Sore Eyes

i just don't get why the public love Diana so much. what did she actually *do*? ok, so she was quite pretty, and she did some good charity work, but on a grand scale of goodness, she still doesn't rate that highly in my (clearly unpopular) opinion.

Beats me.

I think that one factor is that - like all the best rock stars - she died young. Another is that she very was very good at PR: she set herself up in the public eye as the polar opposite of the royal family (warm where they're cold, concerned with the "common people" where they're into foxhunting and polo, informal where they're stuffy and obsessed with protocol) and flouted her "victimhood."

It'll be very interesting to see how she fares in a poll like this twenty years down the line.

Personally, I found the whole contest to be incredibly irritating, yet another example of the BBC's decline. The ads for it were annoying and far too frequent (as with any programme the BBC wants to push) and the contest itself is meaningless.

The Brunel vote was aided by students of Brunel University swamping the online polling booths, apparently (which seems a bit unlikely, but there we go).

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,847092,00.html

Thoroughly pointless venture, anyway - they'd have done just as well to leave it as an unranked top ten, rather than bickering over whether art is greater than science is greater than politics.

I completely agree that the title of "Greatest Briton" bestowed by the contest doesn't mean a great deal, both because of the prospect of organised voting campaigns and because the results may have been influenced as much by the presenters as the subjects. I wonder what the result would have been if Michael Portillo and Mo Mowlem had swapped subjects?

The frequency of promos for the programmes on BBC TV didn't seem all that over the top to me. Not that I've sat and counted ads, but it seems to me that ITV promote their football coverage, the occasional 'classic drama' serial or the latest sensational developments in their soap operas every bit as hard as the BBC promoted Great Britons. Perhaps it's just that whereas the campaigns for soap operas and dramas run for a week or two the Great Britons campaign ran for six weeks or so?

I do like the idea of an unranked Top 10, but I I can't imagine that any TV company nowadays would have been able to resist ranking them.

I don't think that it's necessary to insist that the final voting reflects the voters' opinions of the relative merits of politics vs showbiz vs the arts vs science vs commerce. If you'd replaced Darwin with Hawking, Churchill with Lloyd George and Diane with the late Queen Mother you'd have got a very different ranking.

I've commented on this elsewhere, so I won't dwell on it too much in your space, but one of the things that struck me was how weak the so-called 'champions' generally were during the debate last night. Andrew Marr and AA Gill were far and away the best debaters, which is a bit worrying considering that a former and a current MP were among the panel.

Perhaps it's a symptom of the way that modern politicians rely on set-piece speeches, the delivery of soundbites, and trying to stay "on-message." It's one thing to deliver a script, and quite another to think on your feet.

I've been voting for Brunel (after seeing an episode of Local heros that featured him) all through the series and I was very happy with JC's documentary. I'm dissapointed that he didn't win because I believe he needs the recognition much much more than any of the others. Then again I'm sure he's done pretty well from just being in the top 10 and having someone like JC championing him.

If it wasn't to be him I'm glad it was Churchill and highly relieved it wasn't Di. What DID she do?

I think Jeremy Clarkson's documentary was clearly a big factor in Brunel's success. A weak documentary could have left him pretty near the bottom of the final 10, just because he's a representative of a profession which doesn't get the recognition it deserves nowadays.

As for Di, she died. Watch and see what people think of her in twenty years...

While neither I understands the whole DI cult, I'm not sure twenty years is enough. People tends to create illusions of those who died prematurely, illusions which then gets written down as history. The worst case senario here is that she'll turn into some sort of JFK-figurine.

The reason I suggested twenty years is that by then presumably Prince Charles will have married Camilla (and maybe even ascended to the throne, unless his mother lives as long as her mother did) and there will have been enough time for Diana's sons to marry, settle down and set up their own spin-offs in the royal soap opera.

I'm not saying Di will be forgotten, but experience shows that the passage of time works wonders. Look at the adventures of the late Princess Margaret: her romance with Group Captain Townshend, her divorce from Lord Snowdon, her retreats to Mustique: all considered fairly racy in their day, but twenty years on they were just facts waiting to be aired in her obituary.

Granted, Diana was more of a global media presence than Margaret. Even so, I can't help thinking that unless one of her sons makes a point of carrying out his royal duties in Diana's name and actively keeping "Saint Di" alive in the public imagination her star will fade a bit over time, at least to the point where nobody would place her in their Top 10 Britons of all time. I hope.

I don't think JC made that much difference. Maybe 5% max. I don't think of him as a representative of engineering though but more of science because he was more of an inventor and pioneer than "just" an engineer.

But as you pointed out Simon, you were already a fan after a documentary earlier this year. I think that someone who was aware of Brunel but didn't realise just how many things he'd designed/built could have been influenced quite a bit by Clarkson's passionate advocacy of the case for Brunel.

And yes, I agree that Brunel was there on behalf of science as much as pure engineering. It's just that he was the only engineer in the Top 10, so he got to carry the banner of applied science, while Darwin and Newton got to represent the scientists.