Category Archives: Articles by Theme

Checking up on the Blog

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As this website approaches the tenth anniversary of its launch, I took the opportunity to look over the statistics which WordPress records for me. This site is not run for profit, but it is nice to feel that my publications are appreciated.

The view counts for each calendar year are as follows:

  • 2015 – 0053
  • 2016 – 0415
  • 2017 – 1289
  • 2018 – 0987
  • 2019 – 1469
  • 2020 – 2571
  • 2021 – 2800
  • 2022 – 2882
  • 2023 – 2300
  • 2024 – 4664

The first two entries don’t really count as the site didn’t exist until October and there were no meaningful posts on it until March. The third may be artificially inflated as many of the views will have been me checking posts myself to check that they’d uploaded properly. The readership exhibited steady growth from 2019 onwards, albeit with a bit of a dip (not sure why) in 2023. Last year raised the bar substantially, as the previous record was broken by the end of September.

Regular readers (if there are any) may also notice that some changes have been made to the way the blog is organised: Every now and again I go through my old posts deciding which categories and tags are needed based on regularity of use, abandoning some which are no longer needed. Today I have converted many of the most used tags into categories (with many posts inevitably being in more than one) and collapsed most of the menu options into one. I have also invented a few new tags for recurrent subtopics. I hope it makes more sense this way.

UPDATE (4th January)

Four days into the new year I’ve already reached 61 views, thus exceeding 2015’s record.

UPDATE (29th January)

Four weeks into the year I’m on 416, thus exceeding 2016.

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.

Here We Go Again

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As the minutes tick down until the end of December, I find myself once again resetting and archiving the talk page for my Wikipedia account, which I have already done on ten occasions before.

Some people think of time as a straight line, others as a circle. I have come to compromise by thinking of time as helical. The turn can be conceived of as lasting, hours, days, months, years or even centuries. Sitting at my computer desk now, ready to perform the same routine again, I find that the manoeuvre is ready in my muscle memory. It almost feels as if mere minutes have passed since I did this on 31 December 2023, or 2022, or 2021…

Conversely, events from earlier this year – such as the general election or the D-Day commemorations – feel a lifetime away. Perhaps the cycle of the seasons is to blame; by July it can be easy to forget the feeling of cold and darkness, and by January equally hard to remember the feeling of warmth and sunlight. Habits, timetables, wardrobes all change accordingly so that we almost inhabit two different selves with little knowledge of each other.

Christmas intensifies this effect, given the disappearance and reappearance of the same decorations each year, as well as the propensity of television and radio to endlessly rerun the same seasonal songs and specials. What’s more, Christmas is often a bit between, when work and school temporarily shut down. Once the rush of shopping for Christmas Day itself concludes, we find ourselves in the awkward denouement, the anticlimactic final week of the year when nothing much happens, which gives us time to reflect. It can all be a bit disorienting and existential, really.

What a strange phenomenon it is that memory and perception should vary in this way – over and over there will be weeks, days or even individual hours which feel excruciatingly long, yet somehow the year as a whole can go in no time at all.

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!

 

An addendum to the Qatari state visit

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A week after the event, the royal YouTube channel has uploaded a seventeen-minute video of the state banquet given at Buckingham Palace. The footage itself is the same as found on commercial news channels, but what catches my attention is the little animation at the end – the title card shows the line drawing of the royal arms that appears on the header of royal.uk, including St Edward’s Crown. I am a little perplexed that this is still being used for these purposes given that a new illustration with the Tudor crown now appears for the channel’s logo. This little animation does not appear at the ends of earlier videos, making it an innovation that only debuted after the artwork itself had already become obsolete.

Our Lady, Our Prince

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A magnificent ceremony was held last night in Paris to commemorate the re-opening of Notre-Dame Cathedral after years of restoration works. Many world leaders attended and, as usual, this gave the opportunity for political networking.

The American delegation was rather strange – the First Lady Jill Biden and her daughter Ashley were in attendance but the 46th President himself was not. The 45th & 47th President Donald Trump did attend however. He was without family for the occasion, making the event feel like the setup for a very strange episode of Wife Swap.

Trump is in the strange position of being a past and future but not current head of state, though it would be hard to tell from his interactions on this visit and his coverage in international press more generally you could be forgiven for assuming that Joe Biden had already long since left the stage. A similar phenomenon occurs during every post-electoral transition period in the United States, but the striking difference in personalities between incoming and outgoing leaders this time around leaves the latter seeming an even lamer duck than usual.

I am not entirely sure which order of precedence was being followed for this event – hosted by the Catholic Church in France rather than the French government – Mr Trump was seated directly beside M. Macron while Dr Biden was two spaces further along. Other national representatives filled the next section, including the President of Ukraine.

