Your starter for 10 – is University Challenge cheating us?

Jeremy Paxman says British taxpayers ‘do not want to think [their] money is being wasted’ on education for nitwits. Photograph: ITV/Rex

Name: University Challenge.

Age: 54.

Appearance: A hotbed of lies.

Your starter for 10: from the Greek for “unguent”, which five-letter term denotes a complex of molten silicates with water and gases formed within the upper mantle of the Earth? I don’t know.

Oh, do come on. Nope. Don’t know it. Haven’t got a clue. It doesn’t matter, though. Let’s just edit this bit out.

What? You can’t do that! Don’t worry, it happens all the time. Jeremy Paxman has even admitted it himself.

He did? During an appearance at the Henley literary festival, Paxman said that if he asks a run of starter questions nobody can answer while recording the show, “they all get edited out”.

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Why? Because, according to Paxman, if you’re a British taxpayer, ”you do not want to think your money is being wasted” on university education for a succession of gormless, bad-haired nitwits.

So, University Challenge is nothing but a fraud? Oh, hardly. All television is edited in some way. And, as the BBC has said, in response to Paxman’s claims: “If minor edits are made, they always accurately and fairly represent each team’s performance. Viewers should not be in any doubt that University Challenge contestants are the cream of the TV quiz crop.”

Hang on a minute. If they edit out all the questions that the contestants can’t answer, does that mean …? Yes, it means they’re only leaving the really easy questions in.

But I can’t even get any of those right! I know. This news must be doing nothing for your sense of self-esteem.

Oh, as if you’re any smarter. Try this one: chief of the Eleatic school of philosophy, which Greek philosopher demonstrated that the senses could not be trusted by constructing four paradoxes, including one about Achilles and the tortoise? Don’t know. Edit this bit out.

You’re really taking the fun out of this. Oh, fine, the answer is Zeno. And the answer to the first one is magma.

Did you just look those up? Of course I did. If University Challenge can cheat, then so can I.

Do say: “How dare our nation’s students only be a bit cleverer than me, rather than a lot cleverer than me.”

Don’t say: “Please don’t tell me that they also edit The Chase.”