Here’s the £1m question — has Millionaire been dumbed down?

That’s a stonking start. as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? (ItV) returned for another week-long run, the first contestant romped through the questions.

English teacher John Robinson wasn’t cavalier or incautious. at every moment, he seemed ready to shrug and quit the quiz if he didn’t know an answer.

Rather than take a gamble on the million- pound puzzler, he announced straight away that he wasn’t sure of his facts and had no intention of playing on.

Instead, he banked his half-amillion quid and walked away.

host Jeremy Clarkson was cock-a-hoop. this was the biggest prize he’d given away since taking over the show last summer, and the first time he’d ever posed a £1 million question.

Until bowing out, John had barely faltered. he had a bit of a wobble at the £2,000 mark, over what creature produces royal jelly, but the audience were on hand to assure him that it was bees (and not frogs). after that, it was plain sailing. Which author was born in 1818 — Barbara Cartland, agatha Christie, Virginia Woolf or Emily Bronte? John is an English teacher, for heaven’s sake: of course he would know it was Bronte.

Diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps was instrumental in the construction of what — the Brandenburg Gate, the Eiffel tower, the suez Canal or the st Gotthard Pass? the clue was in the wording (canals are constructed, the others were built), but just to be sure John phoned a knowledgeable friend.

he made it look easy . . . perhaps because it was.

No ludicrously arcane trivia was involved. this was all basic pub quiz territory, about FIFa World Cups, international currencies, hollywood blockbusters and GCsE science.

Even the final question, which John flunked, was fairly guessable: which Prime Minister was never Foreign secretary — Winston Churchill, anthony Eden, harold Macmillan or alec Douglas-home? Yes, you’re right — it was Winston. But no lucky guesses, no wild punts, and John pocketed a fortune. a cynic might suspect the producers, desperate for a big winner after so many candidates have flopped out with only £1,000, decided to remove a few obstacles . . . such as the more difficult questions.

still, it makes a welcome antidote to the feeling I got earlier in the evening, with BBC2’ s Only Connect and University Challenge, that if my IQ was pocket money I wouldn’t have enough for a Mars bar.

too many brains aren’t always a bonus. saifullah Khan, an afghan refugee brought up in a Pakistani transit camp, won a place to study at Yale. he seemed in the grip of an arrogant superiority complex, during interviews with Louis theroux on The Night In Question (BBC2).

Khan was accused of raping a young woman after a halloween party. From the outset, his version of events sounded self-serving and devious.

theroux can usually seem sympathetic to anyone, however creepy, but this time the look on his face said it all: Khan made his flesh crawl.

the young man was so selfsatisfied that he quoted from Barack Obama’s funeral eulogy for Nelson Mandela, applying the words to himself.

It was no surprise to learn, at the end of the hour- long documentary, that Khan (although cleared in a criminal court) had been expelled from Yale and may face deportation.

‘I instinctively knew there was something wrong with saif,’ Louis has since said.

that was obvious to any viewer. any advantage in giving Khan airtime was less obvious.