I woke up this morning to find Gail Trimble, the captain of last night’s winning University Challenge team, doing a round of media interviews. This young woman is supposedly the cleverest contestant they’ve ever had on the show – half the time, she seemed to be answering Paxo’s questions before he’d even started asking them, from Euripides’ Bacchae to the Asian Dub Foundation. Unfortunately for her, this hasn’t gone down well on the weird wide web – every man and his blog has been slagging her off for being smug and arrogant. Suddenly she’s on Radio 4 trying to justify the fact that she’s got a brain the size of Canada.

Being clever isn’t very cool these days. To be fair, I’m not sure it ever was – generally speaking, clever politicians have never gone down very well with the public. ‘Too clever by half’ is a classic British put-down. But these days, when the papers are full of vacuous celebrities, it appears to be a lot easier to be famous without any discernable talents. Highly intelligent people – particularly women – just seem to make people suspicious, or resentful, or possibly both.

Given that the UK is supposed to be a knowledge economy these days, highly dependent on services, it strikes me as a pretty bad thing that people have such a downer on cleverness. How are we supposed to catch up with the countries that have surged ahead of us in education and skills when kids spend their lives watching gormless Big Brother contestants make a fortune on TV? (sorry though I am for Jade Goody). It tells you something that one of the first people on the phone to Ms Trimble yesterday were the blokey blokes at Nuts, who apparently wanted her to do a ‘tasteful photoshoot’ (they have those in Nuts?)

OK, so perhaps she came across as a little smug sometimes – but I probably would to, if I was that good at University Challenge (I’ve rarely seen Paxo gaze on someone so admiringly). And I know that being good at quizzes isn’t necessarily the same as being clever – but the fact that she’s doing a doctorate at Oxford suggests she’s probably quite smart too (although we have an Oxford classicist on staff at MT, so we know for a fact they're not all geniuses). Why can’t we just enjoy the fact that we’ve got someone on TV that actually has a brain in her head?

Of course in an ideal world, it would be nice to think that Ms Trimble will soon be putting her capacious brain to work for the benefit of UK plc – which let’s face it, needs all the help it can get at the moment. But unfortunately, it sounds like her ambitions extend no further than becoming a Classics don at Oxford. Shame.

In today's bulletin:
Royal Mail row escalates as pension fund backs sale
Vodafone adds to gloom by shedding 500 UK jobs
Editor's blog: Trimble's University Challenge to UK economy
Honda engineers new CEO
Books Special: The Secrets of Success in Management, by Andrew Leigh

For reasons of late development, I did. Having kicked off my driving career in 1984 with a £250 Morris Marina (gorgeous in sun-faded red), worked my way through a Triumph Herald 13/60 convertible (written off by a moonlighting Chinese chauffeur in a Cadillac), made do with a one-litre VW Polo (lean, early 90s recession years) and then completed the century with a Saab 1995 900S, I finally got my new Saab 9/3 in 2001 and still drive it every day.  

So it's with a heavy heart - but not too much surprise - that I hear today that Saab is heading for the scrapheap of history. I knew that my version was just a re-skinned Vauxhall Cavalier but that didn't matter. Right from the ignition key sitting between the front seats to those weird ads showing Swedish fighter jets, Saabs were a bit different. The problem they had was being quite sure what exactly that 'difference' entailed. As a brand it was always a bit of a mystery, lacking any of the certitudes of BMW or Audi. It's never bothered me, as the thought of being pigeon-holed by my wheels was pretty unattractive.

Now with more offspring on the way I'm being forced to rethink the family's car situation. And none too attractive the options look, either. I'm currently trying to kid myself that an ageing 7 series BMW would accommodate two baby seats nicely in the back. My wife is having none of it. There are limits to what a man can take. And, if you ever see me driving around at the helm of a Vauxhall Zafira, you have my permission to shoot me.

In today's bulletin:
Northern Rock starts lending again as banks feel the heat
Mandelson gives LDV row the swerve
Ryanair's check-in desks checking out
Were our big banks run by psychopaths?
Editor's blog: Sadness as Saab reaches the end of road

Well, it had to happen. You’re not going to attend any gathering these days – dinner party, conference or even bus stop queue – without hearing the fourth estate receiving a good kicking. Here in Portmeirion yesterday afternoon at the 'Names Not Numbers' conference, the media took a mauling from an ad man - and an ex-McKinseyite ad man at that. William Eccleshare, the boss of BBDO in Europe, took the great inky unwashed to task for being such a bunch of Cassandras and resolutely ignoring all those green shoots of recovery that we currently see springing out everywhere through the frozen lawns.

