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.
This new international edition – let’s call it Universal University Challenge – could be the UEFA Cup or Champions League of knowledge, with the best of the best fighting it out to be the global, supreme winner. Suddenly the domestic game might look rather boring in comparison, but that would be a price worth paying for a global UC league worth its name.
Clearly, there would be a mild advantage for native English speakers. But a mastery of the language is probably the least of it when you consider the vast breadth of knowledge required to win. In any event, there would surely be enough competition with the Americans, Australia, Canadians and Kiwis as it is – assuming three or four teams each – quite aside from when India, Germany, Switzerland and the rest pile in.
And the best thing of all is that this way, if you scheduled the domestic show as normal, then you could follow straight on with the internationals, meaning we’d have enough weekly episodes of UC to last all year round. Just like the football season, it would never stop.
Just like the football season, it would never stop
Of course, there is an argument that it might be best to hold the international version only once every four years, so we could have a proper UC World Cup. Or, perhaps we could opt for a Ryder Cup-style UC play-off, with teams from Europe and the USA slogging it out. Either way, there should be more than enough to keep Amol Rajan busy. That’s if we don’t opt for a rotating chair to reflect international preferences and to ensure fairness – probably essential once the big betting bucks start weighing in.
But what a thought! University Challenge could become the biggest British export since James Bond, JCBs and Formula One. And on the back of this could come an audacious UC visitor destination – the icing on the cake for some hitherto unpropitious northern town, or maybe it could be located on the outskirts of one of Sir Keir Starmer’s future new towns if they ever happen: the ‘University Challenge Universe’. Here, rather as Warner Bros, for instance, has done at Leavesden Studios outside Watford with its ‘The Making of Harry Potter’ experience, far-sighted television executives could create an interactive global visitor attraction where anyone from anywhere can play in their own half-hour episode of UC, regardless of whether or not they were able to make the cut (or university) the first time round.
An international championship could work. We know it, because – say it very quietly – this venerable British quiz show was actually inspired by an American quiz show called College Bowl which continues to operate in the US. Moreover, since Bamber Gascoigne first uttered the immortal words ‘starter for ten’ all those decades ago, University Challenge has spurred a string of other international versions – notably, University Challenge New Zealand, which ran for two decades till the late 1980s, Challenging Times which ran for 11 seasons in Ireland until 2001, and University Challenge Australia, which apparently ran from 1987-88. And, hear this, there have also been special international editions pitting winning teams from the UK against those of New Zealand and even – perhaps most thrillingly – a contest between winners of University Challenge and College Bowl, albeit in the dim, distant past.
All told, there is clearly an appetite for a properly organised global challenge. Yes, we would need to stack the teams on screen – it’s part of the winning formula after all – but in our globalised times, with more and more telly ‘franchises’ going international, it makes perfect sense. What would we call the trophy? The Gascoigne Cup has a ring to it. So does the Paxman Plate. But that’s all trivial detail. This could be University Challenge’s time to teach the world a thing or two.
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