So "the Rachel" is considered to be the most influential hairstyle ever? In the history of the world? Really? Personally, I would have put my money on Farrah to win.

But perhaps that's because hers was the only hairstyle in the top three that my sister sported as a child. She was a BIG Charlie's Angels fan and spent much of the late 1980s running around our backyard in a swimsuit and high heels armed with a supersoaker. In her one-year reign of terror she arrested our dog, Zorro, 327 times.

Sadly, her hair never quite matched her crime-busting attitude and despite spending hours with a curling wand, she looked less like Farrah Fawcett and more like Punky Brewster packing an Uzi.

Not that she was immune to the Princess Diana phenomenon. When Shy Di was in the news in the late 80s, she decided to roadtest her short haircut on her Malibu Barbie. She stole the "good scissors" from Mum's sewing basket and hacked away at Barbie's cascading locks as she attempted to recreate Lady Di's hairdo on Malibu Barbie's head.

Unfortunately, by butchering her lovely, long hair she went from being Malibu Barbie to Girl Interrupted Barbie. Which sounds more marketable than Self-Harm Barbie, since she had, on occasion, missed Barbie's head and put cut marks down her arms.

But I digress. What this survey once again confirms is the influence that pop culture, particularly TV, has had on us. And "the Rachel" is just the start of the many ways television characters have influenced what we say, wear and do.

In the late '90s, Australians were captivated by Sea Change; a new TV series about a female corporate lawyer who, on a whim, decides to get out of the city and make a new life for herself and her children in a coastal town.

Starring Sigrid Thornton the series is credited with inspiring the "sea-change boom" which followed as thousands of Australians followed suit and "did a Laura", looking for their own slice of Pearl Bay (and their own slice of Diver Dan).

In the early '90s the most popular show on television was Beverly Hills 90210. When Brenda Walsh (Shannon "Dogerty" Doherty) started hanging out at the Peach Pit wearing a white T-shirt underneath a little black dress with spaghetti straps it was immediately copied by 20-something women everywhere. And most of them seemed to hang out at Friday's Nightclub every Saturday night in 1992.

Meanwhile, Sex and the City is, of course, not only credited with raising the profile of Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik shoes but also made the cranberry juice-inspired Cosmopolitan cocktail THE drink to order.

Seinfeld introduced a whole range of Seinfeldisms into our everyday conversations including "low talker", "close talker", "man hands" and "not that there's anything wrong with that" to name just a few. And then there were those of us who were inspired to follow George's lead and start eating Snickers bars with a knife and fork.

Madonna is credited with being the first person to start using "not" to negate her sentences (eg. this weblog is really funny, NOT). It was in her documentary Truth or Dare that Madonna first started using that expression and it was quickly adopted around the world.

Ideally, we all want to be trendsetters rather than followers. So with that in mind, I'm going to pass on my big hit prediction.

The children's book that has best-seller written all over it is Dougal The Garbage Dump Bear by Queensland author Matt Dray. This hilarious and engaging picture book is about a bear called Dougal who, when abandoned at a dump, befriends a toy bee called Bumble and goes on to learn the importance of making the best of bad situations (of course he also learns to play pool and drink ginger beer in the process).