With President Bush now one of the least popular presidents in history, and Hillary Clinton raising money for her 2008 White House campaign while looking scarily like Dr Evil (grey trouser-suit, buttoned to the neck, chunky shoes), something inevitably had to break in this nation’s fragile psyche. And now it has finally happened — thanks to a new hit TV gameshow entitled Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? Not since the Austin Allegro flew the flag for Britain’s postwar manufacturing capability in the 1970s has a country become so obviously and dangerously consumed by self-loathing.

As far as I can tell, the idea behind Are You Smarter than a Fifth Grader? is to prove to the world that the average American grown-up has less intelligence than a child. This is achieved by making adults and children answer the same questions from a fifth-grade textbook. If the adults lose, they must turn to face the camera and declare themselves an idiot. The show is of course not really a test of intelligence, but of the ability of adults to remember classroom trivia from several decades ago. Still, there’s something addictively unsettling about finding out that no, you have absolutely no idea how many sides there are on a trapezoid, while little Jimmy sits there with a delighted grin on his face and crayon outline of a quadrilateral on his desk.

(Being British makes the show even more uncomfortable. For example: I had to look-up “fifth grader” on Wikipedia.)

But can this show really be good for America? Can you imagine if, say, the French had come up with the concept? I imagine a Frenchman in a conference room somewhere in Studio City, California, wrapping up his pitch to a circular table of unsmiling TV executives: “And so, mon amis, the aim of ze game eez to prove how very stupeed are you stupeed Americans, so stupeed you have not even the brains of a small child! Hah!” Long silence. Cut to the Frenchman waking up the next morning, naked and bleeding in Tijuana.

It doesn’t help that the show is hosted by Jeff Foxworthy, whose entire body of work revolves around the US equivalent of Irishman jokes, all of which begin with the line, “You might be a redneck if . . .”. Shouldn’t the White House put an export ban on this man?

In the meantime, I have a suggestion for how Fox TV (a sister company of The Times), can tweak the show to help to boost America’s self-confidence. As well as testing the grown-ups’ ability to perform fifth-grade tasks, how about testing the fifth graders with grown-up tasks? I can just see it now: “Watch the clock tick as 11-year-old Bennie tries to complete his Dad’s federal tax return on time!”; “Will ten-year-old Sarah be able to exit the 405-freeway at 75mph in her Mom’s SUV, in heavy rain, while checking a voicemail from work on her mobile?!”

Okay, not all of the children might survive these tasks. But just think how good it would make Americans feel.

God knows, they need it.

Times Recommends

• Bank charges hit us for being human
• Sorry, Father, thou still shalt not steal
• The shed where Santa’s failures go to die