Listmania!

By Alex Allen

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What do we like to do at Christmas? Well, eat, we definitely like to eat. Handfuls of Roses, fistfuls of After Eights and Doritos, stuffing ourselves constantly like famine ravaged savages who have finally escaped from the island they were stranded on. But, more than that, we like to compile lists. If you watch TV over Christmas (and who doesn't?), you'll have noticed that we like to countdown everything. We find a sudden compulsion to work out which are the top one hundred action heroes of 2008, we can't just enjoy them all individually, each with their own merits, we need to put them in order. We need to know how good Steve McQeen was, adjectives aren't enough anymore, we need statistics!

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I find that these shows are great, because they suit the time of year perfectly. Aside from the unemployed, desperate housewives and the elderly, nobody ever really has the opportunity to spend two hours lying on the sofa in the middle of the day at any other time of the year. But at Christmas, those rules don't apply. You don't have to do anything, get dressed, shave, comb your hair, fuck them all! You want a Toblerone for breakfast, you go for it friend! It's Christmas! We never really question these countdowns either, the best sitcom ever is Fawlty Towers? According to who! Some producer sitting in an office somewhere? Yet we take it as granted, it's official, another mystery solved! Let's tackle the next one! Let's try and get to the bottom of who the top 50 child film stars were, shall we? And even if they're counting down something you have absolutely no interest in, the top 100 places to live in England for example, if you happen to flick over to it when they're down to about number 14 you have to know the result! 'Oooh will it be Horsham or Surrey, find out after the break!', as if it's in any way official! I spent thirteen minutes today waiting to see a plane crash that killed off half the Emmerdale cast in 1993 as part of a '100 Greatest TV Endings' countdown. Thirteen minutes may not sound like very much, but it was enough - Cilla Black was presenting it, I thought I was going to shoot myself. Plus, they're a brilliant way of getting television personalities back in to work, I saw Toby Anstis on one the other day, I just assumed he was dead! Again, their authority for being able to comment on these rankings is just, y'know, being alive, sometimes not even at the time the person they're commenting on! But we trust these people, we enjoy this incessant list making. Let's list everything, channel 4 will assort everything in to an easily definable order for us, nobody will ever argue again! Gerrard or Lampard, look it up! Let the countdown guide us, let the countdown answer all our deepest questions. Let's step it up a bit, I want to see the top five religions, let's get some answers! Let's put that question to bed! More than that, I want to see the top five wars, which was really the worst? I know that these are difficult, complex questions, but I'm confident if anyone can answer them, it's Channel 4.