Speaking ill of the dead

Over the past few weeks, right-wing newspapers have made it clear that anyone who so much as murmurs objections to St Margaret Thatcher's biography (kitten-lover, washed the feet of the poor every evening, sent every miner a postal order on their birthdays, always the last to leave St. Patrick's Day ceilidhs) is a damned traitor who should be hung in Trafalgar Square and is bloody rude too.

In my ongoing attempt to point out that political discourse in modern Britain is politer than in any previous period, here's an obituary:

The subject is King George IV, spendthrift, hypocrite and bigot. He was ridiculed in life and damned in death by all and sundry. I find it hard to imagine a mainstream newspaper being quite so pungent about any royal or politician these days… even Prince Andrew or Tony Blair. 

Despite building the magnificent Royal Pavilion in Brighton (which the racist English Defence League recently mistook for a Mosque.

the only way George is at all remembered is as a foppish moron in his years as Prince Regent, memorialised so gloriously by Hugh Laurie in Blackadder the Third. 

Sausage! SAUSAGE!

By which I refer, of course, to Blackadder the Third's depiction of 'the big batey fellow in the black', known to history as Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first Dictionary of the English language. The entire episode starts here, and the 'sausage' reference is explained by this sequence (from 12.48 minutes). It's true, too. Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to check the dictionary for rude words when we visited his house, as is usually compulsory (11 minutes in).

But why am I dribbling on about Johnson? Because on Saturday, I mooched around in his home town, Lichfield, graced also by one of the most elegant cathedrals in the country.

I took some photographs, which you may view here: below are some samples: click to enlarge. If anyone can identify the various flowers here or on the Flickr site, that would be great. I recognise the roses, by the way.

The new gargoyles don't look entirely Christian even to my atheist eyes. In fact they're more Buffy or the 'Blink' episode of Doctor Who than devotional

I've desaturated this - I think it works quite well

Lavender

?

More lavender

So you've started fancying boys…

No, I haven't. But I'm teaching a Shakespeare comedy tomorrow, and as you know, classics of English literature aren't complete without a bit of cross-dressing (the same applies to stag nights).

And so this episode of Blackadder springs to mind:

"A triumph of stupidity over common sense"

Messers CURTIS and ELTON, before they became Infected with the Curse of NOT BEING FUNNY, expressed all that is Good about Politickal Humour in their Televised Play, Blackadder the Third.

(With added Hollandish surtitles for your Convenience).

Bob's yer, well, not sure really

I took a seminar on Twelfth Night the other day, focussing on gender and performance: apart from the confusion of men playing women playing men and everybody falling in love with the 'wrong' person, the play's stuffed with reference to, well, plays.

Just to break the ice, and to get a conversation on gender confusion going, I showed this clip from Blackadder, which got a lot of laughs even now.

Time team travesty

In my semi-comatose state, I watched a few minutes of Time Team, featuring Tony Robinson excavating a World War 1 British command bunker in Belgium. I had to stop when he said 'nobody knows what life in the bunkers was like'.

1. Yes they do. There are thousands of diaries, accounts etc.

2. Tony Robinson does. He lived in the trenches for a whole series as Baldrick in Blackadder Goes Fourth (or was it Forth?). Yet for Time Team, he didn't make a single reference to this funny and heartbreaking series. It was the elephant in the room and I couldn't bear it any longer.

In case you've missed the reality of life in the trenches, and like poetry, here's Robinson's earlier take:

Teaching teaching teaching

Last night I taught Twelfth Night, using lots of Sinfield, Greenblatt, Butler and Blackadder (to which they took rather well). This morning was a lecture on semiotics, followed by my poetry class - 'The Seafarer', Petrarch, Spenser and Shakespeare. It's quite exciting covering such big themes - but I'm quite tired, and have lots of marking to do!