The BBC1 TV show Hard Spell is big news in India, because girls of Indian descent came first and second.
This BBC report tells more, although "disequilibrium" is surely a poor example of a word which is hard to spell.
Much of the coverage that I read in the Sunday papers yesterday was were very critical of the show, on the twin grounds that it was cruel, and that in any case spelling doesn't matter.
A. A. Gill, for example in his TV complaint column in the Sunday Times Culture section, had this to say:
No television ever made is worth an 11-year-old’s tears. I was really shocked by this show. How could anyone imagine that it was entertaining to watch small children being pressured to the point of breaking down with so little enjoyment? It was cruel, plain and simple. The evening news had just told us that umpteen kids are being excluded from schools every day. Last week, Tony Blair made tackling bullying a priority. Well, you get out of children what you put in. This programme publicly picked on, humiliated and bullied kids when we should all be respecting and protecting their status and their importance to our future.Now, you may think I'm overreacting to a game show. Well, perhaps I have an interest. I'm excused spelling – I have a note from my mum. The truth is, it doesn't matter, not a jot, not a tittle. Spelling only matters in Scrabble and to retired civil servants who write dull letters in green ink and teach their budgerigars not to split infinitives. I just pressed the spellcheck on my computer – 805 words misspelt out of 1,200 – and you know something, the bottom line is I get paid the same for the wrong ones as for the right ones.
The claim that spelling is unimportant is bollocks, or bolix as A. A. Gill would perhaps spell his proudly illiterate version of that ancient insult. The proof? That if the Sunday Times were to print Gill's writings in the misspelt form that he boasts of submitting them in, they would make very, very public idiots of themselves, and in fact would never live it down. (Look what has happened to the reputation of the Grauniad, as it is affectionately known, on the strength of about as many typos in a year as A. A. Gill claims to perpetrate in each of his pieces. Clearly someone at the Sunday Times has to be able to spell, even if it isn't him. Imagine what A. A. Gill himself would say if road signs, or the writing on the front of CDs, or the instructions for his DVD player, were routinely miss-spelt. What a W-A-N-K-E-R.
Nor is the perhaps excessive pressure that this first batch of kids have been put under an incurable state of affairs. The show just needs to be managed a bit differently and a bit more humanely, and no doubt it will be next year. Because this thing is here to stay, I'll bet you. And a good thing too, I say.
Anything that gives the swot tendency a bit of national recognition is surely worth encouraging. I'm not saying that we should deliberately make children cry on national TV and on principle, merely that this is a risk worth taking in order to create what I will, I feel sure (I hope anyway), soon become an impressive national institution.
On Monday I visited my Mum, as mentioned here, and while there I talked also with my brother Toby, who is a UKIPer.
The report I wrote yesterday about our conversation has become the trigger for a very satisfactory Samizdata comment storm about matters European and EUropean, as I write this still blowing.
After writing that, I then googled "Toby Micklethwait", which I haven't done lately, and I found my way to this:
This is my contribution to the BBC charter review.
That's all the explanation you get, in the page I googled my way to. Presumably, what Toby is referring to is this. I am not encouraged that "Micklethwait" is spelt so very wrongly in the web address. This suggests to me that no very great attention was paid to what he said.
Which, if true, would be a pity, because after Toby's what-you-would-expect-from-a-UKIPer denunciation of BBC bias (concerning the idea of Britain getting out of the EU – surprise surprise), he then veers off into this:
Finally, perhaps off topic, it seems to me uneconomic to spend billions of pounds on language education in schools, and then to fail to spend the few millions needed to ensure that there are free to air television channels in French, Spanish etc. Such channels should be purchased from abroad. The best programs for learning languages are quiz programs (preferably with text on screen), followed by nature programmes, and then news. Fast moving comedy is very difficult to understand in another language.If proof is required that TV affects language learning, then I point out that dwellers in Copenhagen understand Swedish well, whereas in Esbjerg they do not. The difference is not in the schooling, it is in the TV.
What an interesting observation. He is quite right that our government, or at any rate a fragment of it, has for some time been in initiative mode about language teaching in schools. We now have a strategy to make more people learn foreign languages.
Toby's idea is the best I've heard for achieving greater foreign language knowledge in Britain, and, as he says, at a trifling cost. Just sling a few cheap and cheerful foreign language channels up on regular don't-pay-as-you-watch TV, and let nature take its course. Excellent.
So good is this idea that I reward brother Toby with two gratuitous pictures of him, looking studious and educational, and looking happy, taken a year or two ago at a Christmas family gathering at his home in the leafy suburbs of Surrey.
A few learned comments on this TV helps language learning idea would be very welcome. Does it really do this? Is Toby (and am I) getting too excited about this idea? If he is right, are there some other examples to throw into the pot from elsewhere in the world? I do recall reading in all kinds of places that lots of people have learned English by going to the movies and listening out for the English words to go along with the subtitled words at the bottom. But how about TV? Do Spanish speaking Americans learn their English (assuming they want to learn it) by watching Anglo-TV? Do Europeans learn English by watching British and American TV?
If the idea survives scrutiny in the comparative privacy of here, I can then give this notion another push on Samizdata. If I get no comments here, I'll stick it up on Samizdata anyway.
Apart from the idea itself, is there any way to access the place where this piece got posted, and most especially any replies to it? I tried ringing Toby to ask this, but he seems to be extremely busy just now. He is, presumably, among other things, UKIPing, helping to reinforcing their success. If so, it makes sense.
