I went on University Challenge and there’s a nerve-wracking reason why Jeremy Paxman puts fear of god into contestants
NOBODY does withering scorn quite as brilliantly as Jeremy Paxman.
For an astonishing 28 years, Paxo has asked the questions on TV’s University Challenge as generations of academically astute undergraduates discovered that they were not quite as smart as they thought they were.
A year after his diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, Paxman has announced he is leaving the show.
He will shoot his final series this autumn, for broadcast next year.
University Challenge without Paxman is going to be like Top Of The Pops without The Hairy Cornflake.
Doctor Who without an old white bloke driving the Tardis.
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After nearly three decades hosting the programme, Paxman made it his own.
And it wasn’t originally his own — uber-nerd Bamber Gascoigne fronted the ultimate quiz show from 1962 to 1987, and Jeremy was drafted in for the reboot in 1994.
Under Paxman’s flinty gaze, University Challenge once more established itself as one of the great bastions of the BBC.
Indeed, Paxman’s University Challenge performed the BBC’s remit — inform and entertain — better than any other show on air.
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Like all the great BBC shows — Match Of The Day, Top Of The Pops, Strictly, anything featuring David Attenborough — Paxman’s University Challenge cut across all barriers of class, age, race, sex and even cleverness.
That starter for ten rendered everyone equal.
Four years into Paxman’s tenure, I appeared on the show as part of a team of tabloid journalists, including The Sun’s Jane Moore.
We faced off against a team of broadsheet journalists, captained by a 34-year-old hack from the Daily Telegraph with a genius for self-promotion called Boris Johnson.
It was a privilege and a pleasure to see the great man at work.
Paxman, I mean, not Boris.
He was firm but fair
In that University Challenge special, Bojo hardly stopped talking, but achieved very little — story of his life.
Our tabloid team stuffed those broadsheet swells 210 to 165.
“Soundly trounced,” declared Paxman — one of the highlights of my career.
A generation of BBC broadcasters have totally misunderstood the legacy of Jeremy Paxman.
When they shriek, berate and constantly interrupt some hapless politician on BBC’s Newsnight or Radio 4’s Today show, they think they are doing what Jeremy Paxman did. They are emphatically not.
Paxo is no pussycat, not even in the relaxed confines of a green room with a drink in hand.
I found him firm but fair, never needing to raise his voice, and even at his most acerbic there is always a twinkle in his eye.
A humour, warmth and humanity. Even when he is eviscerating someone, he does so with a kind of deep-frozen courtesy.
On that Fleet Street special, Boris was outrageously attention-seeking, like a three-year-old in the grips of a sugar rush, almost out of control until Paxman slapped him down with a few withering words.
“He was an innkeeper!” Boris burbled, answering a question about the profession of Rahab in the bible.
“No,” sniffed Jeremy, taking that killer Paxo pause.
“SHE . . . was . . . a . . . prostitute.”
University Challenge found you out. Paxman found you out.
It was not enough if, like Bojo, you went to Eton and Oxford, you were steeped in the classics, you were a posho who was destined to one day be “World King”.
‘Nerves of steel’
So what? It did not matter on Paxman’s University Challenge.
You had to be smart, fast on the buzzer and possess nerves of steel.
You had to be right — and you had to be right before anyone else. It was daunting beyond belief.
Not least because when you pressed that buzzer, with your mouth all dry, and Paxman looked you in the eye, you better know your stuff.
There are other scary shows.
Mastermind is genuinely terrifying, because you sit alone in the darkness as that funeral dirge theme booms out.
Pointless is strangely unnerving because it can go pear-shaped so quickly and you can be on the way home while your mum is still putting the kettle on.
And of course, squeaky bums are as a much a feature of Strictly as fake tans.
But the presence of Paxman made University Challenge uniquely nerve- racking.
Here was the great interrogator of BBC Two reinvented as a quiz show host.
He brought his hanging judge demeanour with him.
In one notorious Newsnight waterboarding in 1997, Paxo asked former Home Secretary Michael Howard the same question 12 times.
He was not expected to go easy on a bunch of spotty, self-regarding students. And he didn’t.
University Challenge famously featured the stars of tomorrow.
