I was asked to find four surveys of UK towns today, in an attempt to illustrate the banality of such things. You know the stuff: “Birmingham is the fourth most most popular city in which to buy chips on the second Friday of the month”, sort of thing.

The only condition was the survey had to be published this year. The ones I found were on eco-friendliness, driving, children and customer service. I think the highest rank for Birmingham was something like 42.

On seeing this, newsdesk asked me to do a quick search to try and find a survey where Birmingham had come out on top. Using the search words “Birmingham tops” the first three surveys that came up were about: buisness crime, pirated CDs and downloading porn.

We decided to keep to the original four.