Thanks to our bad attitude, we’ve infected the general public with a bad case of depression, said Eccleshare - they now believe the end of the world is nigh and are behaving like a miserable coven of 7th Day Adventists. And, paralysed with angst, they’ve stopped spending so much at his client Sainsbury’s. 

This tirade got a good reception. Yes, said one sage in the audience from Edelman, the media consistently comes lowest of all the groups surveyed in the trust index. Lower even than politicians. I heard from a 'very very senior' BBC person the other day, remarked another, that they’ve had enough of Humphreys' and Paxman's unrelenting gloom, but they cannot do anything about it. Paxo’s out of control.

Well just hang on one sec. We’re currently in a situation in the UK where Honda in Swindon is shut until the summer, a huge swathe of the banking industry has been nationalised and investment banks have been as good as been wiped out. Where Jim Rogers, Soros’s sidekick from across the water, says UK plc is washed-up, with nothing left to sell or trade with. What are we supposed to do? Pronounce, like a village idiot, that everything’s sunny in the garden? That all will be well and all manner of things will be well? 

But there’s another point. The marcomms industry (with advertising in the vanguard) has ridden the boom years very nicely, urging us all to spend and borrow more to make the good times go on for just a bit longer. Wouldn’t any reasonable person say the orgy of consumption that characterised the last ten years has been encouraged by the siren voices of ad men? The ones who whispered in the ear of the punter chasing a 120% mortgage and a couple of buy-to-let loans: go on, go for it, carpe diem. Never mind that nobody in the UK has saved a penny in the last decade for tomorrow, next week, or their old age.

We’ve lived beyond our means and now the wretched price has to be paid. It ain’t Armageddon, as I’ve written here before. It’s called a correction, and during a correction, people don’t spend so much because they’re trying to reflect on what went wrong. They’re anxious, and it’s our duty as media to tell them what we see as the truth about the world.

In today's bulletin:
Crosby falls on sword after HBOS whistleblower row
Unemployment up again as Bank admits 'deep recession'
Ashley makes approach for Blacks
Salad days no more for UK graduates
Editor's blog: Pontificating in Portmeirion

When you attend a conference entitled ‘We are Names Not Numbers’, you expect a few starry appearances. Julia Hobsbawm’s bash at Portmeirion, from where I’m writing this overlooking the estuary, doesn’t disappoint.

Simon Schama bought me a Welsh whiskey last night and Michael Wolff, Rupert Murdoch’s biographer, was excellent company as he regaled us with stories about his larks while researching The Digger. We’ve got business school heads, MPs, Home Office mandarins, digital gurus, and even Lord Elis Thomas, the presiding office of the National Assembly of Wales – who for some bizarre reason insisted on addressing us in Welsh (we had Sennhauser ear pieces to provide simultaneous translation). My, we’ve even got Clarence Mitchell, the official spokesman for Gerry and Kate McCann. Clarence is, so far, just listening and has yet to offer his solution to the global credit crunch.

What are we up to? Well, putting the world to rights, of course. We kicked off this morning with an address from David Smith, the CEO of Jaguar Land Rover. That job has to be one of the toughest gigs going at the moment. Smith confirmed he’s not got his hands on any state aid yet, but he’ll have seen with envy that Sarko over in Paris has today bailed out the far less efficient French auto industry to the tune of billions of euros. He just wants some finance for his potential customers, likening his plight to an engine seized up through lack of lubricating oil.

There’s a lot of angst and hand-ringing going on. Plenty of analysing how we all got it so wrong and wound up in this mess. ‘Individuality is the vanity of wealth,’ remarked one wag this morning. Another went even further and asked – rhetorically I assume – whether we are witnessing ‘the collapse of capitalism’. Could an ‘excessive desire for individuality’ really have caused the crash, they wondered?

Hang on a minute. How can wanting a Ford Fiesta that doesn’t just come in black be the root of all evil? I know we’re undergoing a correction at the moment – but we’re not about to spend the rest of our lives in hair shirts, reading Mao’s little red book and organising ourselves into collectives...

In today's bulletin:
HBOS and RBS chiefs say sorry for ignoring risks
JJB calls in the administrators after retail shoeing
Ed makes a Depressing Balls-up
Harriet Harman: No more sexism in the City
Editor's blog: Putting the world to rights in Portmerion