A Third In Engineering & 10,000 Episodes of Countdown

< "Go to bed before I set the clown on you"

I watched an episode of Room 101 last night which featured the comedian Mark Steel, who further cemented his reputation as a bloody good bloke by attempting to consign Bono, Ben Elton and oppressive school teachers to oblivion. The first two made it in, and as Meat Loaf so rightly said, two out of three ain't bad. During his argument against teachers, he informed the nation that he had been expelled from school at 15, which I thought was a great example of how little academic success really means. Sadly, it was last night and I'd already done that stupid Lego thing. Coincidentally, I found the following out just moments ago, on a football website, no less:

Carol Vorderman left university with a third in Engineering. She achieved a third in every year of her degree course at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.



Now I know it's not quite the same as leaving school at 15, but I think it demonstrates that academic ability doesn't necessarily make you intelligent, nor does a lack of it make you less so. I don't think anyone could argue that Vorderman's not clever (though in recent years the Botox does seem to have stunted her arithmetical powers), yet she only achieved the same degree level as her former co-host, Richard Whiteley. Much as we all loved Whiteley (I particularly liked his attempt to make up a fresh quip about starting the letters game every single time) he certainly wasn't the sharpest tool in the box - that time when he got the numbers and nobody else did drew a reaction akin to the wonky-eyed kid catching the ball in a school cricket match. When Diamond Des Lynam rolled in and started suavely rolling out correct answers twice a week, it was all a bit embarrassing.



Anyway, Countdown is a game that tests your mental capacity to such a terrifying extent that only pensioners with a half-century of Telegraph crosswords and autistic 9-year-old boys seem capable of playing it properly, and two schmos without a 2:2 between them managed to make a success of it, so good for them. Vorderman earns £5 million a year from the show (all of it immediately blown on plastic surgery) while Whiteley, sadly now revealing the great Countdown Conundrum in the sky, has spent more minutes on our screens than anyone else in the history of television - with the notable exception of the girl on the Test Card who, though now mostly sidelined by 24-hour telly, has clocked up a staggering 70,000 hours. Incidentally, the lairy-looking little clown toy is called Bubbles and is still owned by the girl, Carole Hersee.