Starter For Ten (three stars)

Director Tom Vaughan Writer David Nicholls Stars Ian Bonar, Alice Eve, Rebecca Hall, Catherine Tate Certificate 12A Running time 96 minutes Country UK / USA Year 2006

Don't let the pathetically weak opening scene - a flashback of a university applicant as a boy, watching University Challenge and guessing the answers - put you off. Starter For Ten actually manages to get better. Although nominally about qualifying to be on the TV famous game show, the film is really a light-hearted coming-of-age drama set in the 80s. It has convincing performances and a lovingly recreated period of Thatcher Britain, when corduroy was cool and Kate Bush was for intellectuals.

Working class Brian was not born clever - he has to work at it. Gaining entry to a posh university, he meanders through undergraduate days with a classic dilemma: do you fall in love with the intellectually attractive brunette or the blonde goddess? Karl Marx, Freud and John Lennon, like smoking hash and learning how to do blowbacks, are all part of the social landscape of what is trendy and what isn't. Half way in, the film subject matter allows plenty of social commentary on the irksome British class divisions that penetrate romance, friendship and the University Challenge team.

Versatile Catherine Tate puts in an amiable performance as Brian's ever supportive and cooing mother: she's having an affair with the ice-cream van man ("you can hear him coming"). This enjoyable no-brainer of a movie is aided and abetted by a blistering 80s soundtrack with bands such as The Cure, Psychedelic Furs, Buzzcocks, Yazoo, The Smiths, Tears for Fears, The Undertones - and Kate Bush.

Starter for Ten is not searing drama, but it does make a pleasant and worthwhile trip down nostalgia lane. The characters are ones we can love and care about and the movie mostly avoids predictability and cheese. If "the most important questions in life are the ones we already know the answer to," and are not exactly rocket science, the subject matter of Starter For Ten is a welcome and unpretentious antidote to the plethora of similar American teen comedies. If you like the music, it's worth going for that alone.

"Starter for 10" is a 2006 British film set in 1985 about a working class young man, Brian Jackson (James McAvoy) who attends Bristol University on scholarship and is accepted on the team of "University Challenge," a televised college quiz show. He's crazy for a hot blonde on the team, Alice (Alice Eve). After a disastrous post-Christmas visit to her house when his penchant for movie quotes gets him in trouble, he spends New Year's Eve with another girl, the more grounded and politically active Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall) -- but when he wishes her Happy New Year, he calls her Alice. He has a habit of blowing it, and the best is yet to come.

I actually sought out this film because I am a huge fan of Benedict Cumberbatch. Here, Cumberbatch plays the fastidious nerdy head of the College Quiz team (even though they keep losing),and he's hilarious. When he gets into a fight with one of Brian's friends from home, the guy punches him, and Cumberbatch's response is to start flapping his hands on him as if he's shaking out a dishtowel.

The acting in this film is very good, and it's interesting to see that all these young people have come up together. Cumberbatch and Eve are in the upcoming Star Trek; Rebecca Hall and Cumberbatch starred in the miniseries "Parade's End," and McAvoy, of course, has had a marvelous career, making a splash in films right around the time this film was released. The supporting cast is led by the wonderful Lindsay Duncan and Charles Dance as Alice's parents, and Catherine Tate as Brian's mother.

While "Starter for 10" is a little predictable, it has a nice quality about it and gives one a feel for university life, leaving home, meeting new people, and the adjustments that need to be made.

Starter for 10 is a coming of age tale with a lot of 1980s music but a slight and bland story.

Brian Jackson (James McAvoy) loved facts ever since he was a wee nipper and has enrolled at Bristol University where he has a chance to enter University Challenge then a long running ITV show with Bamber Gascoigne.

He also falls for lively, flirty, posh and good looking blonde Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve) but also gets entangled with lovely, lively, left wing activist and good looking brunette, Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall).

When it comes to the television quiz he has a testy relationship with captain of the team Patrick Watts (Benedict Cumberbatch) and things get worse when one of Brian's hometown friends gets involved in a fight with Patrick.

The film has a cast of youngsters who have gone on to become famous such Cumberbatch, McAvoy as well as Dominic Cooper and James Corden. Mark Gatiss is a convincing Bamber Gascoigne and the recreation of University Challenge is very good but that is a very small part of the film despite the title of the movie.

The rest of the film about a young teenager discovering a romantic awakening in Thatcher's Britain is rather humdrum. The film is an adaptation of the book which may be more spiky than this.