It was comedy like Till Death Us Do Part that brought rude to peak-time television. ibid.
Bernard Manning was a king of northern comedy. Manning made his part of seventies Britain laugh. ibid.
The Comedians made national stars of regional comics. ibid.
Rudeness that was crude and offensive. ibid.
Anger made Bell’s pen drip with vitriol. ibid.
Television also satirised Margaret Thatcher in a comedy show that first appeared on ITV in 1984: Spitting Image. ibid.
Spitting Image didn’t just attack politicians; the programme also went for the British establishment ... Now the Windsors were part of Rude Britannia. ibid.
A generation intent on creating a new kind of comedy ... The Young Ones were getting laughs out of new sensitivities. ibid.
What political correctness demanded was that comedians like Bernard Manning should have no place in television’s mass democracy of rude. ibid.
Banned from television, Manning became the new alternative comedy that went underground. ibid.
Viz [comic] from Newcastle. ibid.
Rude traditions of northern clubland also lived on. Here the reigning king is now Roy Chubby Brown. ibid.
One series proves that television’s mass democracy of rude can still exist today: Little Britain. (England & Great Britain & Comedy & Rudeness & Humour & Television) ibid.
What rudeness there is has a cordon sanitaire placed around it. ibid.
There has always been a war between rude and crude. ibid.
The flower of a generation. The glory of England. Chariots of Fire 1981 starring Ben Cross & Ian Charleson & Nicholas Farrell & Nigel Havers & David Burghley & John Gielgud & Lindsay Anderson & Cheryl Campbell & Alice Krige & Nigel Davenport & Patrick Magee et al, director Hugh Hudson, freshmen’s dinner
In the late War we were invited to fight to preserve England. We believed, we fought. It may well be to preserve England, but better to have an England worth preserving. We saved our country that we might ourselves destroy it. Clough Williams-Ellis, England and the Octopus 1928
But then in a cold dark January Winston Churchill died. And all of a sudden London stopped swinging. Simon Schama, A History of Britain s3e4: The Two Winstons, BBC 2002
Orwell and Churchill did have this in common: they not only wrote the history of their times, they lived it. Look at Churchill, look at Orwell, and you’ll understand what happened to Britain in the twentieth century. You’ll see how our past shaped our future. ibid.
He [Churchill] was after all born in a palace at Blenheim. ibid.
Winston’s father Randolph, boy wonder of the Tories, Chancellor of the Exchequer at just 37 ... Finally, the Tories let him go and he never got back to power. ibid.
But Winston hardly knew his parents ... He was packed off to boarding school at the earlier possible opportunity. Churchill wrote he had only had a handful of conversations with his father in his entire life. ibid.
Winston began to gorge on history ... Almost all his life he believed in the greatness and the goodness of the British Empire. ibid.
When he defected to the Liberals in 1904 he joined a party joyously hammering the nails into the coffin of Victorian England. ibid.
All sorts of social reforms poured from his fertile mind – labour exchanges, unemployment insurance, cleaning up sweatshops. ibid.
His [Churchill’s] grandstanding egotism. As Home Secretary he was a bit too ... trigger-happy employing troops against strikers. He regarded the suffragettes like prisoners of war. ibid.
Gallipoli 1915 – 52,000 allied troops perish in Turkey. A bloody fiasco and an expedition championed by Winston Churchill. ibid.
Churchill did his penance on the trenches of Flanders. ibid.
He was now back in the fold as Chancellor of the Exchequer, busy crushing the General Strike. ibid.
Winston was still mistrusted by the vast majority of his Party. But the swing in public opinion towards him was so great it seemed prudent to include him in the government. ibid.
All the qualities that generally made him so impossible – his pig-headed obstinacy, his low boiling point, his romantic belief in British history, were now in the black days of May exactly what the country needed. ibid.
In the general election Churchill received the thanks of the nation by being handed a tremendous drubbing. ibid.
The Stiff Upper Lip still plays some part in our national story. Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain III: Last Hurrah? BBC 2012
On 4th May 1926 more than two million ... downed tools ... in solidarity with Britain’s one million miners. ibid.
As Edward VIII he reigned for just 326 days before abdicating in disgrace. Best known for his affair and subsequent marriage to Wallis Simpson. Edward VIII: The Traitor King, Channel 4 1995
Evidence has now emerged that he passed national secrets to foreign governments. And of his complicity with Adolf Hitler. And of his financial dealings. ibid.
Edward had an abiding love for all things German. ibid.
And frequently dodged his duties to have affairs usually with married women. ibid.
He soon gathered a new breed of courtier around him. ibid.
Increasingly, Edward was seen as a security risk. ibid.
Not one word of his affair had been reported to the British press. ibid.
In October 1936 the Simpson divorce came through. ibid.
She was to be the public excuse. ibid.
The truth is that Edward’s unacceptable political beliefs and wilful actions were the key reasons for his removal. ibid.
The Duke and Duchess finally set off to meet their host Adolf Hitler at his mountain retreat. ibid.
His treachery is proved by a detailed inspection of the German foreign policy documents of the Second World War. ibid.
They were warmly welcomed by Franco and his government. ibid.
Edward was still convinced that appeasing Hitler was the answer, and the War was a mistake. ibid.
Edward died in 1972 with most of his secrets intact. ibid.
There is another story: 70 years ago King Edward VIII was pushed off the throne. It was a coup engineered by a powerful conspiracy of court, church and government. Abdication: A Very British Coup, BBC 2006
Many members in the government fear Edward’s mass appeal and apparent disregard for the established order. ibid.
Edward was as popular as ever with his subjects. ibid.
The future Queen Mother detested everything about Wallis Simpson. ibid.
The King had played straight into Baldwin’s hands. ibid.
Four days later Baldwin drove to Fort Belvedere and told the King that the Empire was unanimous in its opposition to the Morganatic marriage. But he was not telling the full truth. ibid.
Not a word of the crisis had yet appeared in the British press. ibid.
‘The storm is best; the fat is now properly in the fire.’ ibid. Henry Chips Channon
Parliament and country were divided over the crisis … a groundswell of popular support. ibid.
Baldwin was delighted and relieved. ibid.
He had been King for 326 days. ibid.
In May 1940, just eight months into war, MI5 and Special Branch swooped on locations in central London: their targets were members of the Right Club – an extreme pro-Nazi society led by aristocrats and Tory MP Archibald Ramsay. The Right Club wanted to bring down the British government and forge an alliance with Hitler. Churchill and the Fascist Plot, Channel 4 2013
A murky world of fascist toffs, disaffected foreign aristocrats and spies. ibid.
The Right Club would pose as big a threat to his [Churchill’s] position as Adolf Hitler. ibid.
By January 1938 Ramsay had become a fanatical anti-Semite. He was not alone. ibid.
Archibald Ramsay was released in 1944. He never changed his anti-Semitic views. He died in 1955. Anna Wolkoff was released in 1947. She died in a car crash in 1983 while visiting a former Right Club member in Spain. ibid. caption
In 1937 the Queen’s father, George VI, was crowned in Westminster Abbey. George did not expect to become king. His older brother Edward inherited the crown. But within a year at the centre of a scandal that rocked the nation Edward had abdicated. Edward VIII: The Plot to Topple a King, Channel 4 2012