Someone Gives Annie Lennox A Degree

We've never been able to get our heads around honourary degrees. A university gives a famous person a bit of paper with a degree on it, even though it's not exactly going to help them get a job, and they don't have to cripple themselves with debt and cheap booze to get it.

Yesterday, the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama awarded three honourary degrees to three of Scotland's biggest stars; Annie Lennox now has a BA (hons) in Doing The Soundtrack To A Rubbish Demi Moore Film, Billy Connolly has a BA (hons) in Telling One Funny Joke On Parkinson In The 1970s Then Making A Bunch Of Shit Films and Tilda Swinton has a BSC in Making It Winter For 100 Years And Never Christmas.

The fact that we're even mentioning that any celebrity has been given an honourary degree in Scotland shows what a shocking day for news it's been, but the fact that one of them is Annie Lennox - the uber-bland, permanently dour middle-aged singer who hasn't done anything vaguely of note for 20 years - is a sure sign that we've reached the bottom of the barrel.

Annie Lennox - a woman who divides her time equally between sending the largest global television audience in the history of the world to sleep by warbling her rubbish songs during Live 8, ripping off Enya in the hope that it'll land her an Oscar, releasing dismal albums that sell so badly she has to try and talk Dave Stewart into reforming the sodding Eurythmics for the billionth time and generally annoying us quite a lot - has been given an honourary degree by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama.

And how has Annie Lennox responded to being made to dress up all weird and take a certificate from a man she's never met? By slagging degrees off a bit, as it appears:

"What I have done with my life has all been about self-invention and I didn't have degrees or qualifications or anyone to guide me and I still work very much in that way. But I do think it's great that young people today can have people to help them out, because Scotland has turned out some tremendous artists and performer and writers, and if we can keep that tradition going, it would be a fantastic thing. I'm very happy to be here, even though I feel like a complete fraud."

Also awarded degrees were Scottish comedian Billy Connolly and Queen Of All Narnia Tilda Swinton, who - now that they have degrees - can try and get a proper, serious job for two or three years before realising that going to university didn't really help their prospects very much and end up as the night shift supervisor of a call centre or something.

Read more:

Why Annie Lennox Feels Like A 'Fraud' - CBS

[story by Stuart Heritage]