Season 9 - Episode Guide

It's day one, round one of the competition, and the children display a phenomenal array of linguistic skills, tasked with spelling some of the most complicated words in the English dictionary. For round two, they must master Old English, a language so difficult it's normally learnt only by academics. As the competitors take to the podium, it's their first taste of performing live in front of the Child Genius audience. The heat is on as the children vie to avoid elimination.

Today it's all about maths, as the competitors demonstrate extraordinary feats of written and mental arithmetic. There's additional twist to the first round of the day, as the competitor with the highest score will get a fast pass straight through to day 3, avoiding the day's challenging second round. The remaining 15 will have to take on one of the most complex recall rounds yet - memorising information relating to companies, sectors and share prices from FTSE 100 companies, as well as having to do complex calculations with the data.

For the third day of Child Genius the 14 remaining competitors take on geography. With questions in the morning round covering 4.5 billion years of our planet's history, the nerves are really kicking in. And the stakes couldn't be higher as the competitor with the lowest score will face immediate elimination. In the afternoon the remaining competitors take on a challenging memory round in which they must memorise a sequence from a pack of 100 randomly shuffled cards, each with an image of a different world flag. At the end of that round, a further two competitors will be knocked out.

The quarter-final of the Child Genius competition. The remaining 11 children have seen off some seriously tough competition to get his far, but things get even more challenging as they compete for a place in the semi-final. Today it's science. In the morning the competitors must demonstrate an extraordinary range of knowledge about some of the world's most complex scientific principles.

The semi-final of the Child Genius competition. Nearly half of the eight remaining competitors will be knocked out today, as only five can make it through to tomorrow's final. To make matters worse, illness threatens to derail one competitor and nerves nearly send another crashing out. Quizmaster extraordinaire Richard Osman presides over today's gruelling language rounds. In the first round, the competitors face fiendishly difficult definitions and anagrams, as their understanding of the English language is stretched to its limit. In the afternoon it's sudden death spelling, where one false move could send even the morning's top scorer home.

After five gruelling days of competition, it's the final of Child Genius 2019. From the hundreds who applied to take part, only five formidably talented children remain. Each one has chosen a specialist subject, which they'll be tested on with degree-level questions. The topics are epidemiology, eukaryotic cell biology, cryptoanalysis, the periodic table, and the physics of black holes. Three contestants will be eliminated, leaving just the top two, who are set to face off in a head-to-head quick-fire round. Who will walk away with the Child Genius trophy?

The annual Christmas special of the game show for gifted youngsters returns, pitting more of the show's cleverest contestants against a team of famous faces. In 2018, Jimmy Carr led the celebrity team to an unprecedented victory, and now returns to defend his title alongside Jo Brand, Richard Bacon and Vick Hope. They will have their work cut out for them taking on 10-year-old spelling and memory master Dan, 12-year-old Latin scholar and chess champion Fabio, and Rahul and Nishi, two teenagers with IQs higher than Einstein.