Editor-At-Large: Yes, we're the shallowest nation in Europe!

What do Johnny Rotten, Aleister Crowley, Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher have in common? You, the British public, have apparently voted them the greatest Britons of all time. Please get up and dust yourself down.

Just get the espresso machine primed, because tonight you have the opportunity to watch Great Britons, a mind-numbing three-hour extravaganza on BBC2, which relentlessly unrolls the 100 people that 33,000 voters consider the most important members of our society throughout history. The results are so culturally threadbare I may have to recant and declare that Prince Charles was right to hold a conference about the way we teach history.

It would be easy to accuse the BBC of dumbing down, to complain that allowing Anne Robinson to present a programme made by the General Factual department of the BBC – the people responsible for cookery, gardening and leisure – was never going to result in a 21st- century version of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation or Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. Even a popular mainstream programme from the 1970s such as James Burke's Connections would probably now be considered Open University degree- level stuff destined for the midnight hour in the current fight to the death for ratings. You cannot deny that the concept of honouring worthy people chosen by the general public via telephone voting and the internet sounded good on paper. But I know from experience that polls involving popular taste are wretched. Given half a chance, most viewers would vote to bring back hanging for paedophiles, repatriate anyone who couldn't recite the national anthem in English, and screen football for four hours every day.

The concept of a great Briton, although fulfilling the part of the BBC's remit to be inclusive, implies that the people voting have understood more about British history than can be gleaned from watching Top of the Pops, The Office or Men Behaving Badly. The list reflects how little most TV audiences know about anything except sex, costume drama and pop. Of the 100 finalists, only 13 are women, and five of those are royals – a hat-trick of Elizabeths, Diana and Victoria. Women in the arts are woefully lacking. Julie Andrews is included, but not Charlotte Brontë. Ditto JK Rowling, and Jane Austen, but not George Eliot. But then, the list as a whole is dire – the only artist being William Blake (perhaps because his drawings are used in the current Hannibal Lecter epic Red Dragon), you can forget Bacon, Freud, Gainsborough, Turner or Hockney. Actors are represented by Michael Crawford and Richard Burton – forget Sir Alec Guinness, Lord Olivier or Sir Ian McKellen.

It is the world of middle-aged pop that dominates. Step forward John Peel, Freddie Mercury, Bono and Boy George, Bowie and dear old Sir Cliff Richard. All male. Forget Annie Lennox, Dusty Springfield or Lesley Garrett. I'm only surprised that Ant and Dec haven't had a mention. Television is littered with list programmes, and this project falls fairly and squarely into that category, relegating everything to the same cultural Complan of banality, pop music relentlessly playing over politician's speeches and newsreel footage. The tone is cosy and utterly fluffy. Sir Walter Raleigh is described as a "Tudor toy boy" and Marie Stopes has her contribution to women's rights described over a backing track of "Let's talk about sex".

The experts commentating on the public's choice include social historian and agony aunt Mariella Frostrup, Sir Richard Branson, professional pensioner Sir Cliff and novelist Will Self. I was pleasantly surprised the production team refrained from including Jamie Oliver or Delia Smith. If I decide to give up to three hours of my life to a TV programme, then is it too much to expect something in return, some new factoid or revelation that enriches my night? If those are your criteria, too, give this effort a wide berth.

The top 10, which received "thousands" of votes, is made up of John Lennon, William Shakespeare, Lord Nelson, Sir Winston Churchill, Princess Diana, Elizabeth I, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Oliver Cromwell and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Interestingly, all have been covered in depth on television, and you could argue that all this "competition" does is reinforce television as the medium most people glean any information from. Anne Robinson has said she's "incandescent" that Baroness Thatcher has not scaled the final summit. Mind you, Ms Robinson's face is so strangely immobile these days I am surprised she can be incandescent about anything.

Hour-long films have been made on each of the top 10 (Jeremy Clarkson on Brunel and Rosie Boycott on Diana). But what criteria informs them? How do you rate Nelson against Churchill? It's all been relegated to the level of a pub quiz. Finally you, the viewers, can vote on who should win this extremely dubious accolade. It seems plans are afoot to commemorate the winner with a permanent memorial. If it's Diana, I think my personal preference for casting her pyjamas in bronze and erecting them in front of Television Centre will not be approved by the taste police. Mind you, this dog's breakfast got on air, so someone in the corporation has a sense of humour. Vote now and confirm our status as the shallowest nation in Europe.

Road to urban hell

Ian Sinclair is a brilliantly original writer about London. His latest opus, London Orbital, is an account of the year he spent walking the M25. He rightly points out that this is Maggie's true monument, a concrete collar encircling the capital, limiting and defining its growth, the perfect mechanism for all forms of control in the future. He's right: there are more history programmes on television than ever, but by building the M25 we trashed a huge part of our past for ever, obliterating it under ramps, carriageways and lay-bys. The M25 has replaced the Thames as the gateway to London but, weirdly, it doesn't go anywhere. Sinclair, who's a huge fan of JG Ballard and wrote a critique of Crash, is the perfect person to make this journey through the forgotten wastelands of business parks, superstores and shopping malls. Like Great Britons, this book is an indictment of the way we undervalue our past, and the scummy values we accept today. Once we had coaching inns; today we have themed hostelries with "home- cooked" food only available when it suits the publicans – i.e. not you, the customer. Once we shopped in village stores, now we cross the pathetic little pond at Bluewater into a faceless mall where nearly every shop is part of a national chain.

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A member of English Heritage writes that in the last mailing of its magazine Heritage Today he received a brochure for the Land Rover Freelander, offering a chance to win a day off-roading ("a mud bath for the spirit"). The advertisment features the car on a stone track and on a sandy beach. Like me, he thinks that green lanes should be preserved from off-road vehicles at all cost. English Heritage obviously feels differently about our fragile and vulnerable landscape. It should be more selective about its advertisers.