Evan Davis, presenter of BBC Radio 4’s the Today programme, Dragon’s Den and The Bottom Line speaks about the art of journalism and impartiality to Oxford students, at Cherwell’s 90th Anniversary. This is followed by an interview with Antonia Tam.

Step 1: The Basics

The body-con skirt: the pencil skirt’s younger, sassier sister. While the latter could take you from the work wear to winebar, its more modern counterpart is a tighter, shorter, more student-friendly staple that reigns supreme in lecture theatres and nightclubs alike. But for all its versatility, the body-con skirt is one of those essentials that holds the perils of being all too generic and perhaps a tad tarty without a rich milieu of on season accessories – I’m thinking fur coats, silk shirts, and dramatic necklaces for starters.

As an evening piece it has the figure hugging benefits of sleek silhouette and providing it’s a good fabric the effect should be more Herve Leger than Jane Norman. To keep it classy balance out your bottom half with delicate floatiness, luxe layers or rich textures. By clashing the demure femininity of beads or lace with the undeniable sexiness of a great ass you’re set to straddle the style stakes from formal hall to the sweaty depths of Kukui. Then, in the headachy haze of your hangover the same little number, smothered with scruffy tees, granny knits, tights and boots, lends itself to a grungy easiness that will make tangled hair and the smudges of last night’s make-up seem deliberate.

The tan camisole is a perennial wardrobe staple that, contrary to what you might think, doesn’t have to scream ‘underwear’. With the right cut and good quality fabric – no Primark special will do – a camisole (in any shade) is an indispensable and versatile piece, perfect for injecting a bit of slink to a pair of jeans or a casual skirt. Layer under lace t-shirts or sheer blouses to nail the current trends, or under low-cut tops to keep you covered up for work. Tan or camel – the colours of the season – make a perfect accompaniment to an all black outfit.

Cigarette pants are an essential piece of any capsule wardrobe, the ideal solution to get you out of jeans and into smart power dressing. Yves Saint Laurent pioneered the androgynous look with the ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo for women in 1966, and the cigarette pant has transcended fashion fads as a style staple you can rely on to be smart, sexy and effortlessly cool. For an evening out, team with sky scraper heels and a glamorous top or sharp shirt and accessorize with statement jewelry – be bold and embrace your inner macho ego. The beauty of every statement piece is its versatility, so dress down a pair of cigarette pants with a casual tee and slouchy cardigan or grunge it up with boots and a leather jacket, guaranteed to turn heads in early morning lectures.

Coco Chanel introduced the LBD way back when in 1920, and what can I say? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. No capsule wardrobe is complete without the little black dress. Forget all your fair weather florals and high-waisted acquaintances the LBD is a gal’s best friend: always there in a time of need and never fails to put a smile on your face. With so many styles to choose from we have settled on this structured version from Zara which provides a powerful silhouette and is perfect for the winter weather. The simplicity of the dress means you can accessorize to the hilt with all things spangly and colourful. Brogues and patterned tights soften the look for daytime wear, whilst bright heels and Breakfast at Tiffany pearls will have you turning heads at any cocktail party.

As winter chills creep over Oxford, the one item that should never be missing from your capsule wardrobe is the classic blazer. Loved throughout the generations for its versatility and stylishness, it is the go-to piece to brighten up any outfit. Throw it over a light tea dress and ballet flats for easy chic, accessorising with studded gloves and ripped tights for that grungy edge. Or, for the hungover tute we all know so well, team with an oversized tee, leggings and comfy boots to gain extra style kudos. To take the look from day to night subtract the leggings, add a sexy body con skirt, sky high heels, pile on glamorous statement jewellery and exaggerate your make up. It’s effortless, elegant and sexy. Who would say no?

Step 2: The Accents

Keeping your basics to a monochrome palette makes it easy to co-ordinate an ‘look’ when you’re hungover at 8.45am before a 9am lecture, but sticking to black and white does not a stylish outfit make – no matter what the OxStu try to tell you. ‘Accents’ are the subtle, barely-noticable features that make separate pieces come together as a coherent whole, the glue that makes the parts stick, and are the most important part of fashion mathematics. You, and the people who compliment you on your outfit, probably don’t even realise you’re wearing them. The classic nude heel, the silver wrist cuff, the skinny tan belt – these little touches are the difference-makers and the definition of effortless style. Choosing the right accents can transform your outfit from drab to ‘dahling!’, and they are so subtle they can be worn to anywhere with anything – no worries about going from homework to happy hour!

