A little less conversation

'In all my born days,' said the man with the dog, 'I have never heard anyone having a discussion about who the Greatest Briton was'

"There's this advert going out on the BBC at the moment," said the man at the bar, "showing a restaurant full of people discussing who was the greatest Briton of all time. I have to say that is a restaurant I would avoid like the plague."

"In all my born days," said the man with the dog, as he ordered himself another pint, "in all my born days I have never ever heard a pub conversation, a dinner conversation or even a conversation at work about who the greatest Briton of all time was. It's not the sort of thing that people give a Feydeau fart about. So why should the BBC think for a moment that anyone is going to switch on and watch Isaac Newton slug it out with Charles Darwin and Diana, Princess of Wales? And why is the BBC wasting our money organising a TV vote on it all?"

"And why is it on BBC 2?" said the lady with the black hairdo tinged with silver (she's back on the Guinness again). "I thought BBC 2 was meant to be cultural. Not a phone-in station."

"I mean," said the man with the dog, carrying on with his own point of view regardless of her interruption, which is what pub conversations are all about, "the nearest I have ever heard to a discussion of the greatest was the last time there was a football match on TV and people discussed who was going to win. The greater of two sides. That's credible. Not of all time. That's ludicrous. When have we in here ever had any discussion about the greatest anything of all time?"

"Last week," I said. "Don't you remember we had a discussion about the greatest waste of taxpayers' money ever committed by the present Government?"

"Oh? And what was the result?" said the man with the dog, now passingly intrigued.

"The Dome was the front runner," I said. "Measured per acre. But then someone said that Railtrack had lost more money overall, so we sent someone to find out."

"And what happened?"

"He never came back."

"Far be it from me to spring to the defence of the BBC," said the resident Welshman, "but there is one way in which the BBC could justify their pathetic Greatest Briton competition. It cannot have escaped your notice that TV has discovered recently that history is the new stand-up comedy. We are always being led across battlefields by Richard Holmes and down scientific byways by Adam Hart-Davis and through world history by Simon Schama. Peter Snow is taking us through El Alamein this Friday. History is like damp rot in the broadcasting schedules. It gets everywhere. And on Radio 4 the situation is even worse. This week the daily book on Radio 4 was a life of Louis XVII. Louis XVII, for heaven's sake! In a country where having as many as eight Henrys seems a bit over the top, who wants to know about a 17th Louis...?"

"Just get to the point, you Welsh windbag."

"So anyway, what I think is that the people at the BBC want to find out if any of this history they are pushing out is sinking in. So they're organising an end-of-term exam for us all. Of course, they can't call it an exam or a test or anything, so they have to call it 'Who Was the Greatest Briton?' It sounds like a thrilling poll. But it's really just a history exam."

"Actually, I think it's just another version of Big Brother," said the Major. "Or celebrity Survivor. Put Charlie Darwin up against Winston Churchill and see who comes out best. Put Bonnie Prince Charlie on a desert island with Lord Byron and compare their survival skills."

"What gets my goat," said the Welshman, "is the false idea that anyone can be the greatest of all time at anything. If somebody was, we would know it by now. He would be called Alexander the Great. Or Suleiman the Magnificent. Or Charlemagne."

"Charlemagne?"

"That actually means Charles the Great."

"In those days being 'great' actually meant something," said the major. "I'm afraid that we have a very tawdry idea of greatness in this country."

"Give us an example, oh major."

"I will give you an example. Great Missenden. I went to Great Missenden once. It was all right. But it wasn't that great."

At that point that chap came back with all the statistics about Railtrack, so the conversation changed back to that. It suited me fine. It hadn't been a great conversation.