YOUR STARTER FOR 10: Why has University Challenge become a festival of political correctness?
( ) With questions almost no one can possibly answer
OUR quiz shows are important. They help define what sort of people we are. Thousands of pubs hold their own quiz nights every week. Few other events gather the generations together in the same way. And on TV they can have an enormous impact.
Robert Redford’s brilliant 1994 film, Quiz Show, portrayed the U.S. national scandal when NBC’s vastly popular 1950s programme, Twenty-One — which offered huge cash prizes — was exposed for rigging questions to help a glamorous contestant win. The uproar led to a Grand Jury investigation and hearings in Congress.
Britain had its own scandal in 2001 when contestant, the Coughing Major, was accused of cheating on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? with the help of accomplices.
But perhaps a bigger scandal is the transformation of the popular but difficult University Challenge into a festival of political correctness, some of whose questions are more or less impossible to answer, and many more (I suspect) are only answered because so many teams now train for them.
For instance, if I were coaching a team for this programme, I would urge members to memorise as many flags of tiny African or Asian states as possible, plus the provinces and cities of China and India, and the history of practically anywhere but England.
The interminable periods spent listening to reggae, rap, dub and slob music, Krautrock (featured this week) and other modern forms of commercial noise allow otherwise hopeless teams to pile up a few points.
SCOTTIShkings are a good standby. So are women mathematicians, Nobel prize- winners, painters and sculptors. It is a joke in my house that if you don’t know who painted the work in the picture question, the answer will be Artemisia Gentileschi. Because it will be.
Who? Well, though no Rembrandt or Raphael, she was a talented Italian Baroque painter of the 17th century. But what matters is that she was one of very few such artists of that period who was female.
Last Monday, Ms Gentileschi did not feature, but in two questions about painting, contestants were expected to be able to identify women who are not exactly well-known.
The first, Joan Eardley, is again a talented and enjoyable artist, but one of whom I had never even heard — though there has been some fuss in Scottish media about revelations after her death that she might have been a lesbian.
The other artists in this question were the vastly more prominent Vincent van Gogh and JeanFrancois Millet, giants of painting in any view.
Later, teams were invited to spot the work of Anna Airy, an artist of the Great War. Forgive me, but again I had not heard of her. My failing, no doubt. The other artists whose work was shown for the same question were considerable names — Paul Nash, Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer.
Earlier there had been ( of course) a question about who sculpted a statue of the women’s suffrage campaigner Millicent Fawcett. You’ve guessed it. It was a woman, Gillian Wearing.
This sort of thing goes along with the pointed use in questions of kilometres rather than miles. Even fervent metricators must realise that, in this country, miles are still in general use and kilometres are not. And whoever writes the questions has replaced the specifically Christian BC and AD dating system with the aggressively secular BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era).
I do not know who decides these things, but I am sure a decision has been taken, and I do not have much doubt about why it was taken.
And then there are the questions that 99.9 per cent of the population could not answer, and are barely written in English.
I take an example from Monday. here goes: ‘In order for a vibrational mode to be
IR active, and therefore give a peak in infrared spectroscopy, which moment within the molecule must fluctuate during this mode?’ What does it even mean? Amazingly, the answering team knew it was the ‘dipole moment’.
An equivalent question on the arts side would be to list the reasons given for the annulment of Eleanor of Aquitaine’s marriage, the names of her two daughters and the name of the Pope who granted it.
It is not general knowledge. General knowledge is about things we are a bit embarrassed that we don’t know. however, it is particular knowledge that viewers are subjected to on today’s University Challenge. There are people who know it, but there are not very many of them — though anyone picking a team for
the programme will make sure they have at least one member who might cope.
I suspect this sort of question is designed to make nice, generous people say: ‘Oh, gosh, these questions are really difficult — so much for all that talk about “dumbing down”.’
Indeed, it is noticeable how often the celebrity, brought on to present the series winners with their trophy, is prevailed upon to say that the programme demonstrates that claims of educational decline are all wrong.
But I don’t think so. These questions are not difficult. They are just too specialised for most people even to guess at.
Questions which used to be genuinely difficult have been dropped because the current university generation have, with few exceptions, been educated badly and simply do not know the old landmarks of literature, poetry, history, geography and music.
MANYalso have scant knowledge of recent events. Much of the era since World War II is shrouded in a fog of unknowing for them. Who is this harold Macmillan? What was Vietnam? It is not their fault, but it would be subversive, and dangerous to the liberal consensus, to expose it each Monday night on TV.
The alternative would be to shut the show down, as was the oldschool quiz Top Of The Form after it became impossible to hide the damage done by the destruction ( from 1965 onwards) of state grammar schools.
That programme had run on radio or TV from 1948 to 1986. One of its producers is alleged to have said it had been snuffed out ‘because the competitive nature of the show jarred with modern educational philosophy’. Which is a nice way of putting it.
I had thought that the arrival of the new presenter Amol Rajan had led to a change on University Challenge. Jeremy Paxman had presided for years over the new dull, politically correct format.
Mr Rajan is, in many ways, a refreshing change. But after a few weeks, and especially last Monday, it was clear that we were back to normal, plus Mr Rajan’s increasingly annoying habit of asking the contestants rather glutinously whether they enjoyed themselves. Who really cares?
I did not enjoy it when I took part in a special journalists’ edition some years ago when it was still a proper quiz (one Boris Johnson was on the other, losing side). You are not meant to enjoy it. It is a test of speed and memory which you can fail, a rare thing in the modern educational world.
honestly, I think we’d all have more fun if they scrapped it and introduced a new show called Old People’s Challenge, in which those of us who still actually have some general knowledge could make fools of ourselves on TV, as we fumble for the buzzer and forget why we are there.