Step 3: The Personality

This is where the fashion fun begins – open the dressing up box and start playing! There are no rules here – this stage is all about trusting your instincts and putting your personal fashion fingerprint on each item. Think back to the days where you used to dig through your mother’s jewllery box and make up bag and unleash that inner wild child again. The final step of fashion formula is all about expressing your creativity and making the basics your own. The key word here is statement: the statement shoes, coats and jewellery that provide pops of print and colour and turn heads everywhere. Think jewelled clutches, quirky necklaces, and bright tights that glam up your outfit and give an extra personal touch. Add on the accessories, multiply your confidence and the fashion equation is complete.

Rivalry isn’t the first word that comes to mind with Oxford Brookes. As one friend put it, ‘they think we’re rivals; actually they’re just jealous of us and we couldn’t give a shit about them.’ Like the ugly friend (the one with the ‘great personality’), we have a tendency to cast their students a pitiful gaze as we swan into the Rad Cam or pause to admire the architecture of our 400-year-old college, steeped with a rich history of famous alumni. And there are some pretty outdated stereotypes coming from both sides of the River Cherwell. To them, the University of Oxford is home to the Tolkien-wielding, socially-awkward recluse; to us, Brookes is home to the media studies student. So it’s about time to set the record straight: is Brookes really all binge-drinking, sex and drugs while we hole up in the library with our slippers and settle down for an all-nighter? Kim, a Brookes fresher, and I decided to swap for a day and find out who’s tame and who’s wild? Who’s clever and who’s dumb? And who really has it better?

Lectures vs. Tutorials

Helen:Now plenty of times last year when I excitedly told people that I’d got into Oxford was I met with the reply of ‘what, Brookes?’ Although seeming like a reflection on my intelligence (I prefer to think it wasn’t), Oxford seems to have set itself apart as the preserve of gifted yet obnoxious students to all the visitors that wander our arches and quads. Brookes doesn’t have a tutorial system like Oxford, and while it also doesn’t have every leading expert in the world on its books, you can’t fault the teaching. The students at Kim’s history of art lecture were more attentive than most I’ve seen at a 10am theology lecture and 10% of your course is reliant upon turning up to at least 8 out of 10 lectures (incidentally, I haven’t actually woken up in time for a lecture yet this term). If you miss the deadline for an essay at Brookes, you automatically get a zero (although Kim does only have one term…). I guess at Oxford the personal nature of a tutorial means that you can become friends with your tutor, and with friendship comes the occasional abuse of this privileged position when you miss a deadline. Oxford prides itself on the tutorial system for good reason; I don’t think a lecture could ever stretch me or I could enjoy it as much as a tutorial.

Kim:Apparently the one defining aspect of Oxford teaching is the tutorial system, unrivalled in its ability to strike fear into the heart of students. At Brookes, we only really see our tutors at our lectures, which are 12 hours each week, so it was really interesting to be able to join in with a tutorial. Interacting with a tutor on such a personal level as a tutorial was a little intimidating; however, everyone was extremely welcoming and friendly. I’m not sure whether it was down to the tutor, or the quality of the essays, or simply being so much more personal, but in the tutorial I picked up much more than I would in a lecture. At Brookes, tutorials are available to anyone but are not timetabled and need to be arranged privately with your tutor, which most people don’t, so I was startled at how much I picked up just in an hour and how effective (and not scary!) the tutorial system actually was.

Halls vs. College

Helen: RRenowned as one of the most expensive colleges in Oxford, yet still the poorest, my college, Pembroke, perhaps isn’t the greatest example of college accommodation. But compared to modern flats shared between 6 people at Clive Booth halls at least we have character and charm, and that counts for a lot more (if you ignore the 70s’ build at the back). I’d imagine the bedrooms at Kim’s halls were more conducive to any night-time activities than our paper thin walls and ceilings and the kitchen/living areas made it really homely, but that still wouldn’t make me leave our beautiful quads anytime soon.

Kim: The Clive Booth campus at Brookes these days is a construction site with some very ugly 1960s’ buildings so Pembroke was a real treat. I hate to admit Oxford’s better in any way than Brookes but the buildings and grounds of all of the colleges I looked at were gorgeous compared to ours. The whole college atmosphere with common rooms, formal halls (complete with sconsing) and staircases was a lot less Mallory Towers/Harry Potter than I imagined it would be, but there’s no way it can be as much fun. Our parties aren’t about to get broken up by a ‘junior dean’ if there are more than 10 people present.

