Heroes In such an unremittingly grim year, one of its most uplifting features has been the sheer number of people who have gone out of their way to make life more bearable and as normal as possible. From the NHS, care home and mental health workers to the delivery drivers, shop staff and waste collectors. My family, friends and colleagues have all done more than their fair share of keeping me more or less sane. But there have been a few people who have stood out, and in most years the award would have gone to Capt Tom Moore, who set out to raise £1,000 by walking around his garden in the weeks leading up his 100th birthday. He ended up raising nearly £33m and was rewarded with a knighthood.
Yet the clear winners have to be the German husband and wife team of Dr Uğur Şahin and Dr Özlem Türeci, who founded the pharmaceutical company BioNTech that developed the first coronavirus vaccine to be approved. It’s quite something to know your work could save the lives of millions of people. Best TV drama series Having spent most evenings watching television for the last 10 months, I feel better qualified than usual to make this award, though there have been some tough choices to make. I was late to the Succession and Ozark parties, so had a lot of catching up to do as they entered their second and third series respectively. I also loved The Queen’s Gambit, and The Undoing was all set to be in my top five up until the last episode. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who has yet to finish the series, but the reasons will probably be fairly obvious to anyone who has. But my runaway favourite was the fifth and penultimate series of Better Call Saul, the prequel to Breaking Bad, featuring Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman. I’ve been watching the series right from the off and the way it has slowly built up the tension as events get closer to the start of Breaking Bad has been a masterpiece of storytelling. I’m also desperate to know what happens to Kim Wexler as she doesn’t feature in the first series of Breaking Bad …
Best documentary series Again, I’ve been spoilt for choice. Devon and Cornwall, a series that thrived on showing nice people doing nice things in Devon and Cornwall, was perfect lockdown TV. As was This Farming Life, which followed the lives of farmers in Scotland and the north of England throughout the year. It also featured a lot of dogs, which is a serious bonus for any telly programme. But my top pick has to be the fourth series of The Crown for not putting a foot wrong and never mixing up timelines or using artistic licence to enhance the drama. So it was fascinating to learn for the first time of the real conversation Michael Fagan had with the Queen when he broke into Buckingham Palace. And it was uncanny to discover that Diana went out with the Duke of Edinburgh on her first trip to Balmoral to kill a wounded stag. In a straightforward drama series, that could so easily have been confused for a metaphor for Diana being hunted down by the royal family as a sacrificial wife for Prince Charles. Driver of the year It would be far to easy to nominate Lewis Hamilton, who has now won more grands prix than any other racing driver and has equalled Michael Schumacher’s record of seven world championship victories. But for real talent behind the wheel, the award has to go to Dominic Cummings. Most people who were recovering from coronavirus and were suffering from poor eyesight might have asked someone else to drive them to the nearest opticians. But not our Dom. He did it the hard way by going on an hour’s round trip to Barnard Castle with himself in the driving seat, straining his eyeballs not to take out any pedestrians or side-swipe any cyclists and to avoid steering into oncoming traffic. And as far as we know, he completed his eyesight test perfectly without picking up so much as a scratch to the paintwork. That’s what I call real talent. Travel agent of the year Let’s face it, it hasn’t been a great year for taking holidays. By the beginning of summer we had already cancelled a trip to the US to see our daughter and one to Spain to stay with friends, but no one did more to screw up his own hols than the transport secretary, Grant Shapps, who was so out of the loop that no one had told him before his plane there would be a 10-day isolation period on his return from Spain. He only found out when he landed. To make matters worse, he completely screwed up the holiday by abandoning his family and flying home alone after three days so he could get his cold turkey over and done with. The Chris Grayling trophy for failing Fittingly, this award again goes to the man himself for failing to win an election that had been rigged in his favour. Grayling had been lined up to be chair of the joint intelligence and security committee under the proviso that he sit on the report on Russian interference in UK elections indefinitely. But poor old Chris was blindsided by fellow Tory Julian Lewis, who secured the support of the four opposition MPs on the nine-person committee by promising to publish the report asap. By the end of the year Grayling had resigned from the committee in a sulk. Superforecaster of the year This is a category for which Dominic Cummings would normally have regarded himself as a shoo-in. Only this year Dom completely failed to forecast he would be out of a job at No 10 by Christmas. So instead the award goes to Boris Johnson for getting everything right by being consistently wrong. If you want to know what government policy is going to be, you can now guarantee that it will be the exact opposite of what Boris said it would be two weeks previously. Sports personality of the year An easy one. Marcus Rashford for twice getting the government to reverse its decisions on free school meals. The goals arbitration service is still not entirely sure whether to mark these down as goals for Rashford or own goals for Johnson. Either way, there’s every likelihood one of them will complete their hat-trick next year. Book of the year Since the first coronavirus lockdown my concentration has been shot to pieces and I have been unable to complete any book. So instead I am nominating Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light as the book I would most like to have finished. Live gig of the year Not a lot of choice as I’ve only been to two, one of which was the divine Ermonela Jaho’s recital at the Wigmore Hall. But the winner is Opera Holland Park for its socially distanced concert of opera arias with some fabulous singers back in July. It took place outdoors, so naturally it rained, but no one cared. It was a beautiful evening at the end of which my soul felt temporarily restored.