Books
So, Lord of the Rings was recently voted the best book ever by UK voters in the BBC 'Big Read' poll.
Yes, well, Grease was voted the best musical ever, so there is clearly no accounting for taste in any form of Top 100 list.
And with nine of the top ten books voted the 'best ever' by the great British public having been made into film or TV adaptations within the last few years, was it really the books people were voting for or was it Liv Tyler's cheekbones?
Using the red button on your disgustingly expensive digital TV really is just not the most prudent way of voting what is tbe 'best' book I'm afraid. What's good for sales is bad for literature.
The whole awful circus nevertheless raises the wider question of how literary merit is quantified. Popularity decrees that, yes, Lord of the Rings is probably the 'best' book around in that its sales are consistently high over the course of decades, it has spawned numerous adaptations - film, cartoons and audiobooks - but does this necessarily make it a good piece of literature?
Did getting to number one in the music charts make Mr Blobby a good song? Perhaps no.
Any form of election is bound to equal glaring juxtapositions in any list. At 86 on the BBC list is children's book Vicky Angel by Jacqueline Wilson, one above Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (worth reading if you enjoyed Nineteen Eighty-Four, by the way). And is Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban (number 24) better than Animal Farm (number 46)?
And where were Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson and Daniel Defoe - believed by many to be the fathers of the modern novel? Jeffrey Archer was there, I kid you not.
All quantification of the merit of anything is subjective of course, but somehow books should be left to one side in our vote-crazy media-driven frenzy of texting, emailing, phoning and red buttoning. I have no problem with Graham Norton-fronted trash TV regarding the Top 100 TV moments of soaps/sitcoms/nose picking of Rosie Webster - it's cheap TV and it keeps rent-a-quote 'celebrities' in their sixteenth minute of fame off our dole queues.
It's highly ironic that votes for TV programmes which essentially are highly-successful marketing gimmics - think Fame Academy, Big Brother and the Ant and Dec-fronted dross that gave the world Michelle McManus - are the only form of democracy many people ever take part in, especially people our age.
Today it's books, what is it tomorrow? Your votes whittle down from 100 which pensioner gets to go private for that hip replacement. Text SACK to 98554 to take Kilroy off the air for good.
Pick up a book because you want to, because the subject matter appeals to you or you've read a review of it or had a recommendation from a friend.
Don't trust voters, they're usually wrong when it comes to voting on fiction - as the fraudulent claims of Labour's 2001 manifesto have proved if nothing else.
15th Jan 2004