?The only thing it proves is that white South Africans have telephones,? said Max du Preez, a South African journalist with a talent for understatement. The South African Broadcasting Corporation had bought the ?Greatest Britons? TV format from the BBC, and invited the viewers of SABC 3, an English-language channel mostly watched by affluent whites, to nominate their candidates for the hundred ?Greatest South Africans? by phone, e-mail and text message. (Nelson Mandela got a free pass to the top of the list.)

It then dutifully made hour-long television documentaries about each of the ten leading candidates after Mandela and failed to notice until the series began to air last month that not one of the top five was black.

Predictably, there was an uproar. Not only was the list laden with whites in a country where only a tenth of the population is white, but some of them were heroes of the apartheid era, like former prime minister, Hendrik Verwoerd, who was placed 19th, and neo-Nazi leader Eugene Terre?Blanche, who was placed 25th. The series was suspended after the broadcast of the first two episodes, and the head of the SABC, Peter Matlare, announced: ?We?re going back to the drawing board on this one.?

The race to the top

Some other people need to go back to the drawing board too. When the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation bought the format and called for the public to nominate the ?Greatest Canadian?, the top ten included a ranting bigot called Don Cherry, a hockey commentator whose speciality is ethnic slurs against the players. The Dutch voted the assassinated anti-immigrant extremist Pim Fortuyn into second place in the ?Greatest Dutchman? stakes. And there was a serious risk that the British would choose Princess Diana over Shakespeare, Darwin and Newton.

She did get more votes than them ? after all, they only wrote plays, discovered gravity, and created the theory of evolution, whereas she made a bad marriage, threw herself down the stairs, and made bulimia fashionable ? but she was overtaken in the end by Isambard Kingom Brunel, the great Victorian engineer. The loyal students of Brunel University voted early and often, and only the BBC?s tactic of running the Winston Churchill show last ensured that the old imperialist finally came out on top.

Greatest of ?em all

The list that really impressed though was the ?Greatest German? list: Luther and Marx, Bach and Einstein, Gutenberg and Goethe. The Germans have had a profound influence on the world over the past four centuries ? and yet, there is this nagging feeling that the list was incomplete. If ?greatest? means having had the greatest impact on the world, and not just being the cleverest or the nicest, then there ought to have been another name on the list. There might have been ? but the organizers refused to record any votes for Hitler. That?s the problem with this format, you see: many countries have large skeletons in their closets. The French, for example, will undoubtedly include Napoleon on their list.

It?s an awkward thing, history, and this ?greatness? business is doubly awkward. Some interpret it to mean historical importance, and by that criterion Hitler certainly belongs to the German list and Stalin to the Russian list. Others see it as a popularity contest, however, and that?s how foreigners would interpret it if the great killers made it onto anybody?s list. But what if your country is so small or so new that foreigners don?t even recognize any of the names on your list of ?Great Ruritanians??

Best to stay away from the whole topic and avoid both resentment and ridicule. The minority who want challenging intellectual content can listen to radio or read books. Oh, and a prediction: Bill Gates will top the list of the ?Great Americans?.