Latest quiz night

Last night on BBC2:

7:30 Mastermind

This week's specialist subjects:

• The Jurassic Coast - not too far away from me but I really have no idea.
• The major plays of Molière - I may as well snooze until the next contestant; but this one scored barely more than me.
• Queen (that's the band, not the Queen) - this is more like it but I still got zero.
• Mickey Mouse cartoons 1928 to 1935. He should get out more.

The second half of the show is general knowledge questions, in which I have a chance of scoring higher than zero. I should probably just switch on at 7:45.

I'm baffled as to why people watch this programme but it's been going since the 1980s when it got over 20 million viewers. Latest viewership is around 1.5 million. I imagine it's pretty cheap to produce so it'll still be going in the next century.

8:00 Only Connect

Whereas I know that I know nothing on Mastermind, on this programme I expect to be able to solve the mind puzzles but I think, like cryptic crosswords, untangling them is a matter of practice and familiarity. Sadly I'm not there yet. Whereas I don't care about Mastermind, I do care about this impossible quiz.

8:30 University Challenge

I rather like the range of personalities in the teams, and occasionally I'll shout out some answers  - particularly if I know the answer and they don't. For some reason I find it enjoyable. When the team members introduce themselves, I pay attention to the discipline each is studying, in order to assess the balance of knowledge you need to cover all sorts of questions, much as you would to build a pub quiz team. If you have four mathematicians, you're going to struggle. I don't know if this is a recent pattern but it seems as if there are more postgrad students than in earlier years. Not sure that's a good thing.

Fortunately there are plenty of Monday evenings when there is football, so that gets preference.

Of the three questionmasters/mistresses/persons, Clive Myrie doesn't really have much to do except ask the questions so his unassuming persona is what's required, Victoria Coren Mitchell is clever but annoying and Amol Rajan is perfection.