The BBC's stunt may be silly, but it proves democracy is alive

The Great Britons series was a lazy way for the BBC to attract a bit of attention, although it was a harmless enough means of launching an artificial controversy about some fairly high-minded questions.

Comparing the different kinds of claims to greatness of Oliver Cromwell and Diana, Princess of Wales, was always a fatuous exercise. It has about as much validity as the Channel 4 survey that declared The Lord of the Rings the novel of the 20th century, or the endless polls that discover that last year's chart-topper by a band grown in a test tube was the best single ever.

Like most of this list mania, Great Britons was disreputable in its method, too. There was a time when the BBC stood aside from surveys in which respondents selected themselves. That policy seems absurdly purist now – yet it was right. The BBC News website conducts regular straw polls that tell us almost nothing about the true state of public opinion.

A representative opinion poll that told us in what proportions Britons thought Churchill "greater" than Darwin might be interesting, but it (a) does not have the competitive game-show element that draws the crowds; and (b) it costs more than using premium-rate phone numbers by which people have to pay to vote.

For all that, however, the fuss generated by Great Britons and similar programmes such as Big Brother proves one thing, which is that people like voting. When people care about the outcome, they can be motivated to cast votes in large numbers – and often more than once.

Of course, far more people voted in last year's general election, even if turnout was a record low. But it was in a different spirit – and this is the awkward lesson for politics. When it comes to television entertainments, people believe that their vote can make a difference. Politics, by contrast, seems drained of hope. For 41 per cent of the population, voting was not even a tiresome duty.

The challenge for politicians is to recapture some of the crude showbusiness style so shamelessly paraded by the BBC to present us with choices which would have us hurrying to the polling station.