I say...

There's a problem with BBC responses to Freedom of Information Requests.  They really do make it clear they're not bothering to read things.

One has been lodged with the BBC about its own quiz show "Pointless", asking for a full list of Number One hits beginning with "I".  The BBC machine has asked for 20 days to respond.

The pseudonym chosen by the enquirer is Herschel McLandress, last used by J K Galbraith in the 1960s. Galbraith concocted a whole personality to go with McLandress - Professor of Psychiatric Measurement at the Harvard Medical School and chief consultant to the Noonan Psychiatric Clinic in Boston. His most notable achievement was the creation of the McLandress Coefficient - a measurement based on "the arithmetic mean or average of intervals of time during which a subject’s thoughts centered on some substantive phenomenon other than his own personality.”

A rough estimate of a person's McLandress Coefficient can be found by noting how long the subject talks without using the first-person singular pronoun. A low coefficient -- anything under, say, one minute -- “implies a close and diligent concern by the individual for matters pertaining to his own personality.” Not surprisingly, in the 60s, people in show business tended to fall into this range.

Apparently Gore Vidal had a rating of 12.5 minutes. (Writing in The New York Review of Books, Vidal responded, ““I find this ... one finds this odd.”)  Nikita Khrushchev had the same coefficient as Elizabeth Taylor – three minutes. Martin Luther King clocked in at four hours. Charles de Gaulle was found to have the very impressive rating of 7 hours, 30 minutes. (Further studies revealed this figure to be somewhat misleading, because the general did not make any distinction between France and himself.).  At the other extreme was Richard Nixon - estimated at three seconds.