Bamber Gascoigne and me

For people of my generation (I’ll be 40 next birthday) Bamber Gascoigne is a creature of myth. He was the cocksure big brain who grilled those terrifyingly egg-headed University students and scruffy Poly herberts on University Challenge when I was a decidedly un-egg-headed schoolboy (am I the only one who thought the teams were actually stacked vertically?). As if the man’s calling weren’t strange enough, his exotic name inevitably spawned a million schoolboy slang terms, bad jokes and nicknames – he’s one of the small group of media celebrities who’ve crossed over into the language and the collective memory. Anyway. Get this. He agrees with me about broadband.