So challenged

The unfortunate reporter chosen to quiz Paxman then provoked one of his trademark howls of derision for asking if the disqualification of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, wasn’t a bit unfair on team captain Gail Trimble, the woman known to the tabloids variously as ‘the human Google’ or ‘Paxo’s Miss Brainbox’.

“Why?” Paxman barked, fixing the interviewer with his most withering Newsnight sneer.

Oh, come off it, as you might say yourself, Jeremy.

The week’s events are so shocking that I can hardly believe I am writing the words University Challenge and scandal in the same sentence. Big Brother, and even Blue Peter, falling foul of competition rules, I have managed to accept. But it is frankly astonishing that a member of the champion team on a national university quiz should not know that it was meant… well... for students.

What is even more astonishing, as the original University Challenge quizmaster Bamber Gascoigne has pointed out in a pugnacious and Paxmanesque display of his own, is that the quiz should be filmed over two university years, thereby making it impossible for third-year undergraduates to take part unless they are sure of going on to further academic study.

And however much Jeremy Paxman may snort about it, I do think it is a shame on Gail Trimble, on the rest of her terrifyingly bright team, and on the others who took part in this year’s competition, particularly the Manchester team who were themselves fearsomely intelligent.

But Gail is without doubt the reason why the debacle has engaged attention beyond people like me and the Other Half who hold their own sofa-bound duels every week, comparing our own scores from Mastermind and the Bing Bong show to determine who is top dog in the brains department.

This season, competition has been stilled in our house. We have been stunned into admiring silence by the performance of Corpus Christi and particularly of Ms Trimble.

I am awed, but not surprised, to learn that she scored two-thirds of the 1,200 points scored by the team in its four qualifying rounds, before single-handedly turning around Corpus Christi’s fortunes when the team appeared to be flagging in the face of an impressive performance from championship rivals Manchester University.

The world at large has also been dumbstruck by the Trimble intellect, and you’d like to think that it is for this reason that hers has been the picture smiling out of every report on the subject, despite the fact that the person the story is all about is her colleague Sam Kay.

Yes, it would be good to think that she’d knocked Jade Goody off at least some of the front pages because of her outstanding brilliance.

Sadly, that is not the case. Gail has been the most widely discussed University Challenge candidate for years, not because of her brains, but because of her sex. For some, it strikes me, it has been a case of the dog walking on its hind legs; amazement that a woman should have an intellect, let alone one as towering as hers.

Even more tiresome has been the debate about her appearance. She has drawn hate mail from a range of misfits who construe her smiles as smugness, and invitations from Nuts Magazine to pose for what it terms ‘a tasteful photoshoot’.

Even readers of an online article in the Independent, dealing with the way her success has provoked dislike and unpleasant remarks, have not be able to resist adding their own evaluation of her looks.

Decades after men and women were officially declared equal citizens, we are still stuck with attitudes that dictate that a woman like Gail is derided because she is bright, and a man like, say, David Beckham, is mocked for looking good.