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.