Fuzzy Ducks vs. College Bop

Helen: My last encounter with Oxford Brookes was a Faithless gig at their student union. After spending the night locked in several ill-advised clinches with a Brookes’ boy named Drew, I discovered all my friends had left and I was stuck in Headington alone, drunk, with no money and the offer of a night of passion if I left by 9am so he could go to play football with his friends. I was apprehensive then at the idea of another Brookes’ night. Fuzzy Ducks promotes itself on the fact that several years ago FHM called it ‘the easiest place to get laid in the country’; with drunk girls, unfussy men, cheap drink, and plenty of costumes constructed from the odds and ends of Primark’s lingerie department, it isn’t difficult to see why it manages to hold onto its reputation. One fellow student called it ‘the biggest self-confidence boost’, which could either be put down to the ability to pull pretty much anyone you set your sights on or that fact that you’re guaranteed to look better than half the other clubbers. It did seem like a status thing for a Brookes’ guy to get with Oxford girls; Kim’s flat-mate was particularly proud of his current achievement in ‘university challenge’ (getting with a girl from every Oxford college, that is, not the TV show). The DJ’s cries of ‘Let’s show Oxford what we’re made of’ (tut, hanging preposition) whipped the crowd into a frenzy of drunken face-sucking, so Brookes, you’re welcome, I guess.

Kim: The word ‘bop’ evokes images of a 1950s swing dance in a village hall and its new definition as a ‘college disco’ didn’t really get me as excited as the college seemed to be getting about their ‘Halloween themed bop at Que Pasa’. In theory they sound fine, but from what I’d heard, it was all bad fancy dress and drunken snogs leading to a lot of banter/shame the next day. Sure enough, drinking games were in full swing when I arrived at Helen’s house because ‘you’ve got to be fucked to enjoy a bop’. Surprisingly, despite slightly-out-of-date R’n’B and enough Apple Sourz to burn away my stomach lining, I actually had a lot of fun. I guess the whole bop experience is based on the fact that you know nearly everybody there and you can get up to some illicit/incestuous/gossip-fuelling fun with a person you’ll have to make eye contact with for the next 3 years. Although that might be what makes bops good, a little anonymity is what makes Fuzzy Ducks great. If I want a little more of that kind of action I’ve been told a crew date followed by a Wednesday night at Shark End is the place to go. Any takers?

Oxford and Brookes. They’re different, for sure. I don’t think there’s going to be a day anytime soon when you hear the Union President heading for a pint at the Brookes’ SU or any Brookes’ student bemoaning the fact that they haven’t got 16 essays this term. But maybe we should concede (probably rather quietly, and just to ourselves) that we’re a lot more similar than most of us admit.

Phill Jupitus, no really it’s Phill not Phil, brings something extra to the table, whether it’s an extra ‘l’ in his name or an extra discipline of entertainment he has decided to master. Best known as a comedian, he has forayed into the world of TV and radio presenter, DJ, guitarist and performance poet. Spending almost 15 years as a team captain on ‘Never Mind the Buzzcocks’ and making regular appearance on ‘QI’, he has become a household name, although there’s no arrogance about him; as a plane overhead drowned out our interview, he remarked ‘that’s actually my private jet. I want you to know that comedy reaaallly pays’. Obviously it wasn’t. He’d in fact just got lost following his Sat Nav through the ever-confusing Oxford one-way system.

Jupitus isn’t known for mincing his words; he has openly fought with the BBC and exhibits brilliantly cutting wit on the Buzzcocks, taking no celebrity prisoners. Yet the man I found at the Union, wearing a jaunty hat and sitting opposite me on a small wooden picnic table, was happy to share his time, muttering to me conspiratorially as the press officer tried to hurry us up: ‘Don’t listen to him, do a couple more questions. He’s just trying to control me!’ And so it was that we delved into the world of a comedian and the difficulty that is inherent with the public persona versus the private.

‘It’s that failure to meet expectation, which isn’t a pressure so much as an encumbrance on occasions, because people are expecting you to be the guy off never mind the Buzzcocks 24/7 and that’s the weird part of it. But also from a personal point of view, I actually used to be very sort of gobby and chatty among my mates and used to do jokes all the time when we were in the pub and everything, and now I don’t. I just don’t do it because it’s my job- it’s a bit of a busman’s holiday to sort of be larking around when you’re with your friends now.

‘As a parent now you’re just aware of changes more and I think as a comedian, I hate to think that people are disappointed when I meet them that I don’t give them something that they’re expecting. But I think if you keep an open mind it’s cool and if I relax enough then maybe something funny falls out, but I tend to not do comedy on the nod as it were, I only do it under controlled conditions. I’m a lab comic.’

