For 36 years, the “Jeopardy!” host was a figure of consensus in an era that increasingly lacked it, and he died at the end of an election week when those divisions were in full force.

At a time when emotions, opinions and personal details feel like they’re at the center of every broadcast, post and podcast, the exceedingly Canadian Trebek held them all in check, instead valuing formality and factuality, dignity and decorum.

He was surprisingly frank with fans about his nearly two-year struggle with pancreatic cancer before his death Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at age 80. But he gave health updates in a series of polite and formal videos that were typically Trebek, speaking calmly, directly and frankly about the disease and his gratitude for the support he was getting.

Six nights a week for 36 years, after the evening news and before the firebrands of primetime cable opinion shows, Trebek brought together liberals and conservatives, city dwellers and rural folk, grandparents and grandchildren for a half-hour of brainy exercise.

His style was all facts with a touch of fun, and no politics, religion or opinion, unless they came in the form of a question in the course of the quiz show.

“I have a family with a, let’s say, wildly diverse set of political beliefs,” NBC News reporter Ben Collins said on Twitter after Trebek’s death. “Everybody in my life loves Alex Trebek. Everybody. What a life.”

With his flawless delivery of clues about Shakespeare, chemistry and world capitals, he allowed families to geek out with him, and each other.

“Growing up, he made me feel like my nerdiness was valuable and I loved learning from watching jeopardy,” TV personality and author Padma Lakshmi said on Twitter, one of scores of people paying tribute to Trebek. “It was our family’s nightly pleasure.”

Trebek himself came in the form of a question.

He revealed next-to-nothing about his private life, emotions or opinions.

That sense of mystery surrounding him was part of his appeal. He was the composed college professor whose students endlessly speculated about what he was like when class was over.

There were beloved game show hosts before Trebek, but the job for decades had cultural connotations of a smarmy talking head or a clownish emcee.

Trebek gave the role a gravitas, and a virtuosity, that didn’t seem possible before him.

“Alex was the Sinatra of our business,” Wink Martindale, a longtime host of several games shows, said in a statement. “The word class defined him. In my view, there will never be another with such multiple talents.”

Trebek was more a maestro than an emcee, conducting the high-tempo symphony of “Jeopardy!,” elegantly squeezing a world’s worth of trivia into the 13 minutes of game time in each episode.

He was a more typical figure earlier in his career, a swinging, mustachioed man’s man who owned race horses, rolled on TV’s “Celebrity Bowling” and hosted several game shows including “High Rollers” and “Battlestars.”

But when he settled into the sole role of hosting “Jeopardy!,” the most serious, intellectual and highbrow of game shows, it helped forge him into the high-class figure of class he became. He would win five Emmys and a prestigious Peabody Award, a prize usually reserved for serious TV news personalities.

He shaved his signature mustache in 2001, and increasingly became a warm, grandfatherly figure for viewers.

He wasn’t all warmth, though. Viewers loved it when he showed his sharper edges.

Some thought he showed a bit of funny condescension when he explained the correct answer to a wrong contestant — though he insisted he never knew all the answers — or when he gave a “good for you!” to contestants who shared especially banal personal stories during the mid-show chat break.

And his formality made him fodder for comedy.

Will Ferrell on “Saturday Night Live” played Trebek as a composed man who was constantly having his patience driven to the limit by impossible contestants, especially Sean Connery, on “Celebrity Jeopardy!” (The real Connery died just over a week before Trebek.)

In the social media era, Trebek became the subject of many a viral video.

One compiled his stiff attempts at showing a bit of rhythm and soul when reading the rap lyrics that came in “Jeopardy!” clues.

Another was a supercut of him saying the word “genre,” with impeccable French pronunciation. (Trebek’s mother was French-Canadian.)

When the word came up in a subsequent show, Trebek added a “yes, I said it,” as if to tell viewers, “I know what you’re all saying about me when you think I’m not listening.”

He usually was savvy enough to be in on the joke.

In a famous exchange during the original run of the show’s greatest champion, Ken Jennings, Trebek delivered a clue:

“This term for a long-handled gardening tool can also mean an immoral pleasure seeker.”

Jennings responded, “What is a hoe?”

As the audience began to titter, Trebek told Jennings, “Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. They teach you that in school in Utah, huh?”

Trebek immediately snapped back into the show’s rhythm, as he always did, as another contestant gave the correct response, “What is a rake?”

Everyone agrees Trebek is irreplaceable. The show has given no indication of any host plans, and has not used guest hosts during Trebek’s illness. Viewers will get a good bit more Trebek through episodes he has already taped, and through well over three decades of reruns.

Some have speculated that Jennings, who became a consulting producer on the show this season, would be the most suitable replacement.

But on Sunday, Jennings was just another of Trebek’s countless admirers.

“Alex wasn’t just the best ever at what he did,” he said on Twitter. “He was also a lovely and deeply decent man, and I’m grateful for every minute I got to spend with him.”

Follow AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton on Twitter: https://twitter.com/andyjamesdalton

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Of course, there are other differences between the two. The player says, “I’ll take ‘Liz and Don’ for $400!” Alex would read, “The one who served in the military.” The winning answer-question would be “Who is the Queen of England?”

Certainly, it’s not the president of the United States. As we all know, Trump’s rich daddy got a podiatrist to write up a diagnosis of bone spurs for his son, real or imagined, which meant that he got to avoid the draft.

The queen, then princess, who had a rich daddy herself, begged and pleaded until he allowed her to enlist in England’s uniformed Auxiliary Territorial Service during World War II. She served as a mechanic and truck driver. We’ll never know if that thought crossed her royal mind as she sat beside the president during ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of D-Day.

He certainly was on his best behavior and did nothing that would have turned the solemn commemoration from D-Day into T-Day.

In fact, he was relatively subdued during his entire visit to London — a state visit complete with all the pomp and ceremony that the Brits do better than anyone.

Trump, as we well know, loves pomp and ceremony. Now that he’s witnessed the spectacle that greeted him in London, do not be at all surprised if Commander in Chief Trump returns to the U.S. and insists on the creation of an elite unit, whose uniforms include the big bearskin hats that the Coldstream Guards wear. Oh sure, there were demonstrations too, complete with that fat-baby balloon, but he didn’t seem to notice.

He also didn’t seem to notice those subtle digs from Queen Elizabeth and Prime Minister Theresa May. Addressing Trump at her state banquet in Buckingham Palace, the queen, in her oh-so-proper way, cited the two nations’ postwar cooperation in creating “an assembly of international institutions.”

Since President Trump has trashed those very same institutions, like NATO, put that down as a sneer on the usual royal stiff upper lip. Meanwhile, outgoing Prime Minister May gave the American leader Winston Churchill’s own draft of the 1941 Atlantic Charter. That document years later became an underlying argument for the United Nations, another body that Donald Trump regularly disparages. So that was more snarkdeftly administered, of course.

It’s likely that it was so deft that POTUS didn’t even notice, but his political enemies back home could take some lessons in nuanced put-downs from those two. Perhaps it’s their British accent.

Whatever the national style, both countries are flirting with economic disaster. The U.K. has Brexit, negotiations over the bitterly contested divorce from the European Union, which is the manifestation of a harsh swing to the right. The U.S. has the prospect of tariffs, used as a weapon that does great harm to both the target nation and the one pulling the trigger.

Back to our game show: If Alex Trebek’s clue is “It’s the future of both the U.S. and U.K.,” the correct question is “What is in serious jeopardy?” Bob Franken is an Emmy Award-winning reporter who covered Washington for more than 20 years with CNN.

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