Macron, Trump and Zilensky had a much-covered trilateral meeting before the service. The President Re-elect then went to the British ambassador’s residence for a bilateral meeting with the Prince of Wales. The press reel from their discussion does not include much of the dialogue itself, but does include the amusing moment when the two men sit in awkward silence while waiting for the film crew to shamble in after them – complete with camera wobble and heavy footfall.

It has been difficult to find free photographs of the event – neither the British nor American governments appear to have taken any, Wikimedia Commons currently has eighteen pictures licensed by the Italian President’s office and the Ukrainian President’s licensed a further eight. I hope more will emerge in time to come.

Notes on the Qatari state visit

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Today and yesterday the United Kingdom hosted Sheikh & Sheikha Tamin & Jawaher bin Hamad Al Thani, Emir & Consort of the State of Qatar.

The visit included a speech by the Emir to the British Parliament and a state banquet at Buckingham Palace – likely the last for some years as the building is soon to be closed for a major renovation project. He also gave a speech at Mansion House and received a tour of Westminster Abbey.

As is typical, the visit involved an exchange of honours. The King appointed the Emir as an Honorary Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath. This is consistent with his father who was given the same honour in 2010, but it feels like a category error as normally royal heads of state are made Stranger Knights of the Order of the Garter while the Bath is given to elected presidents – the most recent being last year with Yoon Suk Yeol of South Korea, who coincidentally is also back in the news today. The Emir in his red sash stuck out a little next to all the British royals wearing blue ones.

Charles had already been awarded the Collar of the Qatari Order of Merit in 1986. Yesterday he was presented with the Sword of the Founder Sheikh Jassim bin Mohammed bin Thani.

The recent state visit also saw growth in the Royal Family Order of Charles III: The Queen having appeared as the founder member at the Japanese state visit earlier this year, the order is now also seen sported by the Princess Royal, as well as the Duchesses of Edinburgh and Gloucester.

I notice a discrepancy in the spelling of the visitor’s title – the royal and parliamentary sources say “Amir” but the newspapers and Wikipedia say “Emir”. Getty is inconsistent, even sometimes within the same photograph caption.

First Look at Royal Variety

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It won’t actually be broadcast for a few weeks, but 2024’s iteration of the Royal Variety Performance was recorded last night at the Royal Albert Hall. His Majesty was in attendance for the first time in his reign, having last attended (virtually) in the somewhat abnormal edition arranged for 2020. The Queen was supposed to attend with him (having also done so in 2013 and 2016) but dropped out at the last minute due to the relapse of a recent chest infection (which also stopped her attending the annual Festival of Remembrance at the same venue).

No photographs or film of the performances themselves have yet been seen, but publicity shots of the cast and attendees are available through commercial photographers, and they show the logo of the Royal Variety Performance printed on the wallpaper of the backdrop. It very obviously uses Sodacan’s illustration of Elizabeth II’s royal arms with St Edward’s Crown instead of the Tudor one. The charity’s website is much the same – the background has a monochrome outline of the full heraldic achievement similar to that on royal.uk and a smaller representation of the same appears in the footer. When you hover the cursor over it, the outline changes to a full-colour copy of Sodacan’s graphic. I wonder how long that will take to update?

Ironically the royal box inside the hall features a textile version of the royal arms with the Tudor crown, which was evidently erected there before Elizabeth II’s accession and left there throughout her reign without update until it eventually came back into style. All fashions are cyclical, one supposes, even if this particular rotation took a very, very, long time to complete.

Bluemantle? No, Blumenthal!

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Just over a month ago there was an exciting announcement in the world of heraldry – The Heraldry Society was launching its own blog. This is important because most of the output of the society – and of heraldic societies more generally – tends to be in the form of lectures and academic papers. If these are available online at all (and not behind a paywall) they tend to become so on a very slow timescale. While there are also plenty of heraldry blogs and some of them are updated regularly, these tend to be the work of enthusiastic amateurs looking in from outside rather than vice versa. This looks as if it will move at a somewhat faster pace while also giving authoritative insights.

So far there have been three articles published on the blog and it does not yet appear that a theme has been settled on. The first is an interview with Professor Gillian Black, the Carrick Pursuivant of Arms. The second is by Jean-Eudes Pierra talking about the history of bees in heraldry and the third is by celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal recounting the process by which his coat of arms was granted. Happily this one also includes photographs of his letters patent in quality high enough to be legible. Blumenthal’s shield was one of my earliest illustrations for Wikimedia Commons, being published in the summer of 2018.