Varsity

I like a good quiz programme. Not one that is slow and dressed up in frilly entertainment  but a quiz programme that gets straight to the questions and values knowledge.

Here in Great Britain, the BBC hosts a weekly quiz show called "University Challenge" in which teams of four students from different universities battle against each other for supremacy. The questions are broad and pretty difficult ranging from astrophysics to the poetry of John Donne and from Formula One racing cars to the life of Alexander the Great. You never know what you are going to get.

It is an institution in this country though the programme fell into abeyance when the first quizmaster - Bamber Gascoigne - retired in 1987. The BBC resurrected the show in 1994 and since then the quizmaster has been Jeremy Paxman who will sadly retire this year because of his ongoing battle with Parkinson's disease.

"University Challenge" is one of my favourite television shows and every week I manage to correctly answer a handful of questions - sometimes ones that the contestants fail to get. 

Some brilliant young men and women have appeared on the show displaying amazing stores of knowledge but there are also panellists who contribute very little indeed and you wonder what they are even doing there.

It is such a part of our modern culture that there have been several spoof versions of it, such as this one from six years ago:-

And this one from even further back in time which I believe was first screened in May, 1984 as an episode within a very popular anarchic comedy show called "The Young Ones" which incidentally I mentioned just the other day when I encountered my old friend Neil:-

from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/iHe0AxV