Your views: Quintessential survey

You've seen the results of our Quintessential survey. Now it's your turn to tell us what you think.

What do you think about what did - and didn't - make the various top fives? Are you quintessential? Let us know...

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Did only 40-year-old blokes vote in the films section? And why does the dreary, tedious, drawn-out dullness of Bladerunner constantly appear in these film polls? I turn 40 next week. At midnight, will I start twitching and groaning and morph, re-born, into a Bladerunner fan? Biggest surprise for me was the Manics album topping the music poll. I mean, it's good, but come on...
Simon Feegrade

I find the idea that the quintessential Newsnight viewers list ought to have included more pieces by foreign nationals irritatingly political correct and typically post-modern. Exactly why should our culture simply be a melange of ideas and mediums stolen from other cultures? Turn off the TV Anon, leave your room and look around; Newsnight Review does not speak for the entirety of British culture.
Dave, London

Well burn me in the fires of wild heaven - Apocalypse Now, Hamlet, Guernica, The Scream, The Holy Bible, Dark Side of the Moon - are all Review viewers suicidal men? You should have put the Samaritans' number up at the end of the programme.
Phillip Edwards, Nottingham

Music!? If the major BBC2 arts slot ignores classical music - where has it all gone wrong? And from the Corporation that sponsors the Proms! Shame on you...
Michael Lowy, East Grinstead

I was expecting more 60s and 70s stuff in the music department, due to being 25 and thinking myself one of the younger viewers of the show, but apparently not. The list did come out a lot more "schooly" than scholarly! Here are my theories:

Most Newsnight viewers don't trust/understand their computers and so the youngsters were over represented. Most middle-aged respondents thought twice about admitting to the extent of their fondness for Deep Purple -Newsnight really is the informed choice for the Thatcher/Major/Blair generation...? Curious, whichever way!
John Muir, Edinburgh

"Limited cultural exposure"? Most certainly! Perhaps also limited literacy. What on earth is a "complement"? Is it a stationery piece of something or other?!
Harold James, Rickmansworth

Not many women in the Newsnight viewer profile - what does that tell us?
John, London

A quick check shows that nine of the ten literature texts in the Newsnight Review viewers' lists are set or recommended texts in the A Level and Higher English syllabuses of England and Scotland in the 1980s and 90s. Lord of the Rings is the exception (routinely despised, of course, by the chatterati). It confirms research evidence that most British people (unlike other Europeans) stop reading serious literature after school. Also suggests that the Newsnight audience may be more middlebrow than the programme likes to believe.... Incidentally, what happened to serious/classical music? Or need we ask?
Dr Robert A Davis, Glasgow

RE: Quintessential Newsnight - the reviewers ask why the lists were so downbeat? The reviewers week-on-week provide little praise for what they've seen, complaint, derision, negativity and despair feature in majority and inherently in their criticism. Many of the compiled favourites had complaint, derision, negativity and despair at their core. Whatever the state of art's current entire output, or indeed what's chosen to be reviewed, is this surely not a case of the Newsnight "medium is the message"?
PT Barnum, Wimbledon

I am a teenager (of admittedly limited cultural exposure, though not through lack of trying) and frequent Newsnight Review viewer, odd combination I'm sure, but on seeing the results of the recent Quintessential viewer poll maybe there are a lot more teenagers of little experience of culture outside of the mainstream watching and compiling these lists as nearly all of the banal and uninteresting items could have been put forward by my contemporaries in a mildly informed bid to appear culturally aware (This is not a complement!) [sic]

Come on! The results were surprisingly unsurprising - "Shawshank Redemption", My God. The poll also manages to be unsettlingly ignorant and insular; with the exception of the artwork list and the mention of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, there is no one of any other foreign culture, absolutely no subtitles in the film category. I shall also point out the obvious lack of females (with the one exception Harper Lee) but this is admittedly a problem with culture as a whole.

I feel ashamed for believing the viewers and compilers of these lists my cultural superiors as they are clearly middle-aged, middle class, depressed white men (traits unfortunately similar with the majority of those who produce our culture) who have not progressed culturally since they were teenagers studying Shakespeare in school, reading Lord of the Rings, and listening to Prog Rock.
Anon, Dundee, Scotland

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