Where do they find them?

Now don’t get me wrong, I am all in favour of more Davina McCall on our TV sets, but, the return of Big Brother 10 is both compelling and appalling. Where do they get their candidates from? Are we truly that unintelligent as a nation?

Take last night when Karly (Scottish glamour model who likes to parade around in as little as possible and stand around on chairs a lot in the absence of a podium or pole) got involved in a discussion about languages. Karly declared that she spoke a bit of German and found the German language easier than others because they were grammatically the same (they say things in the same order). And, this was all because the Nazis had come here during the second world war! What? When? Who?

While she may have been correct about a shared origin of the two languages I think she will find that she was about fifteen hundred years or so out of time (unless you count such words as “hamburger” and the advertising slogan “Vorsprung durch Technik” and the fact that the “Queen’s English” is spoken by someone who used to be part of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha dynastic line).

She was also incorrect about the grammatical similarities. Now it is a long, long, time since I passed my German “O-Level” (these were exams that we had in the 1980s before the onset of GCSEs. The main difference being that “O-Levels” were actually worth something ) but I seem to remember something about a German grammar rule of Time, Manner, Place which meant that the English sentence “I went to school early yesterday” would be written in German as “Yesterday, early to school went I”, or, in Karly’s case “I didn’t”.

Surely this will go down alongside Jade Goody’s (RIP) assertion that Norfolk was “abroad”……..

Mind you, it is not just reality TV contestants that seem to be lacking in grey matter. I recently endured a long flight from Manchester to Corfu during which the couple sat behind me demonstrated a complete lack of Geography “that must be France down there” topped off by the statement, on hearing that we had begun our decent to Corfu,  that “Good. It’ll start getting warmer on the plane now!” And, I thought most planes were equipped with something akin to air-conditioning……

Thank goodness for Davina.

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