We need an international University Challenge

As the autumn nights close in and the heating goes, there are few pleasures so improving for body and soul than half an hour spent in the company of University Challenge.

Not only do you learn a bit (well, until you forget it) but nothing makes a middle-aged man or woman of a certain disposition quite so happy as knowing that they can still best a bunch of 19-year-olds when it comes to elite trivia.

So here’s a thought – why do we keep this beloved split-screen televisual wunder-quiz to ourselves? Why do we hoard it? After all, we were gracious enough to give the world the blessing of football. We gave them golf. We gave them rugby. We birthed the modern Olympics. We even gave the world badminton. So why should we deny the world the pleasure of University Challenge (not to mention Amol Rajan’s ever so slightly lethargic consonants, while we’re at it)? 

What could be a better expression of our post-Brexit spirit of re-energised national aspiration and ambition than to export the world’s most middle-class quiz-show to the rest of the species? We could, like the organisers of the Booker Prize, throw the doors of UC open to the Americans – but why stop at Stanford, Berkeley or Yale? Let’s see the universities of Tokyo, Zurich, Singapore, McGill, Sydney and beyond battling Britain’s best and brightest.