I wish I could say that Bamber Gascoigne would be turning in his grave at what has happened to University Challenge. But unfortunately, I understand from people who knew the Eton, Cambridge, Yale and Grenadier Guards historian, playwright, critic, polymath millionaire and scion of the upper classes that he chose to compensate for his privilege by embracing progressive causes. So, chances are, the shade of Bamber is thrilled to bits at seeing his old quizmaster’s seat occupied by someone who drops his aitches and pronounces ‘h’ where it should be aspirated and landed a mere 2.2 from hearty, insufficiently medieval Downing.

Bambi’s successor Jeremy Paxman probably isn’t too bothered either. Like a lot of TV presenters who affect to be a bit bufferish, old-fashioned, mildly curmudgeonly, quintessentially English and into stuff like cricket, The Lark Ascending, warm beer, pipes, pre-Beeching railways, fly-fishing – see also Ian Hislop – the real-life Paxman is quite startlingly luvvie-ish. I know this because I once won a prize from a charity quiz he hosted and though he didn’t quite air-kiss me on both cheeks I’m sure he would happily have done so had I proffered them.

I actually don’t care much that the tediously ubiquitous (though in the flesh very affable) Amol Rajan got the job. Of course he did, for any number of reasons, some of which I have delineated above. But it really doesn’t matter because nobody watches University Challenge any more. Well, I certainly don’t unless my son begs and pleads with me to keep him company – and then tuts at me when I say things like: ‘Why has that student wearing a dress got an Adam’s apple?’

It’s a shame because for much of my married life University Challenge was the perfect programme: about the only thing we consistently watched, year after year, first as a couple and later, when the children were old enough, as a family. It offered most of the things you could possibly want from half an hour’s family TV: dopamine hits; intra-family competition; light snobbery; mild freakshow-ishness; proof that your Alzheimer’s wasn’t quite as advanced as you’d feared; definitely no sex; reassured intellectual smugness; rare but welcome jokes; and characters such as Gonville & Caius’s Ted Loveday, who rose to international fame by knowing what hapax legomenon was, and with whom, thrillingly, Boy once went out drinking having met him in a Bulgarian student hostel.

But hapax legomenon was in 2015, before the rot set in. Possibly it had already and I wasn’t quite aware of it or was in denial. Whatever, at some point between now and then, the order went out: ‘University Challenge must die!’

And so they killed it, not in one blow but by a thousand cuts. Jeremy Paxman remained in place, giving the illusion of stability, continuity and integrity. But little by little you found yourself realising that not only did you not know the answers to many of the questions but that you actually didn’t care to know the answers. The geography questions were no longer about the capital of Mongolia but about climate change. The politics ones were about tedious supranational bodies such as the EU and the UN and their various offshoots, such as the IPCC.

Maybe worst of all was what happened to the arts questions, which hitherto had always come up as such an incredible relief after the boring, abstruse science questions and the even duller maths ones. Whereas they once tested your knowledge of all the most important writers, painters, poets, composers that ever lived, now they were about the few representatives in those categories that pushed the correct gender and diversity buttons.

Look, I’ve got nothing particularly against Artemisia Gentileschi, Clara Schumann, or George Eliot but there are only so many times that the heart can leap with delighted recognition in the picture round of ‘Judith Slaying Holofernes’, or the ear can thrill confusedly to an excerpt of whatever it was Clara Schumann may have written. (Still, at least in the science rounds you know one of the answers is going to be Marie Curie.)

The problem is not confined to University Challenge, I appreciate. Just recently, for example, out of curiosity I did a Google search on the world’s greatest novels. According to the online Encyclopedia Britannica, the top 12 include Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Virginia Woolf’s (unreadable) Mrs Dalloway, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and a book called Invisible Man (not the H.G. Wells one) by someone called Ralph Ellison, which is apparently a groundbreaking novel in the expression of identity for the African American male. War and Peace doesn’t feature. Nor anything by Stendhal, Dostoevsky or Flaubert.

So no, I’ve absolutely no problem with the fact that, very much unlike Bambi, and quite unlike Paxo, matey, demotic, lightly bling and laddish Amol Rajan makes no pretence that he could answer all the questions or is familiar with any of the languages in which he attempts to pronounce the foreign names. He’s exactly what the programme deserves.