Hitlist: celebrity degrees
As Dame Vivienne Westwood prepares to put down her knitting needles to receive an honorary degree at Dundee University this week, Hitlist toasts four other famous recipients of certificates to hang in the loo.
Clarkson is the proud recipient of not one but two degrees, the first in 2003 from Brunel University, the second in 2005 from Oxford Brookes, the ceremony for which was overshadowed when eco-mentalists threw a custard pie in his face. With a third honorary qualification, he says he will become the Three Degrees.
The Zimbabwean president must have seemed a decent sort when Edinburgh University awarded him an honorary degree for services to education in Africa in 1984. Unsurprisingly, it was revoked last year.
Stevens, or Yusuf Islam to his friends, was one of many celebrity graduates at Exeter University last July. Also honoured were Brian May, Jonathan Dimbleby and the married couple Jennifer Saunders and Adrian Edmondson.
The former weatherman was the court jester of daytime TV in the 1980s and 1990s thanks to his bounding-about on a floating map of the British Isles moored outside the This Morning studios in Liverpool. Recognition came last year when he was made a doctor of science at Manchester Metropolitan University.
