Over the years, the Tate Gallery’s Turner Prize entrants and winners have attracted public derision and disbelief. Each year, people assured each other they could have done better art than that on show at the Tate for the competition.

Trevor Prideaux, organiser of the Turnip Prize, started the annual competition when Tracey Emin’s Unmade Bed won the Turner Prize in 1999. You can see his point – most of us have done similar works of art – every morning in fact. Of course, we don’t think about the meaning of our unmade beds and explain it to art experts so they could write learned pieces explaining it to the rest of us and telling us why an unmade bed is such great art.

Don’t think the Turnip Prize doesn’t have strict criteria for entry. There have been disqualifications for works that aren’t of the required standard. Some of them were too good and too much effort had been put in to producing them.

When the competition was announced in 1999, it was plainly stated, “You can enter anything you like, but it must be rubbish,” so people who produce work that is too good only have themselves to blame when it’s disqualified. One year, the most famous piece ever to be disqualified might or might not have been by famous graffitti artist Banksy. It was a stencil of the Mona Lisa holding a rocket launcher firing a turnip. It wasn’t eligible for the competition because obviously too much effort and thought had gone into its production.

The prize has just been award for 2008 and it went to 69 year old Ivor Prance with his Fleeced and consisted of a piece of sheep’s wool which he picked off some barbed wire near his home. He said, “The work took no time at all to create.” He won the coveted trophy, a turnip stuck on a 6 inch nail.

The competition takes place each year at the New Inn, in the village of Wedmore, Somerset (south west England). If you want to enter, then it will have to be November 2009. Don’t spend time thinking about your entry or making it because, if you do, it will probably be disqualified. See the rules on The Turnip Prize.

Other winning entries:

1999 – Alfred The Grate (two burned rolls on a fire grate)

2000 – Minstrel Cycle (a bicyclemade from sweets, cocktail sticks and Tampons)

2001 and 2002 the competition was cancelled.

2003 – Take a Leaf out of my Chook (A raw chicken stuffed with leaves)

2004 – Jellied Deal, A wobbly jelly with submerged playing cards.

2005 – Birds Flew (An empty birds’ nest with a box of flu remedy)

2006 – Torn Beef (empty corned beef can)

2007 – Tea P (Used tea bags in the shape of a P)