Once again I find myself sitting here with an incredulous look on my face and shaking my head in disdainful wonder at the so called “Great British Public”.
The BBC news has an article today that details a list of fifty unsung British heroes that the National Lottery has assembled as part of its 15th anniversary celebrations. You can see the full list here, but I’ll try to limit myself to a short rant on the contents of the top ten:
1: Michael Faraday, physicist
2: JM Barrie, author
3: Edward Jenner, smallpox vaccine pioneer
4: John Peel, broadcaster
5: Alan Turing, mathematician
6: Baldrick, Blackadder character
7: Midge Ure, singer
8: Percy Shaw, cat’s eyes inventor
9: Tim Berners-Lee, worldwide web inventor
10: Fred Scott, BBC cameraman
Admittedly some of the people in the top ten are underappreciated for their contributions to science, arts and society in general. Others though I would say are very well known, and some, well some shouldn’t even be on a list of people who are supposedly “heroes”.
Apologies to people of a nervous disposition, but I have to get something out of my system before I continue.
BALDRICK is a fictional character you FUCKING CRETINS!
Sorry about that.
The rest of the list is a strange mixture. As I’ve said I agree that many of the people mentioned on the list are deeply underappreciated by the public. The news was recently filled with the demand that the British Government apologise for basically hounding Alan Turing to suicide after the Second World War. His contribution to the fledgling art of computing and cryptanalysis during the war cannot be overstated and I believe he rightly belongs near the top of the list.
Midge Ure however is a world famous musician and responsible for a good chunk of the organisation of Band Aid, and the Band Aid Trust charity. I don’t see why was he chosen over the heads of other worthies such as Sting, Fish or even, dare I say it, Bob Geldof who was the more visible partner in Band Aid. I suppose at least Midge managed to do more than spend his life riding along on a one hit wonder band and thumping tables at charity gigs.
Another odd entry is Fred Scott the BBC cameraman at number ten. He’s the award winning cameraman who was filming when John Simpson and his Iraqi translator Kamaran Abdurrazaq Muhamed were caught in a friendly fire incident during the Iraq war. Kamaran was unfortunately killed when a US warplane bombed the convoy of Kurdish vehicles they were travelling in. Simpson was left deaf in one ear as a result. It was an important moment in the media coverage of warfare. I wouldn’t go as far as to rank Fred as high as 10 on this list, but I wouldn’t do him the dishonour of ranking him lower than FUCKING BALDRICK.
The more I read this list the more I begin to wonder if the people who voted for it were even aware of whom many of these people were. To me it reads like a list of people that young, trendy eighteen to twenty-four year olds have vaguely heard about from various sources and they picked them out of the hat. The inclusion of people like Stephen Merchant who co-wrote The Office seems like it was thrown in by some insane fan and the inclusion of the FICTIONAL CHARACTER of Jeeves the butler from the Jeeves and Wooster short stories strains credibility. Why not replace Jeeves with P.G Wodehouse himself? He’s not exactly well known now as he was when he started publishing stories.
I’m going to lie down in a dark room before I decide to go all Dr. Evil and try to put end to this farce we call society once and for all.