Starter For Ten

Starter for Ten is a charming, largely insubstantial British film from 2006 that seldom deviates from the standard coming-of-age template. But I found it interesting from a personal perspective, as the story revolves around a college student involved in an academic quiz program.

When I was a college student, I couldn't shoot a basketball or hit a curveball, but god damn it I knew how to wield a College Bowl buzzer. I say this without any hope of being able to prove it, but I was the best College Bowl player at SUNY-Stony Brook in the early eighties. For three years I captained the team at the regional intercollegiate tournaments. We had middling results those three years--we got slaughtered by Princeton, but lost to Columbia on the last question (the answer was the Aurora Borealis, but a Columbia student just beat me to the buzzer). It was all great fun, in that you were hobnobbing with freaks just like yourself, who knew all the presidents in order, all the Academy Award-winning best pictures, and could tell you that "To err is human" was written by Alexander Pope.

That quote is mentioned in Starter for Ten, and it's a key bit, because the hero, played by James McAvoy, is quite the fuck-up. He comes from a working class town and gets into the University of Bristol, which is a step-up but it's still not Oxford or Cambridge. He tries out for University Challenge, the British equivalent of College Bowl (I did some Wikipedia research and learned that the show ran from 1962 to 1987, and was hosted by the unlikely-named Bamber Gascoigne) and ultimately makes the team. Also on the team is the bone-crushingly beautiful Alice Eve, whom he falls for (because he is male) but makes a buddy of Rebecca Hall, who spends most of her free time at demonstrations. Because we are led to believe that McAvoy only knows two women at school, we see where this headed in the first third of the film. The rest is just waiting, but it's not a bad wait.

The film is set in 1985, so there's lots of period music, mostly by mope bands like The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, New Order and Psychedelic Furs. There's also the requisite elements of this kind of film, in addition to the choice between two women. There's the coming to terms with one's mother's sexuality (he discovers her in flagantre delicto with the ice cream man), and the drifting away from ties with mates from his home town (personified by Dominic Cooper as his slacker best friend). There's a neat and orderly gloss to all this that suggests either studio interference or a reluctance by the writer, David Nicholls (who wrote the source novel), or the director, Tom Vaughan, from daring to be different.

Still, the film is very kind to its characters, particularly Alice Eve's beautiful blonde. It would have been easy to paint her as some kind of man-eating bitch, but the script and actress treat her fairly. And, truth be told, if someone that beautiful were on my quiz team I would have done the exact same thing.