Miriam Margolyes in 1963. The late Clive James in 1968. Stephen Fry in 1980. Kwasi Kwarteng in 1995.
But the biggest star of all was always Jeremy Paxman, even when the young Boris Johnson was screaming “me, me, me” in 1998.
Paxman was one of the great TV stars because, like Michael Parkinson, like Clive James, he thought of himself as a journalist, not a talking head.
TV TEST FOR YOU TO TRY
1.Which English term for a time of day is derived ultimately from the Latin phrase meaning the ninth hour after sunrise calculated according to the Roman method?
2. Which of the following US states has a total area closest in size to that of the United Kingdom? Texas, Michigan, Alaska, Rhode Island?
3. Nenagh, Clonmel and Cashel are towns in which inland Irish county, bordering Galway and Cork?
4. What four-letter word is this? A Buddhist teaching says it’s in the heart of a person who inwardly despises his father and disregards his mother. Shelley says it’s like London. John-Paul Sartre says it is other people.
5. Which Alfred Hitchcock film from 1951 features Farley Granger as tennis star Guy Haines, who is involved in a murder plot?
6. “In the darkening twilight I saw a lone star hover gem-like above the bay.” This was the last diary entry of which explorer, written on January 5, 1922, at Grytviken in South Georgia?
7. On display in the National Gallery, “Whistlejacket”, a life-size portrait of the Marquess of Rockingham’s racehorse, is the work of which English artist?
8. Which of the following countries is NOT a permanent member of the UN Security Council – Germany, China, Russia or France?
9. What is hydrated magnesium silicate known as when used in a bathroom?
10. The novels Midnight’s Children, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Robinson Crusoe and Tristram Shandy all open with which of these words – When, Stop, I or Want?
ANSWERS: 1. Noon; 2. Michigan; 3. Tipperary; 4. Hell; 5. Strangers On A Train; 6. Ernest Shackleton; 7. George Stubbs; 8. Germany; 9. Talc; 10. I.
‘Don’t say anything stupid’
I have found the man to be a diamond. Paxman was the first person to champion my novel Man And Boy, stunning all when he confessed it made him cry.
He interviewed me last year for his podcast, The Lock In, and despite his friendly demeanour, I felt exactly as I did on that special edition of University Challenge a quarter of a century ago.
Don’t say anything stupid! It’s Jeremy Paxman!
The rise and rise of Strictly after Bruce Forsyth’s retirement proves that all great TV shows have a life of their own.
And yet it is hard to fight the feeling that University Challenge will lose some of its soul, sceptical mind and intellectual rigour when Paxman signs off for the last time.
Paxman’s skill set, essentially a total intolerance of any form of ignorance, does not feel as though it belongs in these woke times.
It is hard to fight the feeling that a bossy old white bloke like Jeremy might struggle to have a glowing career in the BBC of today.
Paxman, like any Englishman in his seventies, is an unsentimental type.
I can imagine him recoiling from the heartfelt tributes that will come his way.
“I had a blast,” was what he had to say when his retirement was announced.
And so did we, especially when we got a question or two correct.
Which all leaves the burning question.
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Fingers on the buzzer — your starter for ten — I am going to have to hurry you . . . who can replace Jeremy on University Challenge?
Bzzzzzzzz. Nobody.
'I LOVED HIS PUT DOWNS'
By Martin Roberts, Homes Under The Hammer
I GREW up watching University Challenge with mum and dad, so I was delighted to represent my old university, Bradford, in last year’s Christmas episodes.
Jeremy didn’t give me the benefit of the doubt because I was a famous face.
But his wonderful sarcastic aggression was always done in such style, you couldn’t help but laugh.
He was so brilliant, it was a pleasure to be put down by him.
It’s a great skill to be able to do that without causing offence.
The questions were so difficult and Jeremy pulled no punches.
Luckily, we had a bunch of talented people on our team who knew about ancient history, Greek mythology and Renaissance art.
It is sad Jeremy is retiring.
He did an extraordinary job in personally challenging circumstances.
Being given a tough time by the great Jeremy Paxman is like being shouted at by Anne Robinson – a beautiful rite of television passage.