Clockwise trorn bottom lelt: Lara Flynn in last year’s most popular TV show, Twin Peaks; Douglas Hershall and a blurred Peter Mullan in The Tron's adaptallon otTetl Hughes’ Crow; Phlllppe Nolretand Salvatore Caaclo In your lavourlte lilrn, Cinema Paradlso; the second most admired comedian, Gregor Flatter as Rab c. Nesbltt; and ldaal hostage-takers. the Doug Anthony Allstars.
among others. Glasgow’s Barrowland was the venue par excellence among List readers. And Status Quo were the most popular candidates for an enforced retirement from the biz — despite a strong challenge from ‘any old fart with a song in a hit movie’. Meanwhile, on the clubs front: The Brain, Fury Murry’s, The Sub Club, Saddle-Sore, The Usher Hall, The Kangaroo Club, AC Milan, Club Sandino and the Dunblane Folk Club lost out in a big way to the lads at Shag for the coveted Club of the Year title.
It’ll be big hugs all round from those responsible for Crow — Best Theatrical Performance of 1990 and for the staff of Glasgow’s Tramway which won the nomination for Best Theatrical Venue by
an overwhelming margin. At the other end of the spectrum The Ship was sunk by a deluge of ballot slips marking it down for the Wet Lettuce A ward. Way ahead in the art exhibition stakes were The Glasgow Girls though a judges’ commendation goes to the ‘11 Scottish shirts, lifeless, Genoa ’90’. Leaving aside Celtic Football Club, the Naked Man and some obscure scribble about John Major’s underwear, the clear winner of the Worst Exhibition title was the bookies’ favourite, Glasgow’s Glasgow, with The Great British Art Show trailing it narrowly. Edinburgh galleries seem to have fallen between two stools — they failed to feature heavily in the worst exhibitions category and they also received only a handful of nominations for Most Innovative Gallery. That
title went to The Third Eye Centre, which narrowly beat Street Level from a strong field of Glasgow galleries.
The books chosen for Best and Worst of the Year were too disparate to pick one as the title winner, though The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and P453 and How to Collect Them (by Michael Donnelly) seem to come strongly recommended. The majority of the authors chosen were Scottish and Alasdair Gray’s name cropped up most often as favoun'te contemporary author.
Whining letters from Englishpersons notwithstanding, the vast majority of readers had ‘England losing to West Germany in the World Cup’, as their Sporting Highpoint of 1990. Second to that came ‘stuffing England at rugby’. Both of which reflect an unhealthy inferiority complex we seem to have in respect to sport and our southern brethren. Unsurprisingly, the Sporting Nadir involved a South American football team and the infamous ‘11 Scottish shirts, lifeless’ which proved even more unpopular than George Best on Wogan. The preferred reasons for Scotland failing to progress beyond the first round in Italia 90 seems to have taxed your powers of analysis to the utmost: ‘We were crap’, and ‘England’ were the most intelligent, frequent and publishable answers, though suggestions that we were humbled by a failure to ‘Pick sex god Pat Nevin’ or because of ‘Ally McCoist’s cellulite problem’ have so far failed to produce any response from the SF A.
The most important political issue of 1990 aside from ‘the Judas Priest trial’ and ‘who is John Major’ was emphatically the Gulf crisis. Man of the Year was not Mrs Thatcher, Agent Cooper, Lenny Kravitz or Roger Mellie but Nelson Mandela. Woman of the Year was Mrs Thatcher (for resigning — as most people stressed). Gazza can also now revel in the title of List Reader’s Git of the Year — he beat off challenges from Pol Pot, Nicholas Fairbairn, Sonia Sutclf‘ffe, David Bennie, Saddam Hussein and many, many more. Easily the Best Thing to Happen This Year was summed up by one reader as ‘that Boot getting her come-uppance’. Runners-up were: the World Cup, the City of Culture (also a strong contender for Biggest Waste of Money) and Hogmanay. On a more personal note various people specified that losing their virginity ( ‘properly’ — one explained) along with several other things that we can’t publish for fear of prosecution, as the Best Thing to Happen in 1990. To Mr X from Falkirk — leave a large sum of cash at our Glasgow office and we won’t inform the authorities.
Glasgow’s Glasgow, beat the Gulf crisis in a close-run contest for Biggest Waste of Money in 1990, which must be a record first for a council-run exhibition. As for people you wouldn’t mind being held hostage by: Ian McCaskill, Kylie Minogue, Sinéad O’Connor, Natasha Richardson, Chancellor Kohl and ‘anyone so long as they’ve got big bazookas’, the PLO, Paul and Tim from Daas, Donald Sinden, Joyce McKinney, Jeremy Paxman, Ben Elton, John Major and Norman Chalmers were among those that we had heard of.
Your favourite List cover was that of the Christmas issue while the possibility of having a million quid burning a hole in your pocket drew forth your inherent munificence as you pledged the cash to a wide variety of worthy causes. One man had no such qualms and swore to blow it all ‘on rent boys’. To the reader who swore to use the £1 million to purchase The List (the aforementioned Mr X of F alkirk), we are open to offers. Although we won’t take a pennv under £999,999.
The List 11—24January 199117