Not the Delicious Sugary Wonka Ones

GSGC is thinking tonight about nerds, and now so are you. From the earliest cave painting of a weedy caveman who's rubbish at mammoth catching through to the Milhouse and Mosses of the modern televisual hoo-hah, these intellectual-yet-puny cornerstones of our society have been found in entertainment media since time began.

Yet they've only recently become the stars in their own right, instead of having to loan technical support and trivia hoo-hah to some handsome jerk instead (1980s frat-comedy Revenge of the Nerds aside). Channel 4's the IT Crowd plants a pair of socially inept computer dorks in the limelight, centering its plots on their cunning outwitting of their less-technically minded bosses and perplexion at the operation of normal social activity. Meanwhile, e4 import The Big Bang Theory cranks up the social inability even further, smattering its cast of science dorks with every cliché out of the big book of nerdish stereotypes. While they're still undeniably the heroes, in both shows the character we're meant to cheer along the most is the one with the biggest inkling of how everyone else operates. The one closest to normdom, the least offensive one to their fully functional, twenty-twenty, non-coke bottle-glasses eyes.

On first viewing of The Big Bang Theory, I was so disappointed as to be offended. The show's portrayal of nerdkind was seen through the eyes of norms, and it was a cruel one. We were clowns to them, nothing more than bumbling idiots with glasses, comic books and an inability to talk to girls, sweeping generalizations which are only mostly true. While I've come round to the show's charms since that day, the fact remains that its portrayals of nerds are no better than those of the fat kids who got sat on and flushed down the toilet all the time in Grange Hill, or even worse, that one that was in The Breakfast Club*.

Nerd power as a social movement has grown hugely since the days of Ro-land, though. Nerds are the richest men in the world now, there's a nerd in the White House, and thanks to the Internet a million bored office workers owe nerds a debt they can never repay. And yet. Mainstream media hangs on to the lazy image of the nerd, frozen in the 70s, and by watching it in droves, the nerd masses implicitly capitulate. Vote with your remotes, fellow dorks. End nerdsplotation today.


* He should have got the girl - why did that stupid jock get the girl? What a cop out. He was the most decent human being among them, and yet all he got out of the thing is an important lesson about himself. This is two years post-WarGames, which proved that nerds could do awesome stuff like save the world, and yet nobody's willing to give a high school nerd a punt at getting the girl if he's not going to save the world. I'm not bitter, honest.