Category Archives: Arts & Media

Television, film, music, paintings, poetry, photographs, theatre.

It’s The Dunn Thing

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Today I noticed that BBC Four has started airing the documentary series The Architecture the Railways Built, presented by historian Tim Dunn, and put the whole first season on iPlayer. This series was originally made five years ago for Yesterday, a UKTV channel technically owned by BBC Studios but run more like the commercial stations. This series was already watchable on UKTV’s own catch-up website and repackaged on at least two different licensed YouTube channels, but the lack of advertisements and all-around superior functionality of the BBC’s service will make iPlayer my preferred platform. This makes for a rare case of televisual upcycling in a partnership where downcycling is the norm, the most obvious locomotion-related example being Michael Portillo’s many Great Railway Journeys programs.

Each episode of TATRB is forty-five minutes long and typically covers three locations, two in the United Kingdom and one abroad. No obvious connection is made between the three, so I’ve often been left feeling that it would be better if the three locations chosen were grouped by geographic region, architectural style or railway feature. Alternatively, they could be split up so that each location had a fifteen-minute episode to itself.

In addition to broadcast television, Dunn has made regular appearances in railway-related online channels, including several times presenting Sudrian pseudohistorical lectures hosted by the Talyllyn Railway.

Update Regarding Government Photography

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Over the course of last year I and other contributors furnished Wikimedia Commons with a large number of photographs taken from the Number 10 Flickr account.

These uploads were legally justified under the declaration on the account’s About page which said all photographs were released under the Open Government Licence. After enough photographs had been uploaded this way, a dedicated licence tag was created for it.

Late last year a deletion request was raised over a shot I had uploaded of Prince Louis of Wales at Trooping the Colour. This let to a rather long and complicated discussion over the validity of our interpretation of the government’s many varied and often contradictory statements regarding its intellectual property.

Eventually someone raised a Freedom of Information request over the matter. The Cabinet Office replied, confirming that the OGL was the licence applicable.

I am glad that this dispute has been resolved with reasonable speed and look forward to harvesting a great many more such photographs in the future. I only wish C. Smith had worded the question a little more broadly so it covered all departments of His Majesty’s Government instead of just one.

Note on the Decease of Britt Allcroft

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Hilary Mary Allcroft, commonly known as Britt, was the television producer and director responsible for turning The Railway Series into Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. She was at the helm of the franchise from 1984 to 2003, overseeing its first seven series and the film Thomas & the Magic Railroad. She also created the companion series Shining Time Station for the American market and in early years was part of the production team for Blue Peter.

Directly or indirectly, to this day she remains a commanding influence in the childhoods of many millions in the United Kingdom and around the world. Though no longer in charge of the franchise for more than twenty years she remained a grandee until her death and – however controversial some of her adaptation decisions may have been – her presence was much appreciated by the surrounding community.

Her death occurred on Christmas Day, but was not made public until today. Her family arranged for the first announcement of her demise – preceding any newspapers – to be given by the filmmaker Brannon Carty, in whose documentary An Unlikely Fandom she had recently appeared.

I was not aware of the death of director David Mitton when it happened, nor even born yet when Wilbert Awdry himself passed away. I hope it will be many years before his son Christopher dies.

Farewell Britt, your presents were much appreciated.

UPDATE (4th January)

The aforementioned Brannon Carty has also uploaded his interview with BBC Radio 5.

Public Domain Day 2025

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As another December concludes, another batch of books, films, songs and paintings goes out of copyright.

This year’s categories are works in Britain (and countries with similar laws) the last of whose authors died in 1954, and works from the United States which were first published in 1929.

Last year the jewel of the public domain crown was Steamboat Willie, the first film to feature Mickey & Minnie Mouse. This year it is The Karnival Kid, the first film in which the mouse speaks. Also in the 1929 United States category are the first Marx Brothers film The Cocoanauts and the final Buster Keaton film Spite Marriage. Sherlock Holmes and Fu Manchu also make their first appearances in sound films.

Annoyingly there are some noteworthy works from that year originating outside the United States, which are now public domain there but will remain copyrighted in their home countries for some decades, such as Sir Alfred Hitchcock’s Blackmail and Hergé’s early Tintin cartoons. We do, however, get the first cartoons of Popeye the Sailor Man and Tarzan. We also get the surprisingly-old song Singin’ in the Rain.

