The cream of the crop - those students who are crowned University Challenge champions - appear destined for glittering careers. However, a BBC Two documentary to be broadcast next Thursday has tracked down former champions and found that winning the show is no guarantee of success in later life. Wonderland: I Won University Challenge features tales of alcoholism, drug abuse and failure to find jobs commensurate with their talents. Pamela Groves, a member of the 1968 winning team from Keele University, could only find work as a temp. "I don't think I have made the contribution that I could have made if I'd had jobs that matched up better to my qualifications. I spent two years working really hard looking for work and finally fell back on temping. The problem with a lot of my life is that I have ended up having to dumb myself down," she said. John Burke, who helped the Open University to win the show in 1999, is working as a postman. "I'm certainly capable of a lot more than just delivering bits of paper. I've got a lot of other capabilities and I'm not really fulfilling my potential. If you have got a brain you really ought to be using it," he said. Tony Gillham, who won the show in 2003 with Birkbeck College, spent the following four years as an alcoholic. He was drinking heavily while competing in the programme. "The best victory we ever had was when I had 16 rum and blacks the night before. I was incredibly dehydrated, I stank of booze and I was still completely drunk when I got in front of the cameras. Doing well on University Challenge was not a good thing for me because it was proving to me: look, I can live the lifestyle I lead and achieve victory in Britain's poshes pub quiz." Gillham started drinking as a means of coping with his above-average intelligence. "At school I had this particular kind of brain and drinking was a great leveller. Everybody is equally stupid when they are drunk," he said. His Birkbeck team-mate, Thor Halland, said being clever had blighted his life. "People like successful people but they don't really like intelligent people. There's a little bit of jealousy," he said. Halland suffers from attention deficit disorder and said he had experimented with cocaine, heroin and LSD in an attempt to stop his brain racing. Nor does appearing on the show impress women, as Warwick University champion Prakash Patel discovered in 2007. "Winning University isn't like being a rock star. You're only demonstrating what knowledge you have, you're not showing how creative you are, and that's perhaps what the opposite sex go for, more creative types." Some of the stories in the documentary are happy ones. Luke Pitcher, a member of the Somerville College, Oxford team in 2002, is now a classics fellow. "My biggest ambition was to become a classical scholar and that's what I am now," he said. "I'm very happy being clever. One of the abiding pleasures of my life is what my mind can do."