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Jump to navigationJump to search50 People Who Buggered Up Britain by Quentin Letts (view source)
Revision as of 12:04, 25 August 2020
, 12:04, 25 August 2020no edit summary
Away from the political arena, Letts's choices are a varied bunch. Diana, 'an odd mixture of simpering shyness and galloping egomania', who 'made us more neurotic', Julia Smith, creator of the terminally depressing East Enders (I agree, give me a Leonard Cohen album any day), and Janet Street-Porter, 'the squawking embodiment of ''yoof'', also end up with a good caning.
The book sets out to be controversial, and means to be provocative as well as to amuse, entertain and inform. Some pages will leave you angry, some chuckling, some questioning the author's judgement. I doubt if any reader would agree wholeheartedly with every choice. Jimmy Savile? C'mon, guys'n'gals, for all that eccentric dress sense, surreal hair and omnipresent cigar, the man's heart was in the right place, as it 'appens. And Alan Titchmarsh? Making television gardening uninformative and babyish, and winning a bad sex prize for one of his novels, hardly places him that high in the rogues' gallery, surely?
There is a shortlist of 'bubbling under' candidates who almost made it (Victoria Beckham, Sir Terence Conran, and Esther Rantzen, to name three) and two pages for readers to supply their own candidates. Can I just take my place in the queue to nominate Andrew Morton, the man who made millions out of deifying Diana, and the ludicrously overpaid, insufferably conceited and abysmally unfunny Jonathan Ross, please?
You could shelve this book alongside [[Eminent Elizabethans by Piers Brendon]].
For further reading, may we point you towards [[A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr]], [[Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties by Peter Hennessy|Having It So Good by Peter Hennessy]] (albeit dealing with an earlier period than the one this book covers), or the life story of one of the 50 guilty people, [[Prezza: My Story: Pulling No Punches by John Prescott|Prezza: My Story by John Prescott]]. For a look at the differences between the British and the Americans, try [[Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton]].
