Know-all questioners who pretend to be cleverer than they are

At the end of the latest series of it was good to see commentators mocking Jeremy Paxman for the sneerily superior way in which, when telling a team that they got an answer wrong, he manages to convey that someone as clever as himself would have known it.

This has been particularly absurd since the programme was “dumbed up”, rather than dumbed down, by moving away from tests of broad general knowledge to ask very arcane questions, particularly on science, which only a specialist in the subject could be expected to get right.

But in this respect, of course, Paxman has a long track record from his days on where he exemplified that occupational disease of too many interviewers, not least on the programme, where they ask clever-dicky little questions designed more to show off their own superiority than to help the audience’s understanding.

They want to sound “knowing” without actually knowing. How much more interesting very often are those occasions where an interviewer is genuinely trying to learn something from the interviewee, without pretending to know it all so much better already.