Relatively few prominent British authors entered the public domain this year, the most recognisable ones being James Hilton and Francis Brett Young. Also dying that year was the computer scientist Alan Turing, whose most famous publication was his namesake mathematical proof. Of course, many of these works will conversely not be public domain in the United States, so their proliferation over the internet will still be limited.

The Blackadder Order of Precedence

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The New Year Honours for 2025 have been released, and they include the appointment of former QI host Stephen Fry as a knight bachelor.

I thought fit to compile a tracker for where each major actor in the Blackadder franchise now stands within the British honours system:

Sir Tony Robinson (Baldrick)

Knight Bachelor, 15th June 2013 (Queen’s Birthday), for public and political service.

Sir Stephen Fry (Melchett)

Knight Bachelor, 30th December 2024 (New Year), for services to Mental Health Awareness, the Environment and Charity.

Richard Curtis (Writer)

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, I can’t find the date or cause.

Howard Goodall (Composer)

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 31st December 2010 (New Year), for services to music education.

Hugh Laurie (George)

Commander of the Order of the British Empire, 30th December 2017 (New Year), for services to drama.

Miriam Margolyes (Maria Escalosa/Whiteadder/Victoria)

Officer of the Order of the British Empire, 31st December 2001 (New Year), for services to drama.

Robbie Coltrane (Johnson)

Officer of the Order of the British Empire, 31st December 2005 (New Year), for services to drama.

Brian Blessed (Richard IV)

Officer of the Order of the British Empire, 10th June 2016 (Queen’s Birthday), for services to the arts and charity.

Ben Elton (Writer)

Member of the Order of Australia, 11th June 2023 (King’s Birthday), for significant service to the entertainment industry as a comedian, actor, writer and director.

Tom Baker (Redbeard)

Member of the Order of the British Empire, 30th December 2024 (New Year), for services to television.

So far Tim McInerny (Percy/Darling) and Miranda Richardson (Queenie/Amy) are still without anything from the fons honorum. Rik Mayall (Flasheart), Patsy Byrne (Nursie) and Peter Cook (Richard III) all went to the grave unadorned.

Second Look at Royal Variety

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Three weeks after its recording, the Royal Variety Performance for 2024 has been broadcast. I have also found on the charity’s website some publicity stills from the event along with the official brochure.

The brochure contains a great deal of heraldic illustration, much of which is clearly of Sodacan origin. The artistic schizophrenia is evident even from the front cover, which prominently displays a full-colour Sodacan version of the royal arms with the Tudor crown while also having in the header a monochrome outline (similar to that on royal.uk) of the St Edward crown version as part of the Royal Variety Performance logo. Throughout the brochure the latter is included as part of the page header while the former is repeated many times as a main-body illustration. More curious is that in the borders of several pages another obvious Wikimedia graphic is seen – the coat of arms of the Prince of Wales. Quite why that one was used I am not sure, especially as Charles stopped using it upon his accession and it has yet to be conclusively shown that William now does so. The outline version also appears as the background pattern to some of the pages themselves. To make things even more confusion two more expressions of the royal arms appear in the brochure – in the letterhead of a message from Buckingham Palace on page 7 in the royal warrant part of the advertisement for Mikhail Pietranek Interior Furnishing and Design on page 65.

A quick glance at the brochures for past installments of the performance makes clear – even just from the front covers – that this armorial smorgasbord has been in effect for some time.

As far as the performance itself is concerned, I do not intend to write a detailed review. The one part I deem relevant to the ongoing themes of this blog is the section on the Lord Lloyd-Webber’s famous musical drama Starlight Express:

After the play’s own professional actors had done their carefully-choreographed routine, the night’s host Alan Carr came on for a comedy coda of sorts, wearing a much simpler steam engine costume and clearly much less steady on his feet. Lloyd-Webber himself was on stage at this point. Carr’s entrance was accompanied by the original Thomas & Friends theme tune. I found this amusing for two reasons:

  1. That theme debuted when the series began forty years ago, but then was replaced in Hit Entertainment’s retool of the franchise twenty years ago. Even though the theme has been out of use now for as long as it was in, it still achieves far greater cross-generational recognition than do any of its successors.
  2. Britt Allcroft’s 1984 production was not the first attempt at adapting Awdry’s books for television – Lloyd Webber had approached the vicar a whole decade earlier with his own pitch and had produced a pilot episode for Granada by 1976, but the studio declined to put it into production. This disappointment was the reason he made Starlight Express in the first place!

