I DO like Mondays!

15th August 2018

Tony Mallion shares some thoughts

Unlike Bob Geldoff and his Boomtown Rats I DO like Mondays, especially now University Challenge is back to provide a weekly treat for the next ten months.  There is something particularly satisfying about this student battle of the brains.  Even more so when the three opening rounds of the new series each had contestants from Norfolk
 
Some may find University Challenge too high brow.  It doesn’t bother me to have questions I don’t even understand not to mention some occasions where a student introduces themselves and I can’t work out what their degree subject is either.  No, it’s the speed of their thinking and capacity and diversity of knowledge which impresses and, of course, like others , I feel incredibly smug if I can answer as much as two or three questions myself
 
University Challenge was adapted from an American idea for ITV with Bamber Gasgoine as chairman from 1962 to 1987.  It never did quite fit comfortably into the schedule and was eventually axed.  Happily you can’t keep a good idea down and thus in 1994 it was revived by BBC-2 with Jeremy Paxman in charge.  There it has retained both a prominent slot and faithful audience for 25 years.  Paxman is a good host who, despite his former reputation as a tough interviewer on Newsnight, is firm but fair
 
While we may be in awe of what the contestants can cram into their mostly young heads and the rapidity with which they get fingers on buzzers all of us have brains which control everything we do.  And as the occasional pub quiz or general knowledge questions remind us we don’t do too badly either, even if we might be a bit lost on periodic tables or nuclear physics
 
It set me thinking about what an incredible creation our brains are and, for me, what an incredible creator is our God.  In Psalm 139 the writer David says "You made all the delicate, inner parts of my body and knit me together in my mother’s womb".  Thank you for making me so wonderfully complex!  Now there’s a starter for ten
 

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