Celebrities with mass appeal top the list

New Year Honours: Arts

Joan Collins, Cilla Black and Frederick Forsyth are recognised in a New Year Honours which will be remembered for being distinctly more Dynasty than Dostoevsky.

Ms Collins, the 63-year-old star who reinvented her career with the character Alexis in the soap opera Dynasty is a film producer and novelist and recently won a court case against the publisher Random House. She joins a line-up of entertainment supremos known more for their mass appeal than intellectual challenge. The "people's list" also honours Cilla Black, the presenter of the dating show Blind Date with an OBE and Lucy Gannon, the writer behind Bramwell and Soldier, Soldier, with a MBE.

Other entertainment celebrities selected for the spotlight are Frederick Forsyth, now appointed a CBE, the author of The Day Of The Jackal and other best-sellers, and Roger McGough, the Liverpudlian pop poet, who is appointed an OBE.

The playwright Alan Ayckbourn becomes a knight, while Andrew Lloyd Webber, who co-wrote the hit shows Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Evita, becomes a life peer.

The broadcaster Terry Wogan has been appointed honorary OBE while Derek Cooper, the long-time presenter of Radio 4's Food Programme, is appointed OBE.

Paul McCartney has been knighted, while the landscape artist Derek Hill and writer and broadcaster Ned Sherrin are appointed CBEs. The singer Frankie Vaughan is appointed a CBE for his fund-raising efforts on behalf of the National Association of Boys' Clubs.

At the more upmarket end of showbiz, Britain's leading Wagner bass, John Tomlinson, is appointed a CBE, while Richard Eyre, the artistic director of the National Theatre, has been knighted.

Cilla Black said from her Spanish villa that she was thrilled but "dreading having to wear a new hat".

MARIANNE MACDONALD