Mick Jagger conducted a massive publicity blitz to plug his new album, yet it sold less than a thousand copies on its first day. In tribute to the stalled Stone, CHRIS TITLEY compiles a top ten miss list

1 The Millennium Dome

Where else could we start? This flop is so vast it can be seen from outer space. Or four times weekly on Britain's top-rated TV show - EastEnders. It is almost too painful to recall the Dome's opening night; I seem to remember Cherie Blair doing the hokey-cokey with the Queen while a blue-painted Peter Mandelson bungee-jumped from the ceiling. Later, ministers admitted that this sort of project should be left well alone by Government, then they returned to work on the Wembley revamp. What a waste of Lottery cash. Which brings us to...

2 New Yorkshire museums

The Earth Centre in Doncaster, the National Museum of Popular Music in Sheffield and the Royal Armouries in Leeds: three projects that caught the imagination. Like a sieve. The Armouries and the Earth Centre have been bailed out but the music centre has fallen silent. The Earth Centre boasted an attraction that recycled human waste, and yet still the visitors didn't come. At least it was an attempt to regenerate a devastated mining community, which brings us to...

3 The 1980s

In the Fifties they had Elvis and full employment. In the Sixties they had sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. In the Seventies they had George Best and Star Wars. The Eighties should have been the greatest decade of them all. So what went wrong? Heroin addiction, AIDS, mass unemployment, riots, Stock Aitken and Waterman, greed is good, Ronald Reagan, braces, mullets, Michael Winner films. Need I go on? Mrs Thatcher arrived shortly before and departed shortly after the Eighties. Surely a coincidence, but it brings us neatly to...

4 The SDP/Liberal Alliance

A political movement that flopped faster than Richard Fosberry in chainmail. Tired of their political principles, the Gang of Four - Shirley Williams, Roy Jenkins, David Owen and the other one - broke from Labour and formed the SDP. No one voted for them, so they had to join up with the Liberals. Still no one voted for them. Liberal leader David Steel said of his twin leadership with Owen: "The fact that we can be in two places at once is a good advantage." Certainly good for the egg throwers who doubled their chances of a direct hit. A true bunch of losers, which brings us to...

5 The Team Of The Eighties

Not Liverpool FC, which got on with the business of winning everything, but Crystal Palace. Under Terry Venables, the club had leapt from Division Three to Division One, capturing the FA Youth Cup twice in succession. When Venables left, however, they were quickly relegated and came close to bankruptcy. Still regarded as one of our top managers, El Tel is associated with at least two other flops: the plastic pitch at QPR, and...

6 ITV's The Premiership

"Better for you. Better for us," said Des Lynam at the start of the first edition of ITV's take on Match of the Day, screened early on Saturday evening. The "you" he was talking to transpired to be the extended Lynam family and those in Her Majesty's institutions who did not have access to a remote control. Even these viewers later deserted the programme after discovering that the adverts lasted longer than the match highlights. This mistake was enough to help BBC1 to become Britain's most popular TV channel for the first time since 1955. Another show that helped was...

7 Survivor

With a £10 million budget and a location on a South China Sea island, this was supposed to be the reality TV show that wiped the smile off Big Brother's face. It could have been fun. It could have been It's A Knockout in paradise. But instead of Stuart Hall type-japery, Survivor took itself horribly seriously and hired ITN newsman Mark Austin and tall, tedious John Leslie to present. Result? No one watched. Which brings us to...

8 The All Saints film

Despite acting in this turkey, Natalie and Nicole Appleton and Melanie Blatt had high hopes of repeating their chart success at the movie box office. The film was called Honest, and critics were, brutally so, suggesting that this Sixties crime caper was among the worst films ever made. Cinema chains pulled it after only a week when it had earned only £111,000 (as opposed to £2.5 million for Spice World: The Movie). Few things have plummeted to earth so dramatically. Leading nicely on to...

9 The Euro space project

This long-running flop only confirms that Europe doesn't do co-operation, which bodes well for the single currency launch in six weeks' time. Castle Howard fireworks have enjoyed more time in space than some of our multi-million pound rockets. Remember the Cluster project? Exploded within seconds of lift-off, complete with its payload of four satellites. The Queen Mother's hemline got higher than Cluster. Which is a convoluted way to get us to...

10 Lady Di's wedding dress

This must count as the biggest fashion flop of all time. For years we had waited for Prince Charles to marry. For months we had been subjected to all manner of speculation as to what style of wedding dress his young bride might wear. For what seemed like hours on the big day we were glued to our television sets, with only cubes of cheese and pickled onions skewered onto toothpicks to keep our strength up. Eventually the carriage arrived at St Paul's Cathedral - and disgorged a six foot, half-set meringue. There was something sinister about the sheer density of that dress. Two tons of taffeta held Lady Di hostage so she was unable to run away screaming.

Updated: 10:41 Friday, November 23, 2001