I was going to write loads on this topic but Sarah saved me the bother.
Princess Diana? Ugh, purlease! Okay, she was smart enough to use her hyperstar status, not only to publicise the landmines, but also to increase public acceptability of AIDS. But so what. What about Alexander Fleming who invented penicillin, or Jenner who invented vaccination?
And I'm not too taken by John Lennon. Sure, I'm a pretty big fan, but I couldn't put him in a Top Ten of Great Britons. Especially one that doesn't contain Charles Dickens.
Perhaps Diana was put there as the token woman-who-wasn't-Elizabeth-I, but I would have thought that Florence Nightingale, or Jane Austen could have qualified there. Or Elizabeth Fry. Or a Pankhurst or two. Sometimes I despair at the Great British Public. Not that I voted in this, you understand. Not me.
I gave up on that sort of thing around the turn of the Millennium, when the Beeb were asking for the greatest invention of the millennium. I said the steam engine. The computer won. Because, obviously, the computer has radically transformed the entire structure of society and demography, economics and history in the way that the steam engine did.
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