GAIL Trimble, the University Challenge juggernaut, is to be burnt as a witch, it has been confirmed.
The classics post-graduate student will be tied to a stake in the centre of Oxford this weekend after a baying mob of torch-wielding peasants denounced her as the 'whore-strumpet of Lucifer'.
Oxford professor Julian Cook said: "Her profoundly unfeminine trait of recalling large numbers of random facts is clear evidence of bewitchliness.
"And then there's all that raw, seething lust. Extremely distracting when one is trying to read Dan Brown in the original Greek."
Trimble has terrified millions of innocent people across the country with her ability to answer Jeremy Paxman before he has even finished asking the question.
And her fiery, witch-like temperament was revealed last week when she was overheard telling a frightened team mate, 'it's Thomas Aquinas, you unbearable shitwit'.
Emma Bradford, a terrified sales manager from Leeds, said: "How could any woman who is not the carnal chew-toy of Beelzebub know so many different things?
"Is she Satan's harlot? Or is she just a 26 year-old post-graduate with nothing better to do than sit around all day reading encyclopaedias and having tea and crumpets? Either way I think we should burn her."
Thomas Logan, bursar of Corpus Christi College, where Trimble has been swanning around for the last eight years, added: "I've heard tell that on a full moon she'll suck the brains right out of your nose and then recite the perdiodic table backwards in Aramaic while dancing naked in a circle with a murder of gigantic, two-headed crows.
"And she's also a bit smug."