Iconic? Beeb is so moronic
NICK Hewer was talking about decorating a cake when he gave this clue for a Countdown teatime teaser: D.Warner of Leicester wins £35 for that howler. Keep ’em coming to the address at the top of the page.
THE “icon” disease spreads like a virus. Let’s be clear: Elvis, Bruce Lee and Tommy Cooper were icons. John Barrowman isn’t one, no matter how many times he says otherwise.
The Mastermind chair, Doctor Who’s Tardis and Pamela Anderson’s red Baywatch bikini were iconic. Kim Woodburn is not. (The correct term for her is “deranged old cleaner with anger management issues”.)
JUST six weeks into 2019 and we already have a prime contender for the year’s biggest waste of time and money.
Icons was as confused as a chameleon in Michael Portillo’s wardrobe and as ill-conceived as the average EastEnders plot.
It was pointless, random, shamelessly biased, frequently wrong-headed and more ham-fisted than a light-fingered butcher at Billingsgate.
BBC Two took eight hours to tell us the greatest figure of the 20th century was Alan Turing, pictured above – a bloke 90% of the public couldn’t pick out of a police line-up.
The series wanted to be taken seriously but sabotaged itself at every turn. It aspired to be democratic but was terrified we might vote the “wrong” way, so it micro-managed categories and rigged results.
Missing from the final were such genuine 20th Century giants as Neil Armstrong, The Queen, Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence of Arabia and Elvis.
Lord Reith was not in the running either. Just as well. The Email me at: garry.bushell@ dailystar.co.uk or write c/o Daily Star Sunday,
10 Lower Thames Street, London
EC3R 6EN BBC’s founding father wanted to “inform, educate and entertain”, not preach, patronise and pigeon-hole.
The live final was especially grim, hosted by Nick Robinson and Claudia Winkleman, renowned for her penetrating insights into Ugg boots and lip gloss.
Experts included Dermot O’Dreary, overwrought fox-hugger Chris Packham and a bored Lily Cole. It felt like a BGT live show organised by the National Union of Teachers.
The whole dumbed-down exercise was logically flawed. How can a boxer compete with a scientist anyway?
David Bowie was last century’s greatest entertainer, apparently. Why? Wonderful though he was, Bowie sold far fewer records than The Beatles, Jacko, AC/DC, Queen, Led Zep, Elton John (etc).
He wasn’t as influential as Chuck Berry or as magnificent as Marvin Gaye. Ah but Bowie “showed the world it was okay to be different”.
And Johnny Rotten didn’t?
The Beeb put the boot into Churchill early. Yet Bowie’s coked-up 1970s flirtation with fascism left eyebrows unraised.
You waited for someone to challenge Picasso for his “sexism” and chicanery, or Mandela United FC to even crop up.
But no, the project was underscored throughout by the festering sore of fashionable groupthink.
Len Goodman’s Partners In Rhyme was bad but Icons saw its money-wasting awfulness and raised the bar. And yet still 2,300 people a day stop paying the licence fee. Baffling.
IF the Icons vote had been in 2000, Princess Di would have been in there. In 3000, who knows? Peregrinus worked out the principles of magnetism in the 13th century and who do we remember? Genghis Khan. DON McCullin is a terrific photographer and a genuinely likeable old codger unhampered by cynicism. But Looking For England didn’t look hard enough. Don found token toffs (Glyndebourne opera buffs, fox hunters), some street people (crackheads, a couple of friendly old Rastas), and elderly holidaymakers in rain-lashed Eastbourne.
But there was nothing modern or forward-looking here. No pop-up businesses, festivals or YouTubers. No football crowds, poets or indie bands. And very little sign of people working for a living. Watching a brass band parp away as raindrops dripped down faces had a certain comic charm. But it seemed odd to hear Don claim the English are uniquely eccentric when he also saw hundreds of barechested Bradford men of south Asian heritage beating themselves in the streets. “In the future this will be the norm,” he said. Let’s hope not. My chest couldn’t take it. JON Bernthal, right, Punisher (Netflix)...Les Mis finale..Sally Carmen, Corrie... Das Boot SkyAt)... Hospital. PURE, left, – puerile... Icons live final – more cringe-worthy than TOWIE live...Small Fortune – little point... Magnum P.I. (Sky One) – Magnum P.I.S.S.
‘He takes his pipe out and uses his hands to indulge his only vice.’