Disappointingly, only around 30,000 viewers responded to this initial poll and the choice of the greatest 100 British personalities was rather haphazard. The BBC then set out to make documentaries about the Top 10 most popular and, on the basis of these programs, the TV audiences voted for the greatest Briton of them all, Winston Churchill.

The differences between how the project was run and its impact in the United Kingdom and what Czech Television, in cooperation with its media partners, is preparing seems interesting.

British TV broadcasting has been fragmenting seriously, due to the rapid emergence of hundreds of digital TV channels. The times when the whole nation watched a single TV program seem to be lost forever in Britain. Also, compared to the razzmatazz with which Czech TV is preparing The Greatest Czech project, the impact of the Great Britons programs - incidentally broadcast on the cultural, minority channel BBC 2 - was relatively modest.

Is The Greatest Czech project significant in any way for the examination of the Czech national psyche, or is it merely a device by which Czech TV, battered by the phenomenal success of TV Nova's Superstar programs, wants to increase its audience numbers? What does it mean that populist television projects seem to dominate Czech media and society? Who wants to be a Superstar? was a popular TV program in the United Kingdom, but it did not seem to provoke the mass hysteria seen in the Czech Republic. The Greatest Czech program also appears to attract much more attention from the media and the public than was the case with the United Kingdom.

Is it because nothing much ever happens in the Czech Republic that people follow avidly and en masse the occasional single event? Is it because the Czechs are easily manipulated? Or is it because Czech society is much more homogeneous and thus it is more easily roped in by PR agencies and advertising than societies in the West?

The television programs in the series have not even started and quite serious commentators are already speculating whether or not the project will cast a new, unique light on the national psyche.

In a recent discussion on Radiožurnál, viewers that phoned in were genuinely fascinated by the idea and promised they would vote because they want to learn what ordinary people think. But will the project really reveal that?

The British experience tells us that the final voting was much more the viewers' reaction to the charisma of the individual presenters than a genuine statement about national preferences.

But the Czechs might still surprise us. There are signs that many of them are reacting rather unexpectedly to the advertising campaign. It would appear that the most frequently nominated personality to date is a fictional figure: the tongue-in-cheek genius Jára da Cimrman, originally a parody of Lenin and a total mystification lovingly kept alive by its creators Ladislav Smoljak and Zdeněk Svěrák, and thoroughly enjoyed by the Czech nation for many decades. But what will it tell us about the national psyche and about the Czech TV project if people vote for this nonexistent, Švejkian character?

Originally published in Czech Business Weekly HERE