Prank, or just a display of terrible taste?

kentonline editor

After 63 years of trying, the Queen finally beat Victoria’s “longest reigning monarch” record this week. She now presides over a kingdom where contestants think it’s OK to turn up on University Challenge wearing a leather vest.

That certainly wouldn’t have happened in 1952, although society has changed much in the intervening years. University Challenge was only a glint in Bamber Gascoigne’s eye when Elizabeth came to the throne and anyone wearing a leather vest in public would probably have risked arrest.

The offending student apparently thought he would flout the usual conservative dress code because he didn’t want to look “boring”.

On first sight I felt sorry for the bloke because I thought he’d fallen victim to a practical joke from the rest of the team, who’d all assured him that they too would come dressed in the stage costumes of Right Said Fred.

But rather than being inspired by the “I’m Too Sexy” hitmakers, this was probably more of a student prank aimed at a small but easily amused audience.

The terrifying alternative is that a student at one of our top universities genuinely thought it looked good, although people who are academically bright aren’t necessarily renowned for their dress sense.

There’s a time and a place to prove you’re not boring, and it’s not on University Challenge. Anyone can look “street” sat next to less attention-hungry team-mates wearing jumpers and corduroy jackets, but the whole wildman act goes out the window when you have to sit passively through half an hour of questions about the heat transfer coefficient, Picasso’s blue period and the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon.

Then it dawns on you that the time spent choosing an outfit would have been better spent revising, because knowing stuff always looks considerably more impressive than sitting in silence soaking up the unspoken yet thinly veiled contempt of Jeremy Paxman.