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University Challenge (BBC2)
Earth (BBC2)
Where is the sarcasm? The supercilious disdain? Without the mocking eye-rolls and the hint of despair at youthful ignorance, can this even be called University Challenge (BBC2)?
Amol Rajan, taking the questionmaster’s chair for the first time, opened by warning that a few things had changed since the last series. He didn’t need to mention that Jeremy Paxman, who presented the quiz for 30 years, has retired.
But he promised that ‘all the important things remain the same’ — and proceeded to introduce one radical difference. He was nice to everyone.
Amol was cheerful, and patient, and full of praise. When the players, from Manchester and Trinity Cambridge, fluffed a question, he didn’t scold. And when he had to dock one team five points, he sounded genuinely regretful.
Once or twice, when the students were floundering for answers, he did snap, ‘Come on!’ but his heart wasn’t in it. He sounded much more sincere when heaping approval on both sides.
Amol Rajan, taking the questionmaster’s chair for the first time, opened by warning that a few things had changed since the last series. He didn’t need to mention that Jeremy Paxman, who presented the quiz for 30 years, has retired
‘Wow! Wow! Wow!’ he exclaimed when Cambridge’s Sarah Henderson, the only female contestant, recognised Benjamin Britten’s Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra from the first note of the first bar.
By the end of the half-hour, he’d gone full Brucie. ‘A completely phenomenal performance, and thank you both so much for keeping us hugely entertained,’ he gushed.
I almost expected him to crow, ‘Good game! Good game!’
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He has to set his own style, of course. There’d be no point in performing a Paxo tribute act, dripping with irony and snide asides.
And though Amol is one of the Beeb’s sharpest minds, he can’t compete for sheer brainpower with the show’s creator, Bamber Gascoigne — a man so fearsomely intelligent and talented that he’d written a hit West End revue before he left university.
By the end, as one team snatched a surprise win and the other sat shell-shocked, Amol looked wrung out. He’ll have to get used to it. If past performance is anything to go by, he’ll be doing this for the next three decades.
That’s nothing compared to the timescales in Chris Packham’s Earth (BBC2), an investigation of how volcanic eruptions wiped out 90 per cent of life, 252 million years ago.
Chris is an enthusiastic advocate for Left-wing eco-activists such as Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion, so it was surprising to hear him opening the documentary with an admission: ‘We may think modern climate change is our planet’s darkest hour, but the Earth has seen worse.’
The same script, read by one of those figures the Left loves to hate (imagine Nigel Farage), would provoke howls of outrage. Mind you, I’m stumped to guess how Chris persuaded the right-on Beeb bosses to let him make the series in the first place.
Did they realise he was going to explain that our greenhouse gas emissions are insignificant compared with prehistoric levels in the Late Permian era?
Chris Packham pictured stood on a rocky outcrop with Antelao mountain visible behind him in Earth
And did he spell out his key argument to them, that all life on Earth today is a result of climate change? Perhaps the execs simply clutched at those last two words, ‘climate change’, and gave him the green light.
You can’t blame them. A lot of the hour was heavy statistical stuff. Chris was better on a small scale, inspecting a lizard-like fossil and showing how its large eye sockets might indicate it was nocturnal.
And his joy at watching dolphins feeding off the coast of the Canary Islands was charming. Just as he was telling us we’re all doomed, he got distracted.
‘Global warming isn’t a localised effect,’ he hectored us. ‘The whole planet feels the burn… Ooh! Oh yes! I just saw it catch a fish!’
