University Challenge

''University Challenge'' is a British television quiz programme which first aired in 1962. ''University Challenge'' aired for 913 episodes on ITV from 21 September 1962 to 31 December 1987, presented by quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne. The BBC revived the programme on 21 September 1994 with Jeremy Paxman as the quizmaster. Paxman will relinquish his role as host following the conclusion of the 52nd series in 2023, after which he will be succeeded by Amol Rajan. In October 2022, an ITV documentary, ''Paxman: Putting Up With Parkinson's'', revealed how the disease has impacted him and revealed that Paxman recorded his very last episode of ''University Challenge'' on 15 October 2022, which is to air sometime in 2023.

The current title holders are Imperial College London, who won the 51st series on 4 April 2022.

The show has always been produced by the same company (originally named Granada Television, renamed ITV Studios in 2009 and renamed again Lifted Entertainment in 2021), under licence from Richard Reid Productions and the College Bowl Company. It was recorded at Granada Studios in Manchester from its inception until the studios closed down in 2013; it is now recorded at Dock10 studios in Salford.

History

Format continuity

Despite periodic changes to the sets, studio layout, and presentation, ''University Challenge'' has preserved a high level of continuity from 1962 to the present. Some commentators have cited this as an essential element of its success.Se
Don't ever change, University Challenge
by Harry Mount, the Daily Telegraph, 7 April 2014. Elements of this continuity include:
*The longevity of its quizmasters, with only two presenters in the programme's history;
*The split-screen presentation during the starter question phase, which appears to place one team physically above the other. In the final years of the original Bamber Gascoigne era, the studio set genuinely was two-tiered, although the split-screen effect returned for the revived series and has been used ever since;
*Long serving voiceover announcers, with only three in the programme's history – Don Murray-Henderson from 1962 until his death in 1971, then Jim Pope until his death in 2001, then Roger Tilling. Tilling's delivery typically becomes increasingly high-pitched as the episode progresses;
*The theme tune "College Boy" by Derek New, which has been with the series since the 1960s (although the first series used "Ting A Ling" by Duke Ellington). "College Boy" was originally scored for an ensemble of tubular bells, flugelhorn, harpsichord, brushed hi-hat, bass drum and double bass. The original theme returned for the early Paxman-era episodes, and was later replaced by a string quartet arrangement of the theme recorded by the Balanescu Quartet.

ITV (1962 to 1987)

The programme had its beginnings in an American television quiz show called ''College Bowl''. Cecil Bernstein, brother of Sidney Bernstein who founded Granada Television in 1954, had seen the programme in the United States and liked the format. It was decided that Granada would produce a similar programme with competing teams from universities across the United Kingdom. From its inception in 1962, ''University Challenge'' was hosted by Bamber Gascoigne, who died in 2022. The show was a cult favourite with a small but loyal core audience, and was one of a select few ITV programmes that was transmitted without any advertising breaks. Originally, the series started off in many areas, being broadcast at peak times or just after the nightly news around 22:30; by the early 1970s, the series was relegated to irregular timeslots by the various ITV regional companies, with some broadcasting the show during daytime, at weekends or late at night. In the absence of a regular networked slot, audience figures would often fall, leading the producers to make changes to the long-standing format of the programme. LWT stopped broadcasting the show in October 1983, with Thames following suit shortly afterwards. The programme was not broadcast in 1985 and returned in April 1986, when it was finally networked by ITV and broadcast at 15:00 on weekdays. The gameplay was revised, initial games were staged over two legs; the first in the classic format and the second played as a relay, where contestants selected questions from specific categories such as sport, literature and science, passing a baton between players whenever a "lap" of two correct answers was scored. The final series was also networked, but broadcast around 11:00 during the summer holiday period. Even so, the new networked time did little to save the series from the axe. The last ITV series was broadcast in 1987.

The Universities of Oxford and Cambridge could each enter up to five of their constituent colleges as separate teams, which are not themselves universities: they have far fewer students – numbering in the hundreds rather than thousands – than most universities. This was one ostensible inspiration for a 1975 protest, in which a team from the University of Manchester (which included David Aaronovitch) came second to Downing College, Cambridge, when they started a round by answering every question "Che Guevara", "Marx", "Trotsky" or "Lenin", in the hope of making the resulting show unbroadcastable.
It was, however, broadcast, although only portions of the episode still exist in the Granada Television archives. Granada subsequently banned the University of Manchester for several years.

BBC

''University Challenge'' was revived by the BBC
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