A quiz show hosted by Steve Punt where a team of three University students take on a team of three of their professors.
Coming this week from Cardiff University, The 3rd Degree is a funny, lively and dynamic quiz show aimed at cultivating the next generation of Radio 4 listeners while delighting the current ones.
The Specialist Subjects in this episode are Biology, Journalism and Astrophysics and the questions range from the intricacies of relativistic length contraction to the idiocies of homeopathy via Grexit, webinars and a man called Walter Plinge.
The show is recorded on location at a different University each week, and it pits three Undergraduates against three of their Professors in a genuinely original and fresh take on an academic quiz. Being a Radio 4 programme, it of course meets the most stringent standards of academic rigour - but with lots of facts and jokes thrown in for good measure.
The rounds vary between Specialist Subjects and General Knowledge, quick-fire bell-and-buzzer rounds and the 'Highbrow & Lowbrow' round cunningly devised to test not only the students' knowledge of current affairs, history, languages and science, but also their Professors' awareness of television, film, and One Direction.
The host, Steve Punt, although best known as a satirist on The Now Show also delights in all facets of knowledge, not just in the Humanities (his educational background) but in the sciences as well. He has made a number of documentaries for Radio 4, including The Poet Unwound - The History Of The Spleen, as well as a half-hour comedy for Radio 4's Big Bang Day set in the Large Hadron Collider, called The Genuine Particle.
Producer: David Tyler
A Pozzitive production for BBC Radio 4. Show less