, his collar poking out from his sweater, and a grin so wide and determined that it looks like the emoji for a forced smile.
“I wore the same outfit for every recording, because it was one fewer thing to think about. I try to keep all my mental capacity (for questions). The only thing that changed was whether my collars were tucked in or not, which people noticed,” he told the Daily Telegraph.
Allison Pearson, writing in the same paper, described his “oversized titanium jaw, presumably designed to counteract the vast weight of brain that sits above, into which the contents of the British Library have been downloaded. There is nothing that Monkman does not know. He knows things you do not need to know. He knows about English counties which even English people have not heard of. Why? How?”
Naturally, he became a hashtag on Twitter and a craze arose of depicting him as various heroic figures, from Batman’s sidekick Robin to the Emperor Napoleon and Rocky Balboa. Now the hashtag #monkmania is full of funny videos of, for example, his pronunciation of the Latin name for the logical fallacy “post hoc ergo propter hoc.”
After his team’s defeat in the final, Monkman, who once planned on becoming a physicist, met his hero Stephen Hawking at the trophy presentation.
“I have said in the past that it is not clear whether intelligence has any long-term survival value. Bacteria multiply and flourish without it,” Hawking told the competitors, enigmatically. “But it is one of the most admirable qualities, especially when displayed by such young minds.”
Monkman, who did his undergraduate studies at the University of Waterloo, finished a masters in economics at Cambridge last summer. He intended to do a PhD, but found the work more theoretical and less practical than he had hoped.
He has applied to appear on Jeopardy! but was not accepted.
I'll say it one more time: I really appreciate the support of my viewers and followers. I never expected such a response.
— Eric Monkman (@e_monkman) April 10, 2017
His sister Katie, a doctor, told BBC Radio 4 that the death of their father when Eric was 13 had a strong effect on him, causing anxiety that he managed to ease through reading. She also recalled his distaste for the traditional Canadian summertime rite of passage of the wilderness canoe trip.
“We’d often canoe in the rain, and my brother really disliked that,” she said, “he got very stubborn (when he was) maybe five or six, and after a number of long canoe trips in the rain he put his foot down and said he was not going canoeing again. My father could not reason with him.”
He is in a relationship with a woman called Jiang Na, a law professor who lives in China, and only knows about his new fame from what he tells her.
“She doesn’t really see much that’s happening (to me) from China, so she only knows what I tell her. She thinks it’s a bit strange.”
He is also reportedly learning to play the piano and woodworking as he considers his future, whether in academia or not.
As the final show ended, Paxman thanked “all you guys, of whatever gender.” Then he added, in reference to Monkman’s superhuman reputation, “or species.”
• Email: jbrean@postmedia.com | Twitter: JosephBrean
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