After running a telephone poll to discover whom listeners think should be awarded the title of 'Personality of the Millennium,' the BBC have announced William Shakespeare as the winner.

Obvious names came into the fray such as Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton but the one nomination that surprised me was Winston Churchill.

I agree that the Second World War leader could be described as one of the most important British people of this century but hardly one of the most important people of the last 2,000 years.

Personally, I can think of a lot more people who should be named as person of the millennium but I can't vote for them because I don't know their names.

Like the bloke who invented disposable nappies for a start. Without Winston Churchill, Britain may have been invaded by the Nazis before the war was won by America and the Soviet Union, but then the Germans would have been kicked out again before I was born.

If whoever it was had not invented disposable nappies I would have been up to my eyes in you-know-what for the last three-and-a-half years.

I am sure we could have managed to survive without Darwin's theory of evolution and the 'Origin of the Species' but I don't know how anyone could exist in an office without 'Post-It' notes.

Let's face it, Christian fundamentalists don't believe in the theory of evolution and the animals don't care. If it hadn't been Darwin's theory of evolution it would have been someone else's. The rest of us accept the theory, but there's precious little we can actually do with it.

The only concrete Darwin legacies are the almost daily diatribes about monkeys or birds of paradise we have to put up with from tiresome David Attenborough on the TV.

If the producers of wildlife films did not have a tediously long script explaining why the Tasmanian Devil has three toes rather than two, they would have no excuse to broadcast films of animals eating each other and copulating.

Incidentally, I used to wonder why most wildlife documentaries concentrated so much on birds. Then I realised one can set up a remote control camera in a bird colony and use a telephoto lens for other shots at a fraction of the cost of filming more elusive, yet more interesting, wildlife such as fish, crocodiles or hippos.

I may be alone in this view, but I consider thousands of smelly sea birds nesting on a cliff face about as fascinating as the in-depth study of carpet pile, but that's what we get most of the time because it is relatively cheap wildlife television.

Perhaps if the idea for Ilkley's very own Darwin Gardens ever evolves into reality, birds could be banned in favour of more interesting species.

Certainly there is a case for the unsung heroes of the millennium as well as the obvious ones.

Just think how depressing life would be if the man who invented toasters had not lived. Isaac Newton may have been able to explain exactly why toast falls back down again after popping up from the toaster but did he come up with something that can make an almost complete breakfast in around 30 seconds? No.

Scientific discoveries are often perverted by the corrupt and powerful, leaving the world with deadly but otherwise useless inventions like the atom bomb, land mines and napalm, so most scientists would be completely off my list of Men of the Millennium for a start. We should be looking at the great creative thinkers of the last 2,000 years to bestow our accolades.

As anyone who has ever looked at a history book will tell you, humanity's ideas of reality completely change every 500 years or so.

In the year 2500 the theory of evolution, contemporary physics and the rest of our so-called knowledge will probably appear as quaint and eccentric as the flat earth theory or the Ptolemaic idea of the earth as the centre of the universe do to us now.

Perhaps the Personality of the Millennium award should go to the creation of Ilkley resident John Cunliffe.

Postman Pat doing his rounds in peaceful Greendale where there are no politics, no aggressive war leaders and no scientists inventing yet more ways to kill and maim their fellow humans seems to me the epitome of timeless human perfection.

Shakespeare may have been the best writer of the last 2,000 years but many of his plays are horrible visions of humanity.

Anyone who wants to support my campaign to have Shakespeare stripped of his title and Postman Pat crowned as Man of the Millennium should write to the BBC straight away.

l The views reflected in this column are those of the author and not the newspaper. Letters should be sent to Wharfedale Newspapers, 9 Orchard gate, Otley, LS21 3NX.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.