Can Mastermind and pop culture ever be friends? ... John Humphrys and Jennifer Aniston. Photograph: Charley Gallay/Getty
So, Jennifer Aniston turns up as a contestant's choice of specialist subject on this week's Mastermind and a predictable bout of hand wringing follows as some of us rush to cite further proof that Britain is dumbing down as fast as it can.
The nation has been here before with Mastermind and University Challenge, both old-established shows that don't give prizes and have a tone and reputation lacking on big-money quiz programmes like The Weakest Link and Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. When Julie Kirkbride, shadow culture spokesman, made the charge in 2004, ringmaster John Humphrys told her it was ''nonsense.''
Private Eye's Dumb Britain column routinely takes the mickey out of the genre. This week's gem is from one of Anne Robinson's victims. ''Which German painter was famous for his portraits of Henry VIII, Hans ...?'' Contestant: ''Solo.'' Ho, ho.
It's a moot point whether highbrow devotees of upmarket quiz shows do or even should know who Han Solo is. It so happens that my grandson was ritually initiated into the world of Star Wars by his doting father the other Saturday, so I could have answered that one, though I don't think Harrison Ford's first major role counts as a piece of knowledge on a par with the finer points of particle physics or the Shakespearian canon. But hey, it's only a game.
Back to Jennifer Aniston, Hollywood star and cult heroine of Friends. The programme's producers insist that high culture and pop culture are part of its appeal, that they had Henry Ford, the car maker, German wines and the Mexican painter/feminist icon Frida Kahlo, in Monday's mix. Last week there was Kepler, Wellington (the soldier, not his boots), Lutyens and The Divine Comedy, which turns out not to be a profitable US sit-com after all.
Fair enough. What's changed over the years that I have occasionally dipped into these programmes (as a definite non-addict) is that the staples of high culture in the sense that our great-grandparents would have recognised - classical mythology, the natural sciences, literature, including the Bible, classical music - have all receded as dominant topics.
For one thing, they are not taught in the way they used to be at school or university. In their stead, popular culture has been enthroned - film, pop stars, TV shows - much of it self-referential to a painful degree, but self-absorption is also a conspicuous feature of modern media culture. Charles Dickens, a genius of improving Victorian popular culture, would have understood, but probably been surprised - though not as horrified as, say, Matthew Arnold.
Does it suggest we are dumbing down? At one level, yes. Alan Partridge's CV is not as important as Bismarck's. An egghead friend of mine who sat on a University Challenge panel 20 years ago - and remains an addict - is adamant that the questions are undoubtedly easier now, more populist. Yet pub quizzes, charity quizzes, TV quizzes of all kinds have rarely been more popular. People like the idea of knowing things and most of us routinely deal with equipment of dazzling complexity.
And aren't I right to recall that a young University Challenge team creamed an Old Fartonians team not so long ago? My egghead friend says that was because they have faster reflexes on the buzzer. Yeah, right. But what would your ideal mix of specialist subjects be, I wonder, one which would get the balance right between education and entertainment?
My impression is that most people's knowledge is wider but shallower. More worrying is the passive way we get it now; from TV quiz shows and Google searches, not from books; from precooked soundbites and exam cribs, not from deeper examination.
Does that point to a yawning information gap between Haves and Have Nots? Does it mean that the rising generation of Indian or Chinese teenagers, raised in more traditional learning regimes, will have the drop on British kids who think Millionaire is intellectually taxing? Or do we do knowledge in a different way? If I knew the answer, I might be Mastermind material. But I don't.
