One programme that still shines out as a beacon of intellectual rigour among the sea of dross on television is University Challenge. As always, teams of four students from Britain’s best universities battle it out for the series championship. Rather than assuming the viewer is an idiot, like most factual programmes, it works on the basis that we have a shared culture. There are always questions on kings and queens of England, Shakespeare and classical music. Even if the viewer doesn’t know the answer — and the questions are often fiendishly hard — the producers expect us to understand the question, except when it’s about quantum physics.
The top teams are usually spectacularly good on high culture but struggle with more contemporary arts. Questions about Booker Prize winners are usually met with a blank shrug and last month nobody recognised Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven.
University Challenge began in 1962 with Bamber Gascoigne asking the questions until 1987, then was revived in 1994 with Jeremy Paxman in the chair. My neighbour was in the 1977 series, representing Pembroke College Oxford, which lost narrowly in the opening round. A photo of his moment in the limelight is the first thing you see in his house and it always makes me jealous.
What makes the show so watchable is seeing the student personalities emerge, marvelling at their cleverness or wincing at their gaucheness. Most years someone becomes a cult figure — as Gail Trimble, nicknamed the human Google, did in 2009, and the deadpan Alexander Guttenplan in 2010. Last year was all about Eric Monkman, a Canadian as imagined by Aardman Animations, versus Bobby Seagull, a jolly east Londoner.
Paxman spends some shows full of fury, as if he’s grilling Michael Howard rather than presenting a TV quiz, but on others he has an avuncular twinkle.
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