Wednesday is the day I teach my class on British and American TV. There appear to be three sorts of student in my class. Those who are very interested in media and movies, those who think it won’t be too hard a credit for their English module and those who think that a class where you get to watch television for an hour can’t be all bad. I suspect that the last category is the one that won’t quite achieve the standard for a pass, but you never know.

Today I went over Michael Hauge’s essentials for a story concept and while some students were very interested and took notes, there is always the class’s answer to Krusty the Klown, yearning for his (and it is always a his) own fifteen minutes in the limelight.

There are quite small vestiges of early man who are so out of touch with reality that they don’t want to even imagine that women go to see movies like Troy just to catch a glimpse of Brad Pit’s butt. And it then goes without saying that there are even smaller remnants of early Cro-Magnon who can’t even begin to think about such stuff – Brad Pit’s butt in particular - without worrying that they are gay. Or that any man who talks about BP’s Butt is also gay. Oddly enough this always happens with the loudest character (male) in class. The odd thing is why it so troubles them, that I am quite happy to state the obvious – women I know are quite keen on Brad Pit’s butt and men I know are quite keen on any woman that is marginally attractive, film star or otherwise. These are truths as ancient as the human race. The opportunity to go off at a tangent and demonstrate a large vocabulary that explains why men like this are called ‘Jocks’ is almost – but not quite – overwhelming. Instead I shall have a challenging exposition on the power of Pink Economics and loads of clips from Will and Grace and Queer Eye for A Straight Guy and anything else about gays in the media, for my next class. At a slight tangent to this, I met another student in a supermarket car park when I was with Susi and said a friendly hello and since then this student has been the model of studiousness.

A much more pleasant torture available is the documentary on Shakespeare. Again a collection of observations is irrestible. Students presented with a variety of Sit-Coms from the things-going-hilariously-wrong genre to the things-going-surreally-wrong are often met with indifference. It doesn’t matter that Fawlty Towers is one of the finest examples of English humour or that Father Ted is often so hilariously surreal that it would take twice as long to explain the jokes as it does to watch it. However if I present the students with a fairly interesting documentary on old Shakey, they watch intentively as if there life depends on it. Shakespeare means of course culture while Father Ted is just , well not anything that can they can impress people with at intellectual dinner parties ( strange affairs in general here – it is very rare to ever find anyone throwing up in the toilet just as you arrive – the internationally recognized sign of an officially good party).

In a society where it is apparently very easy to measure intelligence by the way a person speaks, it is also, apparently, a measure of intelligence as to how much crap you can talk about Shakespeare in the space of five minutes. Witness for yourself the theatres packed with English language students whenever the most appalling clod-hoppers of jobbing actors hack the bard slowly to death while simultaneously chewing what little scenery there is, to bits. If anyone wants a tip on how to make money in Germany, just set up a company of players and you could tour the country for life, bashing out any old bollocks as Shakespeare. Since virtually no one in the audience has even the slightest clue as to what it is all about – it’s a license to print money