His argument of comedy needing the right conditions is no better illustrated than by the story of his own inappropriate stand-up, when he was put on with ‘The Who’ at the Royal Albert Hall. Although Jupitus hasn’t done full-on stand-up comedy for years now (through choice, not due to this trauma), he charts this as his number one stand up nightmare – the stuff of sleepless nights: ‘I thought that I’d just be introducing bands at a benefit gig, but as it turns out, he wanted me to go on in the middle of a Who gig and do comedy. Now, if I can just say, in my defence, I was booed off, but if I’d have been in that audience, I’d have booed me off. It’s comedy out of its box. It’s a terrible terrible thing, and it doesn’t work and is wildly inappropriate on occasions.’

Jupitus’ work with the celebrity world, despite the distressing experience above, only developed with his role on the Buzzcocks. He has encountered the sublime to the ridiculous – with recent panellists such as the internationally-renowned Mark Ronson to the identity parade which has featured the likes of DJ Tommy B aka Tom Beasley from Blazin’ Squad (who?). He emphasises the bottom line of Buzzocks: ‘It’s a show where you check your ego at the door’. Yet this hasn’t stopped celebs in the past taking issue; Preston from Ordinary Boys (and Big Brother) fame stormed off the show after the the host Simon Amstell’s teasing got too much. But following my question of who Jupitus found the biggest diva to date, I was a little taken aback; I was thinking along the lines of an internationally-renowned songstress. I remember seeing Bonnie Tyler appear on the show a few years back, and quite frankly, if I had sung ‘Total eclipse of the heart’, I’d definitely be a diva, no questions asked. But no.

‘Oddly enough the most diva-ish person we had on was Vanessa Feltz, and she just was, I hate to say it, she just was quite ungracious. Could dish but couldn’t take. And it’s got to be a two-way streak when you come on that show. And she just really took issue with Simon, the host, I mean really, and suddenly I just felt this icy chill on my right hand side and she became quite angry sort of about half way through the show. It’s a comedy show ultimately and you can’t. If you’ve got somebody as high-profile as Vanessa Feltz, and you’ve put as much of your personal life in the public domain, then when that comes back at you, you should at least, at the very least, be prepared for that. Whereas she was acting like, ‘Oh my god what’s this?’ But all of it was out there; he was using stuff that was in the papers, interviews – stuff from her own interviews.’

The arrival of presenter Simon Amstell did undoubtedly bring a new level of controversy to the show, and a marked depature from the days of Mark Lamarr – Jupitus is now the only one of the old guard to remain. Both the original presenter and the other team captain, Lamarr and Sean Hughes respectively, started their careers in the same field as Jupitus, as performance poets.

Jupitus toured the student scene, travelling around universities, colleges and student unions supporting bands such as Billy Bragg, The Style Council and The Housemartins. And there’s certainly a fondness that is evident in Jupitus’ words about Bill Bailey, the absurdly creative comic who took over from Sean Hughes as the opposing team captain for 10 series. We discuss the most prominent of Bill’s features, naturally his groomed beard and mass of wizardly hair: ‘Well it’s that cling-on look.’ But Jupitus isn’t threatened – he backs his facial-growing prowess to the end: ‘Well I can, if I wish to, grow a similar thing. It’s not a big Hemingway beard, Bill’s, it’s that close-manicured beard, which is a bit like mine when I bother to grow one so I don’t envy it. I can rock one. When the need takes me, I can rock one.’

Jupitus certainly didn’t let us forget Bailey’s departure from the show with his musically questionable, but hilarious duet of Jordin Sparks’ ‘No air’ with Amstell, the presenter at the time. Years of practice in the ‘Intros’ round was put to great use with this performance in which Jupitus expanded from imitating various instruments to a full blown vocal performance. We muse over the innovative scientific question raised by Jordin Sparks’: ‘How are you supposed to breathe with no air?’

‘Well in essence it’s a vacuum. Jordin Sparks has violated a basic precept of physics there surely… And of biology at the same time. If there is no air then you suffocate, but is that not what Jordin Sparks is saying in the song – I am dead because there is a lack of air. And no matter how much I try to breathe, there is still no air. And so how am I supposed to breathe with no air? Well that’s surely rhetoric in its purest form.’

To summarise the life of a comedian, Jupitus shared with me a recent conversation he’d had with fellow comedian, Sean Lock: ‘The way he describes what we’re doing is, as a comedian, you are mining a facet of your own personality, which is an incredibly introspective thing to do and a weird thing to do. You’re pulling part of yourself out and selling it, which can make you feel a bit whore-y’. But there was nothing whore-y about Phill Jupitus; he didn’t plug his work or try to force his humour on me. He was light, casually humorous, and surprising. He didn’t tear my questions apart with the wit we so often see on TV, but revealed himself as a ‘Who’ concert gate-crasher, beard growing, groupie of Jordin Sparks (albeit a sarcastic one).

Follow Phill on twitter: @jupitusphillip