Paxman (pictured behind the famous desk in 2004) is stepping down after nearly 30 years
The time has come to scrap University Challenge. It cannot survive the departure of Jeremy Paxman, which was announced on Tuesday.
In fact, he has been the only good thing in it for some time, and I suspect that a genuine measure of the show’s audience would show a long, slow decline despite his enjoyably grumpy performance.
I must declare an interest here. Mr Paxman and I are old foes, especially since I (tired of his lofty BBC attitude towards Israel in his Newsnight years) subjected him to a cruel series of starter questions on the history of the Middle East over lunch.
I will not reveal his score. Mind you, I doubt anyone else in the BBC could have answered those questions either, but in that case they really shouldn’t be so hoity-toity on the topic.
Even so, Paxman was a brilliant choice for the re-launch of the beloved programme, which I had watched pretty much from the start under the excellent pioneer chairmanship of Bamber Gascoigne. Gascoigne was really an actor who played the part of a dream university don, demanding but forgiving, witty but serious underneath it all.
He was genuinely knowledgeable and actually set all the questions for the first series in 1962. If you took any pleasure from general knowledge, the programme was a special joy, less formal and more adventurous than its sterner school equivalent Top Of The Form (and whatever happened to that?).
Peter Hitchens is pictured during 1998 tabloids vs broadsheets University Challenge contest
Indeed, I remember my family gathering round our black-and-white set one evening in 1968 when my late brother, Christopher, was in the team fielded by Balliol College, Oxford. Silence fell in our small home as Balliol, perhaps the grandest college of the lot, famed for its ‘effortless superiority’, was flattened 210-95 by the tiny Welsh institution then known as St David’s, Lampeter.
Christopher, crammed with historical and literary knowledge and quite capable of remembering huge slabs of Shakespeare without effort, answered (as I recall) just one starter question about rabbits. I hadn’t realised he knew anything about rabbits. I knew from that moment that it was a lot tougher than it looked.
And later I would find out exactly how tough it was, when I took part in the late 1990s in one of the first non-student versions, after the Paxman re-launch. This was between a team from the popular newspapers (including me) and a team (featuring one Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson) from the unpopular newspapers.
A long-haired Paxman is pictured early on in his marathon tenure in the Challenge hot seat
Paxman with team, 2013. L to R: David Brice, Adam Barr, Richard Gilbert and Deborah Brown
I can tell you this: simply by walking into the studio, you ensure that you forget, for the next hour, most of what you thought you knew. Even so, my side, the popular papers, won handsomely, demonstrating once again that the cheeky, irreverent end of Fleet Street is also the cleverer end.
One thing I found out for sure was that, when it comes to starter questions, your main rivals are your own side. Tony Parsons, hitting the buzzer with panther-like speed, robbed me and the rest of our team of several chances to shine.
I recall gaping idiotically at the little white button as I pressed and pressed, trying to work out why there was no buzzing and I was being ignored. Blasted Tony Parsons had beaten me to it again.
Looking back at the recently unearthed recording, I gazed in shame at my utter failure to answer several questions to which I knew the answers. But at least there were no rabbits.
In those days, it was just a reasonably tough quiz with a clever format. It followed, as it had from the start, the rules of general knowledge — which is that general knowledge is made up of things you are a bit ashamed of not knowing, and are glad to find out.
Then something happened. There is a PhD thesis in this, but I think the change came a few years after university expansion got going under the Blairites. It simply turned out to be true that more students meant lower standards.
On top of that, the general decline in education caused by the closing of 1,100 excellent grammar schools in England and Wales, and their equivalents in Scotland, was working through the system.
There has from the start been an awkward, undiscussed quirk in the way the quiz’s teams are picked.
An individual Oxford or Cambridge college, with a few hundred undergraduates, can enter on its own. And it can come up against — and beat — a team representing a university of perhaps 25,000 students, such as Manchester. Before that stage is even reached, a large number of would-be entrants are weeded out by the programme-makers.
And (I have made these up but you know what I mean) you will seldom see a team from the universities of Scunthorpe, Basingstoke or Cowdenbeath even taking part, let alone getting into the later rounds.
Plainly, University Challenge is and must be what the schools and the universities are increasingly forbidden to be. It is selective, and on merit too.
But even then the old standby subjects — remembering poetry, knowing about great books, national and foreign geography, classical music, and above all traditional ‘1066 And All That’ British history — simply are not encountered any more in many schools.
Famously, Paxman once chided a contestant who could not tell William I from William III, some 600 years apart. Some universities have resorted to professional trainers to prep their teams.
These techniques are useful for questions about tiny island nations in the Pacific that have recently changed their names, or the unmemorable flags of emergent African nations.
But the change could not be hidden by such methods, so the questions were restructured. As we moved into the 21st century, the only truly hard questions were increasingly unanswerable specialist queries about the sciences, which scientists can of course answer but are torture to everyone else.
Their equivalents in the Arts grew rarer, unless you count the increasing politically correct need to know the names of women painters, astronomers, mathematicians and explorers, sustained by feminist studies.
The Christmas specials, when the ancient alumni of pre-Blair universities take part for fun, are much more enjoyable than the normal episodes, because the relentless dumbing down of the questions is relaxed, and nobody has to look blank when asked about arcane details about nuclear physics.
This problem is plainly going to get worse as our universities plunge more and more into anti-toff egalitarianism and the intellectual elite go off to Harvard and Yale instead.
And how odd it is that the list of possible successors to Jeremy Paxman is drawn from among BBC broadcast journalists, by no means the most scintillating class of people in the country.
Paxman was good because he is dry, funny and clever, and rather a good actor if you ask me, not because he was once a BBC journalist. Bamber Gascoigne, likewise, never presented the Today programme or Woman’s Hour.
Better to let it go now than to allow it to drag on, becoming steadily more boring and egalitarian, until it has to be dropped because nobody is watching it any more.