Who wants to be like her? I’d quite like to blow up the Beatles

Who wants to be like her? I’d quite like to blow up the Beatles. I don’t find them at all engaging, I find them irritating and I resent them for changing the face of my favourite city Of course, i t wasn’t all their fault, but they didn’t help. I’d also like to blow up the works of Edwin Landseer whose works cast a gloom over my entire childhood They were everywhere. You couldn’t go into a pub or even people’s houses without seeing them. They wer e all mist and rain and animals not having a nice time.”IAIN GALE Independent art critic “Sergei Chepik. He is a third-rate artist, over-hyped, over-priced and much too often over here.

His banal and lacklustre paintings of outplayed ecole de Paris subject matter justify the pejorative use of the otherwise maligned term `illustrative’. His c lowns, myths and boxing matches are the themes of great art but in Chepik’s hands are better suited to Montmartre or to the railings of Green Park.”NICK HORNBY Writer “Sunley and Son, the company that closed the Camden Parkway cinema, the most beautiful cinema in London. There are empty offices all over the city and no nice cinemas, yet despite a huge protest campaign, they closed it down to build offices. It is simpl y tragic.”ROSE JENNINGS Independent art critic “Toys R Art: models, mannequins, stuffed toys, use of in contemporary sculpture. Stick a willy on an Action Man, rough up that teddy fur, and hey presto, you’re asking questions about family dysfunction, infantile sexuality and the construction of identity. Or perhaps not.”SHEILA JOHNSTON Independent film critic “The Heritage department, which in October spent £23,000 to send seven MPs on a freebie fact-finding mission to Hollywood: it would be `one of the most wonderful £23,000 ever spent out of public funds’. Then its Select Committee told British directors they should make Carry On movies.”CARLA LANE TV comedy writer “All out-of-town Sainsbury’s sites.

All roads used to lead to Rome but now they all seem to lead to Sainsbury’s. I’ve nothing against them in themselves but there are too many of them. They’re pseudo buildings, pretending to fit in with the surrounding countryside. It’s like some terrible acne.”DAVID LODGE Novelist “The municipal car park on Brunel Street and Navigation Street in central Birmingham. Constructed of steel girders and painted the colour of dried blood, it is a hideous eyesore even in a city not noted for distinguished modern architecture.”TOM LUBBOCK Independent art critic “I would choose to blow up extended festivals: those long-drawn-out themed cultural programmes, like `Everybody’s Shakespeare’ or (throughout 1995) `Fairest Isle’. They’re hard to be unaware of but largely chimerical entities, which exist only in the minds of their organisers and the critics who cover them. Not positively bad things; not really things at all.”EDWARD SECKERSON Independent music critic “My charges are primed in readiness for any John Tavener piece lasting longer than the sum total of the digits `95′ seconds.