Monday, 8th September 2003 – Grammar School Blues

On Saturday evening, when every other 26 year-old in the country was out drinking, falling over, and having the kind of fun they will later speak of wistfully to their children - occasionally breaking into a conspiratorial stage-whisper ‘so Mum doesn’t hear’ - Jane and I sat in and did the BBC National General Knowledge Test, presented by Anne Robinson and Pip Schofield.

Pip – whose hair is now a weird and un-telegenic platinum blonde – tried to make it into a rip-roaring, seat-of-yer-pants experience, dashing around the studio and extracting toe-curling pre-prepared anecdotes out of estate agents, football fans and ‘domestic goddesses’, but he couldn’t change the fact that this was nothing more than a glorified pub quiz for people with nowhere better to go on a Saturday night. Thus, our participation.

I am deeply proud / alarmed to report that my ‘quiz quotient’ of 142 puts me in the top 1% of the nation. Or, more accurately, in the top 1% of the kind of people who spend their Saturday evenings completing a three-hour-long TV trivia quiz. A bittersweet accolade.

All the same, it successfully re-ignited the flames of bitterness and righteous indignation that flicker at all times in my soul. If I have a whopping quiz quotient of 142, then why am I sat drinking small bottles of beer in a tiny Guildford attic flat? Why am I not sitting on a sparkling throne, chiselled from the world’s largest diamond, having my hands and feet moisturised by illegal immigrants, as befits a member of the nation’s intellectual elite? Why? Why do I have to scrimp and save, when everyday I walk through Guildford and have to put up with the sight of countless peanut-brained jugheads whizzing past in their penis-shaped sports cars, whilst yammering into mobile-phones so futuristic and tiny, they instantly dissolve when hit by the one of the globules of saliva that spurt forth from their stupid, privileged, big-tongued mouths as they chat to their equally rich and brainless friends? WHY!? TELL ME?!

Perhaps it is because a) they were born into money (usually the case in Guildford), or b) they have skills that are actually of some use in the real world, rather than a head full of worthless trivia. Perhaps the sooner I realise that being ‘brainy’ doesn’t earn you the right to instant riches the better.

I was talking this through with a friend (link) the other day, and we managed to trace the root cause of our mutual feelings of frustration and injustice: a massive, massive sense of entitlement, born of seven years of having it drummed into us that we were destined for future greateness. Seven years at Grammar School.

Those words are hard for me to type. I know I project an image of rugged urban cool, but the truth is that I was a frilly-shirted, short-trousered, Grammar School fauntelroy. Well, not really. People tend to mistake Grammar Schools with Private Schools. Private Schools are where the rich send their children to have their humanity bummed out of them, while Grammar Schools are where 11-year olds who do well in a test get sent. As a result, the kids there were not conspicuously better off than those at a Comprehensive. I still maintain that I have working class credentials to match anybody’s. But the fact that this even matters to me proves that I am bearing a large, Wall’s Vienetta-shaped chip on my shoulder (the Wall’s Vienetta being the ultimate icon of working-class authenticity).

Anyway, say what you like about Grammar Schools, they are nothing if not aspirational. The teachers there drum into you that you are at a ‘special’ school, and that you are in the ‘elite’, and that you will inevitably grow up to be important pillars of the community. As an 11 year-old, it is difficult not to internalise these messages, at least to a degree. And even when you are old enough to know better, the notion that you will leave school and go on to University, and then seamlessly on to a high-paying prestigious job, is pretty much taken for granted.

When this doesn’t magically materialise – when the Grammar School boy realises that you actually have to work to achieve things in life, and that Grade ‘A’s in A-Level General Studies and English are not the universal passports to opportunity you believed them to be – you are left bewildered and not a little put out. It can be hard to square the paper-shuffling reality of your actual ‘career’ with the non-specific, pinstriped, Rolexed luxury of the career you presumed you would somehow breeze into.

In truth, I never wanted to be that suit-wearing, cigar-chomping plutocrat. I had always fancied a career in psychology, and went into it knowing that the monetary rewards would not be great, but willing to sacrifice that in favour of a job that actually meant something to me. All the same, in hindsight, the Grammar School boy in me fully expected to moonwalk straight to the top of my chosen profession without even really having to try. When faced with the reality that me and my blazer-wearing chums don’t really have the monopoly on brains or ambition, I felt a bit disillusioned and decided that the world was against me, and the reason that I’m not already in discredited semi-retirement as a truism-spouting TV psychologist, is because I am unlucky and unappreciated. If only people knew how brainy I am! Ask me who wrote Pilgrim’s Progress! Ask me about the symbolism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness! Ask me!!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about being sent to a Grammar School. The quality of teaching was really good, the facilities excellent, and the simmering air or frustrated sexuality and homo-erotic tension first-class. I realise that I was very lucky. For every wordy, frustrated twenty-something like me, basking in the luxury of self-deprecation, there is some poor chump who finds his life relentlessly locked into a path set for him at the age of 11 having gone to a Comprehensive that couldn’t give him the education he deserved. And for fear of being wilfully misinterpreted, I’m not saying that all Comprehensives are inadequate, only that some are, and that it seems unfair to allow kids’ lives to be put on a certain track at such an early age – a track that sometimes it is not possible to remove themselves from. Just as some kids who go to Grammar Schools leave expecting the world to fall into their lap, some kids who don’t leave thinking that they deserve nothing but the worst from life. It hardly seems fair on the basis of a test at the age of 11 years.

So, I’m left ruefully fingering my quiz sheet, and wondering what a quiz quotient of 142 really means. I don’t think I’m really that bad, after all. I am willing to work hard, and I do think that I am as likely as anyone to succeed on that basis alone.

And at least I’m not as bad as Brannon Brockbank, 30, from Wigan, who took a fatal overdose after scoring lower than his wife in the BBC National IQ Test in May. In fairness, I don’t know what I would have done if Jane had scored higher than me on the general knowledge test (that is my way of saying that I scored a whole THREE quiz-quotient points higher than her. Ha.), but I can’t imagine it would have been anything more serious than stubbing a couple of cigarettes out on my arm. There is such a thing as perspective.