Terence Blacker: Who says a national icon has to be a nice person?

Those who achieve extraordinary things are not normally expected to be agreeable. Talent and huggy loveableness rarely go together

On the BBC's studiously hip Culture Show, they are asking viewers to vote for the public figure most deserving the title "Icon for Our Times". Early nominations for this important survey, which have been collected from a few vox pop interviewees, give an indication of what to expect. Jamie Oliver is there, of course, as is David Beckham. Midge Ure received a vote for his work on behalf of the starving millions. Leading the field at present are Sir David Attenborough and Michael Palin.

The poll has already made its own rather depressing point. Respect for a person's contribution to the national culture, it seems, has little to do with talent or achievements and is even less about how unusual they might be. The opposite, in fact: what we should be apparently looking for in our contemporary icons is an outsize version of normality. Jamie, Midge, Michael and the two Davids are the sort of people, presented in celebrity form, whom we would all be happy to have as neighbours. They are perceived to be nice.

What makes this position odd is that, on the whole, those who achieve extraordinary things are not normally expected to be agreeable human beings. Talent and huggy loveableness rarely go together.

Not that being nice is always easy, particularly among those in the public eye. Five years ago, for example, poor old Paul McCartney was in the Champions League of niceness. He had written wonderful songs and yet remained a regular bloke. He had lived it up in the past, with the odd bust for soft drugs, but had subsequently become a one-girl guy. Later, when he married Heather Mills, the image became slightly frayed by the difference in their ages and by tabloid rumours that she was possibly rather less nice than the first Mrs McCartney, the saintly Linda.

Now, as the media gleefully prepare to sup on the spilt entrails of their brief marriage, Macca's niceness will soon be history. Nobody can go through what is known as a "messy" divorce and remain entirely nice: it is a fact of life. However sweet a person McCartney might really be, his image is about to change.

Publicists and managers should drum this lesson into those poor saps who dream of becoming famous. Talent is nothing if the public looks at you and decides that you are a nasty piece of work, or simply not agreeable enough to deserve fame.

This process can often be unfair. A man who, for anyone who listens to pop music, deserves to be an icon, perhaps the icon, of the last 50 years has just celebrated his 80th birthday, with few tributes or fanfares. No one has done more than Chuck Berry to influence the way songs are written and the guitar played since, in an astonishing explosion of creative energy, he wrote and recorded a group of songs in the late 1950s and early 1960s which essentially created the lyrical and musical idiom of rock'n'roll.

But Chuck, it is fair to say, never quite mastered the niceness thing. Badly treated when he was a struggling musician, he has been repaying with interest ever since. There are famous stories about his holding theatre managements to ransom by refusing to go on stage unless another few thousand dollars in cash were handed over. He would refuse to pay for a band, leaving the venue to supply the backing; sometimes it worked - a young Bruce Springsteen supported him one night - but often it was disastrous.

He liked to show up his fellow-musicians on stage by refusing to tell them what he was going to play, or by changing keys in odd directions and without warning in the middle of a song, leaving them floundering. His sexual history is distinctly unsavoury. His public pronouncements are rare and almost always unendearing.

But, in the end, who cares? The music that Chuck Berry created, and inspired in others, provides its own warmth, and lives on, most recently in guitar solos, lifted note for note from Berry's, on the astonishing new CD from the relatively youthful Bob Dylan. That is what makes a true icon. Niceness anyone can do.

Miles Kington is away