It is hard to know where to being when it comes to unpicking the recently announced Top Ten list of Great British wits. OK, let's start with number four. Oscar Wilde (who would have probably called himself Irish rather than British, but let's not even go there), Spike Milligan (who I don't think held a British passport) and Stephen Fry (official national treasure) I can live with as gold, silver and bronze. But Jeremy Clarkson next? Excuse me while I get up off the floor and back onto my high horse.

Admittedly this was a poll to decide who was good with words rather than who looked bad in denim, but Clarkson is often little more than an articulate, over-opinionated pub bore, coming out with the kind of lines you might hear in any Twickenham bar on a Saturday night. During a programme on the USA he said that "in some parts of America people have begun to mate with vegetables." He once called a Daihatsu "gay". To the best of my knowledge he has yet to pen any great literary works, though he did once release a DVD called Motorsport Mayhem.

But if Clarkson is an oddity, the countdown then goes from weird to worse. Winston Churchill comes in at five, but given that he lived to be over ninety you'd expect him to have come up with a few good gags in his time. I like his one about telling the woman who called him drunk that in the morning he would be sober while she would still be ugly, but I don't recall many laughs in his "fight them on the beaches" speech.

Paul Merton is always good value on Have I Got News For You, but then at six should he really be a place above Noel Coward? And two places above William Shakespeare, who never had the benefit of doing retakes. Nice to see Brian Clough at number nine, but then it is nice to see any sporting figure able to string a coherent sentence together. And propping up the chart? Why, none other than eloquent, erudite Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher. I won't say any more about his selection or he might destroy me with his mighty wit. Or twat me.

Still, it could have been worse. Jimmy Carr might have been in the chart.