LISTS and surveys, where would we be without them? Certainly the folks at Channel Four would have a hard time filling their Saturday night schedules without the 50 Best TV On/Off Switches; and where would Q magazine be without its latest list of the 50 Best Side One Track Ones?

GMTV would be all at sea without its daily diets of spurious surveys conducted by heaven knows whom and who they canvassed is anyone's guess. Three quarters of people in the South say they are happily married, says the latest poll commissioned by perfectpartner.com who questioned 87 people at random in Basingstoke one rainy afternoon.

Don't get me wrong, lists are great - surveys too - but they're not gospel. Even the most sophisticated survey that takes full consideration of science, sociology and probability cannot possibly claim to be anywhere near the absolute truth.

Lists and surveys make for a mildly diverting read, a distraction from the humdrum, but they are routinely trotted out as the only way we can make sense of our iPodded cultural past and present. Within days of publication they have been debated, mulled over, carefully considered and fed back into the ever-buzzing mincing machine of opinions, claims, discussions and panel shows.

Given that the vast majority of us suffer profound cultural amnesia - either that or we're blithely taken in by the marketing machine - we find the majority of the British public think Amy Winehouse is the greatest singer of all time, Robbie Williams is better than Sinatra, Calendar Girls is better than Saturday Night Sunday Morning and Bruce Forsyth could teach Nureyev a thing or two about cutting a rug - even at his age.

What is gained by boiling culture down into a top 20 or 50? Not much, other than feeding the media's 24/7 appetite for noise to fire back at us.

Sit back, calm down, put on your favourite record or film and enjoy it for it's own sake.