Sports jocks are so half-baked

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/02/victoria-coren-brains-always-beat-brawn

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He wears a tank top and glasses. He's studying for a medical degree at Glasgow University. He cares about creme patissiere. And he is the nation's latest heart-throb. This is all excellent news.

Contestant James Morton from The Great British Bake Off has triggered a tsunami of internet love, with national newspaper headlines calling him "the hunk in a tank top", thanks to an irresistible combination of treacle tart and doctor's bag. Who wouldn't love a man with a pastry brush in one hand and a scalpel in the other? He could whip out your appendix while making you a perfect baked Alaska at the same time. Take that, Fifty Shades.

James Morton's geek chic is tremendously timely, in television terms. On BBC4, there's a new series of Only Connect, TV's toughest quiz, with its weird questions, brilliant teams and baffling Egyptian hieroglyphs. Everyone's delighted. Even the Guardian, generous-spirited as ever, gushed that the host "just about manages to remain on the right side of smartarsery". Oh stop it guys, I'm blushing.

Meanwhile, on BBC2, Benedict Cumberbatch is starring in a new, adapted Madox Ford tetralogy branded "too clever for normal people to follow". Hurrah! As the blackboard reads at Fergus Henderson's restaurant: it's brains over brawn again.

No disrespect to the Paralympians, whose physical excellence is another cheering story of the moment, but enough athletic prowess already. What about the crossword puzzler, the quiet philosopher, the expert quizzer, the woman whose idea of exertion is lifting a bumper sudoku book on to a train?

We, the physically underperforming majority – the sitters and readers, the studiers and stamp collectors, the pale, short-sighted and wheezy – have been silenced all summer. Ignored, forgotten, disenfranchised, we've spent August creeping humbly around museums, pausing only to enjoy a spot of chamber music or recreate a quick historical battle, imbibing yet more fascinating facts about Henry II or the islets of Langerhans that the world will never ask to hear.

Though we be many, our cultural power is weak. While you were watching the triple jump, 57 more of our libraries closed.

Well, summer's ending, Sport Billy. Our time is come. The sun is kind to swimmers and cyclers and people who suit a Lycra vest, but you have to put your abs away in September. The leaves are already falling, days shortening and temperature dropping. That's no problem for us geeks. We've got our knitted jumpers on; we never took them off. A thunderstorm won't catch us in the park with no coat; we stayed indoors through the whole summer anyway, just in case. You can't be too careful when it comes to pollen. So, who wins?

The thing is, I'm not really joking. Not entirely. When the Guardian, one of only a handful of remaining broadsheet newspapers, monitors a very slightly highbrow quiz for "smartarsery", it's a bit sad.

Whose side are you on, guys? "Smartarse" is something for the school bully to shout at the school swot, while holding his head in a loo. When the little fella consoles himself with a Guardian crossword on the bus home, he doesn't want to find that 13 across says YOU'RE A FOUR-EYED GAYLORD.

It's also worth wondering whether the day the meatheads wipe out all the "smartarses", the Guardian itself will definitely be left unscathed. I don't know much about the quality of its wrestling team, but I know which way I'd bet.

So it is genuinely heartwarming, in the kinder world of The Great British Bake Off, to see James Morton lauded for his knitwear and specs, his eagerness and enthusiasm. Those 4.5 million viewers don't despise him for being square and ambitious, nor even forgive him for it – they love him for it. He'd be cooler if he cared less, tried less, did less and swore more, but he wouldn't be better liked.

The tone is set by presenter Sue Perkins: herself bespectacled, shyly dressed, adorably geeky and famously keen on classical music, ashamed neither of her vast intelligence nor of the joke: "The butter's room temperature, the flour is sifted, but who will crumble?"

(And why should she be ashamed? It's a damn good joke.)

You can be sure that someone, somewhere in the TV hierarchy, tried to argue that a baking show should be presented by someone "more accessible" – ie, younger, stupider and less funny – than Perkins and her co-presenter, Mel Giedroyc. That same person will now be arguing that its huge success and massive ratings are coincidental to the smartarsey old crones who are inexplicably presenting it.

But he (and oh yes, it will be a he) would also have been sure that the sex symbol among this season's bakers would be hunky Stuart. Not geeky James.

Stuart is one of the other contenders. Stuart is a PE teacher. James is a speccy student. Stuart was filmed running around a muddy field in shorts. James was filmed talking about his grandma. Stuart plays rugby. James plays the double bass. To grade 8 standard.

Stuart is so laid back that he only half-read his treacle tart recipe and forgot to put the syrup in. James is so zealous that he baked a batch of pink macaroons just for a topping.

Yet James is the one the viewers fancy. Fancy! This means that, essentially, the nation has scanned the available gene pool on the show and its biological gut instinct has said: "Right now, we need the clever one." We won't be tricked into sneering at him for his unashamed, unphysical aspirations.

Parents nationwide sat their children down in front of the Olympics, and now the Paralympics, to give them sporting role models who aren't just coke-snorting millionaires or fake-tanned Wags; and quite right too. These athletes certainly pique a child's imagination for the better. But you will show them James Morton too, won't you? For pudding?

www.victoriacoren.com