The BBC has just got a much-needed tonic with the controversies surrounding the 2009 series of University Challenge sparking a new wave of interest in the swotty TV quiz programme.
The media have been having a ball laying into the corporation over its mishandling of the disqualification of this year's winners Oxford University college Corpus Christi after it emerged that the team had fielded an ineligible contestant.
The BBC stripped the college of the title and awarded it to runners-up, University of Manchester, following the discovery that a member of the original winning team, Sam Kay, was no longer a student at Corpus Christi.
But the real winners were the BBC as a succession of sensations surrounding the latest series has meant that the quiz has barely been out of the news and generated renewed excitement towards the show.
The programme saw its audience figures go through the roof when word spread about the sensational performances in the earlier rounds of Corpus Christi team captain, Gail Trimble, which led the to media labelling her as the intellectual blitzkrieg.
And the momentum did not stop there. Hungry for more, the newspapers have unearthed further revelations of previous winning teams that had also fielded ineligible contestants just like Corpus Christi.
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