If the polymathic Bamber Gascoigne was ever irked by the fact that he was best known to the British public for the phrase: “Fingers on buzzers … your starter for 10,” he never showed it. More than 30 years after his retirement as the quizmaster on University Challenge – a post he had held for a quarter of a century between 1962 and 1987 – the phrase still dogged his footsteps, despite everything else he did.
Gascoigne, who has died aged 87, with his easy patrician manner, born of a family steeped in centuries of aristocratic connections, proved an inspired if incongruous choice to chair a television quiz show on a commercial channel, even in the early 1960s. He looked and spoke like a junior don, gradually evolving into an uncensorious professor. He did not mind being parodied by Griff Rhys Jones in the anarchic 80s Young Ones comedy series, or by Mark Gatiss in the film Starter for Ten in 2006 – about a student desperate to appear on the show – and he even played himself in an episode of the Jonathan Creek mystery series.
