Last week the debate was raging once again about the contentious and important point as to whether the newsreaders write their own copy, read someone else’s or simply make it up as they go along. Angela Rippon reckoned that she had never heard of a newsreader writing stuff, but her modern counterpart, the babelicious Sophie Raworth, claims that they do the writing and adds that she has a postgraduate degree in journalism.

This is the nub of the issue: what on earth is there to learn about journalism at postgraduate level? The point and purpose of our lowly, occasionally useful, trade could be scribbled on the back of a postage stamp and would easily be comprehended by a 14-year-old hoodie with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and a carrier bag full of glue. Who has decided that it must be dignified with a doctoral thesis?

Nor is reading the news even what one might call “journalism”. It is an even simpler business called “reading”. All that the BBC demands of its female newsreaders is an ability to read in an impartial way words like “Israel has murdered more Lebanese children again today” from the teleprompter without belching or lisping. It helps if they have the eminently presentable demeanour of a girl guide leader from Esher.

They are forbidden to express an opinion. They are not required to go undercover, analyse the Footsie or add witty asides. They are required to be that which they are known as in the trade — “a gob on a stick”. A penetrating intelligence is not merely unnecessary, it is counterproductive.

Newsreaders who are too intelligent soon stop being newsreaders, much as John Humphrys did, suffocated by the banality of their duties. Or they give the game away by doing what that German newsreader did and end the programme, shaking their heads sadly, muttering, “it’s all lies, all lies”.

Which is not to say BBC newsreaders are bad at their jobs: quite the reverse. But we should not confuse competence with intelligence. Newsreaders believe that because they are reading out serious stuff and everybody is listening to them, they must therefore be creatures possessed of a high IQ. They are confusing the message with the medium. I have met one or two clever newsreaders (Sophie herself is no fool) and then there are newsreaders with the reasoning capacities of squid. Like race and gender, intelligence has no bearing on their ability to do the job.

It is a common mistake that people in certain occupations have to be “clever”. There was a shock horror story in the papers last week to the effect that almost all people who work in kindergartens and nurseries are utter imbeciles; ill-informed, illiterate, oxtail soup between the ears, etc. Should we really let these morons look after our lovely children, these terrible Vicky Pollard manqués?

Well, yes, we should. No matter how loveable, cute, cheeky and unintentionally funny pre-school children might be, they are also extraordinarily stupid. The most intellectually demanding task required of kindergarten workers is that they should be able to outwit a four-year-old and thus stop him doing stuff. Other than that, they need to be kindly of nature, patient and competent at handing out the plastic building bricks and making sure the kids don’t try to take a quick dip in the local pond. They are not required to summarise to their charges Wittgenstein’s Tractatus or explain what it was that Heisenberg was so uncertain about. Handing out a brightly coloured book about a mischievous mole while smiling benignly will suffice.

I suspect that one can now do a postgraduate degree in looking after middle-class pre-school children, which will be of about as much practical value as a postgraduate degree in reading the news or a doctorate in announcing the winners of the national lottery.

The expansion of higher education, with its insistence that more and more young people every year should be dragooned into universities, may have had the wholly laudable effect of making thick people feel better about themselves. But because their chosen vocation now requires a “degree” of sorts it does not mean that they are any less thick than they would otherwise have been.

Nor is their thickness a problem. If illiterate and brain dead 18-year-old women are not allowed to look after our frankly cretinous toddlers, what job should we entrust them with — foreign secretary? Or should we not allow them into the workplace at all? My guess is that women who are highly literate and in possession of an inquiring mind might feel a little stifled looking after little Oliver and Clytemnestra all day. So stifled that they might start smacking them about a bit. And that would never do.

There’s a place for high intelligence but we should not demand it of everybody. And certainly not our nursery school staff or our newsreaders.

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