BBC presenter Jeremy Paxman has castigated TV bosses for "insulting" viewers' intelligence by dumbing down TV shows.
The Newsnight and University Challenge host told the Radio Times: "The main reason I love University Challenge is that it gives the lie to the media stereotype about young people - that they all know nothing, and couldn't care less. It's complete rubbish.
"Every year we see more and more teams of young people who know amazing things, and you're just left wondering in pleasurable disbelief, 'How on earth did they get that?'"
Paxman is fed up with TV bosses assuming audiences are stupid
Paxman, 63, told the magazine: "Television bosses should stop insulting the public's intelligence by assuming we're all idiots.
"University Challenge pays the audience the courtesy of assuming that we're quite clever enough to take part.
"From what people tell me, it's often played in families - old against young, male against female, those who went to university against those who don't or didn't. It operates on the healthy assumption that learning and being able to work things out are good things."
Paxman boasted that University Challenge, which pits teams of students against each other, had not gone down the route of rival quiz shows by attempting to draw in viewers with easy questions.
"We haven't compromised. It's quite hard and it will stay quite hard. In an age when you can win shedloads of money or fleeting glory by knowing the Chancellor of the Exchequer's first name (even though that one did seem to stump President Obama), our producers have made the questions more difficult than they have ever been," he said.
Paxman, famous for his own tough interviewing style, refused to divulge how he fared against the students on his BBC2 show, saying: "That one I'm not going to answer."
He added that his favourite round on the show was one in which students got every single question wrong - when they were asked to identify laundry instruction symbols on clothes labels.