Unfortunate victim of circumstance and the time when he lived. Now if he’d smashed the French similarly, he’d be right up there - see Nelson.
I’d vote Newton or Shakespeare.
Churchill and Elizabeth I don’t belong high on the list, as Shakespeare would put it, because “They had greatness thrust upon them.” Somebody was probably going to win WWII for England. Somebody else might have done it without completing the destruction of the empire in the process.
Whether one rates Lennon highly depends in part on how highly one rates music, overall. If there was only one British musician in history, I’d choose Lennon second. (Well, Handel, if he’s to be considered British.) After Sullivan. The thing about Lennon is that he had social importance, as well as musical. For Sullivan, he had to team up with Gilbert to approach that level of influence.
Even more so than Newton, Locke, Lennon, Churchill, or Shakespeare…
Andy Partridge is the greatest ever.
Newton.
What the hell is Diana even doing near this list?
Basil Faulty
What? 
The person I would most like to have met (which, for the purposes of this thread, will be my definition of the greatest Briton) would be Alan Turing, who ranked 21st in the BBC poll. Many of the others are…well…great, but Turing was different somehow - although his contribution to computer science is far from insignificant, I get the impression that we’d be living in quite a different world if he’d had the chance to live out his natural span.
From the Great Britons website:
Presumably this means that the top ten were ranked in the original poll, as were numbers 11-100. Anyone know which order they came in?
Anne Robinson didn’t say in the show. The names were read out in alphabetical order.
Obviously they have a top 10 from the original phone vote of 30,000 now they will have another top 10(probably the same) with 30,000+ new phone calls @25p each.
They’ve got to pay for Kilroy some way you know.
Even though they were read out in alphabetic order, the top 10 ‘slots’ in their graphic were not filled in sequentially; I was still musing over Turing at this point and so I wasn’t paying enough attention to work out who might have been top (if the place in the graphic meant anything).
The profits from the phone calls are going to fund some sort of memorial to the individual that wins the vote, apparently (knowledge of this may influence the voting, I believe)
Ahh that’s fair enough. Does this mean there will be no more Kilroy
And replace it with Going for Gold?
I’d just like to say that I’m glad two of my ancestors made the top 100.
::plonk::
::plonk::
(Names being dropped).
We can hope.
I’m really sorry about the hijack and I’ll stop after this but the Going for Gold ref is just too tempting.
[Henry Kelly] What am I?[/Henry Kelly]
[99% of all humanity] You’re a wanker Henry[/ 99% of all humanity]
Gotcha 
I’d love to know how many people nominated fictional characters for the greatness award.
Well, as Go alien pointed out in the other thread King Arthur made it into the quoted 100, so my guess is plenty. Never mind, if there was a poll for the greatest American I’ve met people who would nominate Jesus.
Jeremy Clarkson does a hour on Isambard Kingdom Brunel tonight on BBC2 21:00.
Yes, I’ll be watching that (in spite of Clarkson). My previous post wasn’t meant to imply that Jesus was a fictional character, btw.
Gotcha; Jesus was English anyway, wasn’t he?