 

Heraldry in “Stoke Me a Clipper”

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Red Dwarf is a science fiction comedy series about a man from the twenty-third century who gets put into stasis and wakes up three million years in the future. As such, one would not expect it to include much in the way of medieval heraldry. Indeed, mostly it doesn’t. However, much like Star Trek, the normally-futuristic series occasionally delves into history, and historical fantasy, by means of either time travel or simulation.

The episode “Stoke Me a Clipper” (1997) involves Lister spending a few minutes in a virtual reality game based vaguely on medieval England, featuring an unnamed King & Queen of Camelot. That term is normally associated with Arthurian legends, which are nominally set in the fifth and sixth centuries but have much of their imagery and iconography backported from much later eras. The scene we witness in this episode looks most likely to be set in the fifteenth century, though no detail is actually given about the overall plot nor the setting of the story and no claim is made to historical accuracy.

A great many heraldic banners are seen in this scene, which manage to almost, but not quite, resemble real historical blazons.

The most obvious of these is “The Good Knight” (John Thompson) who wears an off-model version of the royal arms of England: His tabard is quarterly Gules and Azure, the first quarter bearing two lions passant guardant in pale Or and the second quarter bearing three fleurs-de-lys two and one Or. Curiously the lower quarters were left blank, as were those on his back. Perhaps they were meant to be out of frame?

Screencap circa 6m17s

The King (Brian Cox) & Queen (Sarah Alexander) sit on a raised platform under a canopy on two ornate wooden thrones. Their gowns have no heraldic motifs but several are visible on the wall behind them. Above and between the thrones is a depiction of the coronet of a Marquess, the style of which probably dates to the seventeenth century. Lower down is a shield Argent a saltire between four fleurs-de-lys in cross although I am not certain of the latter’s tincture. At the top right of the screen is a shield with two piles reversed the point of each charged with a rose and in the top left is a shield parted per pale and charged with one large fleur-de-lis. Again the tinctures are uncertain. There are four rectangular images behind the thrones. The first looks to be Azure with at least two fleurs-de-lys Or (France again?) the second and third have a metal background with a fess chequy of a colour and a different metal (Clan Stuart?). The fourth cannot be seen as the consort’s throne obscures it completely from this angle.

Screencap circa 6m22s

Four banners are held aloft to the side of the throne area: That on the far right of the screen is divided per bend, the upper part being Azure four crosses fitchee Or and the lower being Gules fretty Argent. Closest to the platform is Azure seme-de-lis Or a double cross Argent over all a label of three points Argent. In between we have Quarterly 1st & 4th Vert a bend between two crosses flory Or 2nd & 3rd bendy of six Vert and Argent a label of three points Argent and Quarterly 1st & 4th Gules a bend between six crosses crosslet fitchee Argent 2nd & 3rd Gules three lions passant guardant in pale Or a label Argent. That last one bears more than a passing resemblance to the arms of the Howard Dukes of Norfolk.

Screencap circa 8m58s

We also see a trumpeter with a cloth shield hanging from his instrument. My best guess is Per fess Argent and Purpure in chief a cross throughout Gules impaling Gules three lions passant guardant reversed in pale Or. This is perhaps the least heraldic-looking of the bunch.

Screencap circa 6m7s

There are knights either side of the royal couple on the platform. That by the king’s right hand wears a tabard Ermine two piles Sable each charged with a lion rampant Or and that to the queen’s left Paly of four Azure and Argent on a bend Gules three birds displayed wings elevated Or. I cannot identify the birds from this distance but given heraldic trends they are most likely eagles, possibly falcons. Affixed to the roof of the stage is a shield which I would guess as Or a bend between two lozenges Sable each charged with a saltire of the field. The most obviously anachronistic element here (beside the decaying castle ruins, of course) is the tasselled embroidering at the front of the stage which shows a Georgian or Victorian depiction of the arms of the United Kingdom.

