By Sian Brewis

Here's your starter for 10: what ages you faster than drinking from the wrong cup in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade?

The answer, it seems, is going on University Challenge. It's the opposite of the elixir of life.

All of the contestants interviewed in Wonderland: I Won University Challenge (BBC 2, 9.45pm) look decades older than they should be.

One guy, Thor, was a fresh-faced lad in 2003 – it may be six years later, but suddenly he looks about 50.

There's Pakash from Warwick University which won only two years ago. Now he looks late 40s.

If you're not looking old, you're a bit eccentric.

Pamela Groves (Keele University, 1968) lives in a house which looks like Kim and Aggie should visit, with a grubby sign: Dull Women Have Immaculate Homes.

She plays a violin tunelessly while her dog Toby looks at her, his little dog eyes pleading "stop". Other hobbies include morris dancing in her front room.

"How would people describe you?" asks the narrator. "Weird," she says, without hesitating. "I wouldn't mind eccentric."

Although she gets bonus points for giving Bamber Gascoigne a well deserved filthy look for a ridiculously sexist question: "What invention would women in particular thank Denis Papin for?" (the answer is a pressure cooker. Thanks, Bamber.) It's hardly a shining inspiration for being a university boffin. Most of them cheerfully describe themselves as socially inept. A curse of the too-bright, perhaps.

Or, more likely, they deliberately cherry-picked people to gently mock.

Francis (New College, Oxford, 1964) sums up most of them featured: "I'm moderately odd. Not terribly good socially."

The brilliant Schoolboy who Sailed the World (C4, 9pm) was a real inspiring boy's own adventure.

Mike Perham's racing to set the record for the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe. Trouble is, everything keeps going wrong.

The autopilot on his boat kept conking out, his girlfriend Becki's been banned from talking to him after racking up £300 phone bills and he's been moored up for a month in the Canaries getting his boat fixed.

Determined and chirpy, only occasionally does his mask slip.

On New Year's Eve, something else goes wrong again and he cries. "It's the crappest New Year's Eve EVER."

Approaching The Doldrums, appropriately enough, more stuff breaks. You'd be tempted to give up, but it doesn't cross his mind.

Though this sailing round the world is a grown-up business, he was always a teenager. "The boat's in a bit of a mess," he said sheepishly. "There's stuff all over the floor."

Later, he admits to troughing a tub of Pringles. "Who's to stop me?"

As the 17-year-old sails victoriously into Portsmouth, with the Navy coming out to see him, there's a huge crowd – but he only has eyes for Becki as she rushes to greet him.

"That's the hug I had been waiting for," he gushes. Bless.