Your starter for ten: why do we Brits so love University Challenge?

‘Fingers on buzzers!’ says Jeremy Paxman on University Challenge. But technically this is inaccurate. Only one of the teams actually has buzzers. The other side has push-button bells, instead.

I’ve been watching the programme religiously for God knows how many years without ever consciously noticing this. But, once you’ve been told, it’s obvious — in much the same way it’s obvious that the way you tell Thompson and Thomson apart is that one has an upturned moustache and the other doesn’t.

Which, come to think of it, would be quite a good University Challenge question. Apparently, one of its main criteria is that every question must have ‘inherent interest’. That is, it must make you genuinely keen to know the answer. I’ve done quite a few amateur quizzes in my time and this is where almost all of them fall down. Some prat of a question-setter thinks you should care, to the nearest 1,000 miles, how far, say, Mercury is from the sun. And you couldn’t give a toss a) because it’s irrelevant to anything that matters and b) because if you don’t know you can never guess — unlike on University Challenge, where each question often contains a lot of subsidiary clues, so you can work your way to the answer by sundry different routes.

First, though, we were reminded on the two-part documentary University Challenge: Class of 2014 (BBC2, Monday, Tuesday) you’ve got to get your starter for ten. And to do that, you’ve got to be in there before the other team, which requires a tricky balancing act. Press too soon and you risk being humiliated by giving a wrong answer and costing your team five points. But leave it too late and the other team may beat you to it.