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.

Glee Is a Synonym of Happiness

At first glance, I carefully decided that my opinion of Glee (E4, just now, don'cha'know) was that it was like Ed or the Gilmore Girls, but on prime time telly for some reason. Possibly it's even like Judging Amy, but I wouldn't know as I only watched that once. Regardless, this is one of the greatest compliments a fifth-rate TV blogger can offer, so pay attention at the back there.

At second glance, I decided to throw Britannia High, High School Musical and The Biz into the mix, because I'm mad like that and every other review in the world ever won't get away without mentioning at least one of the above, so I at least fit into the safety of the fold here. Luckily, though, the comparisons are wasted, because the only thing shared between Glee and the above three are singing and education, while everything else is thrown into the bins of awful-and-possibly-forgotten children's programming where it belongs.

The show's dialogue is chock-full of the kind of fast-talkin' smooth understandin' characteristic of the higher quality US soap operas (or "comedy-dramas" if you're a bit up yourself) so beloved of E4 afternoon schedulers. This results in everyone, from intellectual and vaguely disaffected teachers to high school drama queens and attendant nerds all talk like they were flicking through the dictionary just before they walked into shot and still manage to get away with it.

For those of us who love to flick through dictionaries before we walk anywhere, this is awesometastic.

As is legally required in programmes of the type mentioned above, the cast consists entirely of variously lovable characters all of whom are quirky in some obvious yet for some reason entirely forgiveable way. There's the quirkily crazy teacher-with-a-crush-on-another-teacher, the quirkily mad drama queen, the quirkily steroidy gym teacher lady and the quirkily whatever everyone else. It's a high school, so you can pretty much fill in the rest of the stereotypes yourself and then just add the epithet 'quirky' in there somewhere, it probably won't matter where. Don't feel bad about it, because that's evidently what Glee's writers have done. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it rather handily saves the programme about sixty minutes' worth of tiresome character introduction, because you already know who everyone is by looking at them. That way, they can get on with a standard loser-bulling based plotline and still fit one in about how being a teacher is apparently an awfully-paid job and any teachers with kids on the way should quit and become accountants in the first hour. Also, the music's awesome! There's Journey, for one, and then a load of a capella stuff over scene transitions and montages.

For those of us who love Journey and a capella hoo-hah, this is equally awesometastic. Somehow, though, the bit where the two are combined manages to suck monkey balls, but you can't have everything.

So, in brief: Glee is good, but then again, so were Ed and the Gilmore Girls, and you never watched them either, you bastards. It's like you don't even care.