Screencap circa 8m16s

A man in the crowd (holding his helmet in front of his chest) wears a tabard which seems to be Per pale Sable and Or a label of three points Gules.

Screencap circa 8m37s

The trumpeter and a knight in the crowd both wear a tabard Gules two broken swords inverted Or on a pile reversed Azure fimbriated a broken sword of the second. Two children wear Chequy Or and Azure on a chief of the second three fleurs-de-lys of the first and yet another bystander wears something like Gules a crescent Argent between an orle of martlets Or.

Screencap circa 7m48s

A shot from the back of the crowd shows a knight with a helmet on wearing Vert on a pile Or a falcon’s head erased of the first and a man in a brown hat wearing Per pale Purpure and Argent a dragon passant counterchanged. Both animals are depicted as langued Gules.

Screenshot circa 9m14s

Lister’s own armorial bearings are difficult to make out – what we see on his outfit looks almost like the Russian double-headed eagle. There are a few other examples of heraldry in this scene but they are too faraway to read properly. Overall the resemblance of this scene is more to a Renaissance fair or a gathering of the Society for Creative Anachronism than to a typical period drama. Ugly faux-heraldry is avoided with almost all the arms shown being in keeping with the principles of good heraldic design, even if the matching up of arms to people is apparently entirely random.

I suppose Blackadder, particularly the first series, is the logical next stop for checking out heraldry in British television. Unfortunately that one doesn’t seem to be on iPlayer at the moment, nor can I find a convenient source of screencaps.

SOURCES

Forty Years of Thomas & Friends

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At noon on 9th October 1984, ITV premiered Thomas & Gordon and Edward & Gordon, the first two episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends, Britt Allcroft’s adaptation for television of The Railway Series Wilbert Awdry.

Although fans have aired their private celebrations, official commemorations (e.g. those by the franchise owners) have been muted. I suspect that is to avoid community burnout when anniversaries pile up. This autumn’s quadragenary of the television adaptation is swiftly followed next spring by the octogenary of the books themselves, and likely there has been a collective decision to focus efforts on the latter instead.

I will keep my own remarks on the short and stumpy side to avoid rehashing the colossal article I posted in 2021. Though T&F has had its rocky periods over the decades (including an especially bad one at present), the classic seasons are a timeless artistic masterpiece in their own right, down mostly to the model-work of David Mitton and the music of Mike O’Donnell & Junior Campbell.

Even forty years on, there still is nothing quite like it.

The Death of Dame Maggie

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Reported today was the death at age 89 of the actress Dame Maggie Smith, best known in recent decades for her roles in the Downton Abbey and Harry Potter series – the latter especially poignant as her co-star Sir Michael Gambon died exactly a year ago.

This post is not meant as a eulogy or obituary for her – many others can do that far better than I – but a discussion of two points of interest relating Dame Maggie to the topics covered on my blog.

First, her status as a Dame: In 1970 Smith was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Twenty years later she was promoted to Dame Commander. This is one means by which to certify her status among the “National Treasures” of British acting, nearly all of whom have had the chance to become a knight or dame even if a small number have declined. The Order of the British Empire was founded by King George V in 1917 and was the first British order of chivalry in the modern era to explicitly allow female recipients to have the title. The top two grades of the order are Knight/Dame Commander (K/DBE) and Knight/Dame Grand Cross (GBE). The DBE is by far the most common form of damehood and it is the only grade of any order at which dames outnumber knights. This is partly because the other orders (e.g. the Bath) are reserved for senior government and military officials, a group which tends to skew male anyway, and partly because there is no female equivalent of the honour of Knight Bachelor (i.e. knighthood unconnected to membership of an order of chivalry) which is the rank that the majority of knights possess (including fellow treasures like Gambon as aforesaid). Most of Britain’s orders of chivalry (the Royal Victorian Order is an exception) have statutory limits on how many there may be at any particular grade at any given time. For the grade of K/DBE that limit is 845, with male and female members counting the same towards the total. I do not actually know how close we are to hitting the limit. The English Wikipedia has a page listing all the people who have been awarded the status of DBE and they number over a thousand, but without going through each biography individually (and some don’t have their own pages anyway) I cannot tell how many are currently alive and still holding the same dignity.

