Icons review: Ambitious BBC series is uncomfortably western-centric

This week Kathleen Turner’s choices – Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe and David Bowie – battle it out

The Entertainers on ‘Icons’ (BBC)

You certainly can’t fault the ambition of BBC’s new popular history show Icons. It is now halfway through its run to find the greatest person, or icon, of the 20th century, no less, and its orbit is still expanding. This week the catch up with Charlie Chaplin, Billie Holiday, Marilyn Monroe and David Bowie – the Entertainers.

Category by category, they’ve been weighing the famous names, and so far we’ve been asked to vote on the Leaders, Explorers and Scientists. In X Factor style, the winners in each category go through to the next round and, in due course, an overall official Icon will be selected. This will be at the “live” (though they’re mostly long gone) grand final on 5 February, with, naturally, a public vote. It may look meaningless, obviously, but it can be thought-provoking and revealing to put Nelson Mandela up against Billie Jean King and Alan Turing. Why not? It challenges us to consider what we think matters most in the world, and how much individual personalities really change the course of history.

Now it’s the turn of showbiz, because, as the episode’s presenter Kathleen Turner – minor icon and the sexy, husky voice of Jessica Rabbit (in the underrated live action/animation Who Killed Roger Rabbit?) – says, how could an icon be anyone other than an entertainer?

Quiet easily, of course, but let’s bear with her. The show is, more or less, a series of standard potted histories of the four top contenders who made it through the first round, when a panel of (unnamed) experts selected them. Chaplin, Holiday, Monroe,and Bowie are all “iconic” (whatever that overused expression means). But why were The Beatles, Madonna and Elvis (Presley, not Costello) relegated to honourary mentions? And how come Frank Sinatra, Laurel and Hardy, Groucho Marx and all of Motown, punk, opera and ballet, to name a few, didn’t even merit a reference en passant? Wacko Jacko was, I suppose, a special case, excluded for obvious, though unspoken, reasons.

It feels a bit too random. And I have to say that seeing Sinatra being supplanted by Bowie this soon in the proceedings feels like Leicester City being knocked out of the FA Cup by Newport County – humiliating, painful and just plain wrong. Still, such controversies are what the programme makers seek to stimulate, so not so bad maybe.

Turner and her producers discharge their responsibilities punctiliously. Well-chosen talking heads, such as superfan Simon Callow on Chaplin, add to the usual archive footage, and Turner delivers a measured, thoughtful assessment of each “candidate”, visiting, for example, their former homes and haunts. That said, she finds herself making some wild assertions about Bowie, who supposedly revolutionised the nation’s perceptions of sexuality. He did, a bit, with all that androgynous stuff, but, as far as I can recall, not as much as Boy George, pilloried for his avant garde act in the tabloid press as a “gender bender”. Mostly Bowie was an attention seeker who just went round dressed up as a clown – literally, or you might say ironically, so for the Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) vids. As Theresa May proves, bizarre outfits are not enough to make you a hero.

The more fundamental problem is that Turner is more curator than passionate advocate, suggesting why each of the four are “worthy of your vote”, but not actually plumping for any of them. So it lacks a bit of bite, which Turner would be well suited to administer. It is also uncomfortably western-centric, and most of the candidates extremely familiar, not to say predictable, fashionable even – Bowie very much in vogue these days.

I’d rather enjoy a balloon-debate-style contest involving some of the figures who achieved astonishing things, a “not-quite-icons-but-ought-to-be” contest. This would highlight people who are in danger of serious neglect – Kwame Nkrumah (led black Africa to freedom), Deng Xiaoping (built China’s vast economy), Marshal Georgy Zhukov (Russian general, beat Hitler) and Alfred P Sloan (created General Motors and the modern corporation). For even more entertainment, I’d also be glued to a new series of “not-the-greatest-but-still-not-bad-Briton”, in which, say, Elizabeth Fry is pitted against Bernard Matthews, Brian Clough gets into a tussle with Jane Austen, and Owain Glyndŵr takes on Agatha Christie for their net positive contribution to our national life. I’d love to see a Clough-Glyndwr final.

Some years ago, the BBC enjoyed great success, and much international emulation, with its quest to find the Greatest Briton. It captured the imagination had that sort of passion and because, grand as that exercise was, it was of a more manageable scale than Icons, less arbitrary, and engaged more patriotic emotions. That was true even though everyone knew Winston Churchill was going to win anyway, because he always does. This time, my money’s on Mandela and Bowie for the final two, with Mandela nutmeging the androgynous inventor of Ziggy Stardust and the Thin White Duke, and scoring just before half-time, and then putting the match beyond doubt in extra time. Like Liverpool FC, Mandela looks unstoppable at this stage.