Dead Dinner Guests And Other Questions

A lazy post this week .....

We Like Poll Lists .....

....... Yes its poll time again ... I don't come across them very often these days, so these are a couple of older ones that I thought interesting enough to type up at the time I saw them.

When the History TC channel asked 2,000 Brits, who they would most like to bring back from the dead, and why, its perhaps not too surprising that it produced a pretty lacklustre list, and frankly ill informed reasons (I haven't linked most of them as googling them is easy):

1.     Princess Diana - For her charitable work.
2.     Winston Churchill - To get us out of the Brexit mess.
3.     Freddy Mercury - To rejoin the band Queen.
4.     Florence Nightingale - To 'fix' the National Health Service (NHS).
5.     Alexander Fleming - For medical research.
6.     Aneurin Bevan - To save the NHS
7.     John Lennon - To write more music.
8.     Leonardo Da Vinci - To invent more things.
9.     Isambard Kingdom Brunel - To fix the railways.
10.     Margaret Thatcher - To get Britain back on track.

Noticeably the list is very British centric apart from Leonardo, and I would expect a US poll would be Americans only .... it makes you think though. Who would you bring back and why?

On a similar theme, every so often some poll or other asks people in the UK who they would bring back from the dead for a dinner party (as if many people have dinner parties these days .... dinner in front of the TV is more like it). One of these was Wahaca, a Mexican food chain who commissioned the poll as part of their 'Day of the Dead' celebrations.

Oddly Robin Williams came top this time .... I can't imagine a more disruptive dinner guest outside of Coco the clown. Out of this list, Marilyn Monroe (what gossip she could tell you), and Winston Churchill are my two choices. Anyway, as people always like these lists here are the full results:

1. Robin Williams 26%
2. Princess Diana 25%
3. Albert Einstein 21%
4. Freddie Mercury 18%
5. Elvis Presley 16%
6. Marilyn Monroe 16%
7. Winston Churchill 15%
8. Nelson Mandela 13%
9. Bruce Lee 13%
10. Walt Disney 12%
11. Martin Luther King Jr 12%
12. David Bowie 12%
13. Muhammad Ali 12%
14. Anne Frank 11%
15. Bob Marley 11%
16. Stephen Hawking 11%
17. Dame Barbara Windsor 11%
18. Whitney Houston 11%
19. John Lennon 10%
20. Abraham Lincoln 10%
21. William Shakespeare 9%
22. Patrick Swayze 9%
23. Neil Armstrong 9%
24. Rosa Parks 9%
25. Leonardo da Vinci 9%
26. JRR Tolkien 8%
27. Kurt Cobain 8%
28. Steve Irwin 8%
29. George Michael 8%
30. Heath Ledger 8%

..... a little more inclusive than the first list .....

Finally after Welsh footballer Gareth Bale recently retired, some (Welsh) fans on a radio call in programme claimed he was the greatest ever British footballer ..... a dubious claim at best. The matter was later resolved when a football fan poll by The Sun newspaper in the UK reported the greatest British footballers as being as follows:

1. George Best (52%)
2. Kenny Dalgleish (7.7%)
3. = Bobby Moore (7.5%)
3. = Paul Gascoigne (7.5%)
5. Bobby Charlton (7.2%)
6. Jimmy Greaves (5.4%)
7. Gareth Bale (4.7%)
8. Wayne Rooney (2.7%)
9. Alan Shearer (2.4%)
10. Steven Gerrard (1.5%)
11. John Barnes (0.7%)
12. Harry Kane (0.4%)

Funnily it only stretched back to the TV era i.e. the 1960's and so overlooked figures such as Sir Stanley Matthews, Duncan Edwards, Dixie Dean, Denis Law and John Charles (Also Gerrard, and Barnes wouldn't feature in my list!).