In 2021 Netflix released an animated sitcom named The Prince, focusing on a fictionalised caricature of Prince George of Cambridge. It was produced and largely written by Gary Janetti, who previously wrote fourteen episodes of Family Guy, and it strongly resembles that series both tonally and aesthatically. Despite its star-studded cast the series received overwhelmingly negative reception for its offensive premise and unfunny execution. The series was neither renewed nor widely distributed and now is viewable only as a scattering of short clips on video-hosting site by either the studios’s own paltry few advertisements or other people’s reviews of it. The first episode features a minor subplot about the possibility of Elizabeth II conferring a damehood on either Kelly Ripa or Greta Thunberg. On two occasions the suggestion results in another character asking if Smith had just died, presuming there to be a moratorium. As explained above this reasoning is technically correct, although Janetti seems to have missed that neither Ripa (American) nor Thunberg (Swedish) were the late monarch’s subjects so could not receive substantive appointments to the order anyway. They could only receive honorary appointments (giving them the post-nominals but not the salutation) which would be supernumerary to the quota.

The news of Smith’s death has brought renewed interest in her earlier appearances, the most famous of which was the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on the 1961 novel by Muriel Spark (who herself became a DBE in 1993). News features about Smith’s death kept playing the same speech by her character, which is also featured on the book’s TV Tropes page:

I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders, and all my pupils are the crème de la crème. Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. You girls are my vocation. If I were to receive a proposal of marriage from Lord Lyon, King of Arms, I would decline it. I am dedicated to you in my prime. And my summer in Italy has convinced me that I am truly in my prime.

Grant with the future George VI in 1933

I have not yet watched the film or read the novel in full, but searching a digital scan on Archive.org for the word “lyon” gives two instances, both of them in the context of Brodie turning down his hand, with the implication that he must be highly desirable and that declining him requires a serious force of will. The only other reference to heraldry in the book is a passing mention of the school’s “crest” which I think is really a shield. The book is set in the 1930s and the Lord Lyon King of Arms from 1929 to 1945 was Sir Francis James Grant, whose Wikipedia article is such a short stub that I don’t even know if he had a wife or not. He was sixty-eight by the time the novel was published, so not in his “prime” by any reasonable definition. Why his title was used in the book is unclear, and may be a matter I need to raise at a subsequent virtual heraldry lecture, whenever that comes up.

Extracting the Anthem

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Many times I have written about the travails involved in finding free-licence images for Wikimedia Commons, but this time it is sound files that concern me.

When Charles III acceded to the throne two years ago, the royal anthem of the Commonwealth Realms changed from “God Save the Queen” to “God Save the King”, having been in the feminine form for longer than the internet had existed. Extant recordings of the masculine form were hard to find, and those that did exist were inevitably very old.

Lacking the budget to form my own choir or hire a recording studio, I went looking for recordings of the song in the place it seemed most likely to find them – videos of His Majesty’s outdoor accession proclamations.

Of the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of these which actually took place, I managed to find just four for which either the venue host or a charitable bystander had uploaded the video to YouTube under Creative Commons. I firstly copied these videos themselves to Wikimedia Commons, then set about extracting the audio of people singing. Both of these involved a bit of a learning curve and the use of some third-party tools.

The Royal Exchange in the City of London (by Alison Pope)

This is the most high-profile of the four, and the one with the best sound quality. The band are playing (I think) Sir Henry Wood’s arrangement of the anthem (which is good because the composition itself is public domain) and the crowd are all in time. There is some noise due to wind, local dogs and the sliding of camera shutters.

Cornwall St Ives (by Cornishpastyman)

This version is sung a cappella. Most of the crowd have picked up by the third syllable and stay remarkably in time for the rest, though not necessarily in tune – one in particular says “noble” and “victorious” in a way that sounds almost like a dog yawning.

Charnwood (by Crep171166)

Music is provided by a lone trumpeter. Almost nobody picks up singing until the second line, and even then they all sound a bit low on energy.

Chatteris (by Chatteris Watch)

Again a lone brass-player and really only one voice is heard singing, picking up midway through the first line.

None of these are studio quality, of course, and none go beyond the first verse. Still, it’s a start.

UPDATE (August 2025)

The YouTuber Gobernador-Heneral has put together a 17-minute compilation of public performances of the anthem in the mourning period.