The Windsors and Anthony van Dyck, 1637 and 1961

Creative freelancers will feel van Dyck’s pain…

“The year 1637 was also that in which van Dyck painted all five of the surviving royal children at the behest of their father–the celebrated picture which focuses on the solid head of an enormous mastiff. After haggling over the payment and reducing it from £200 to £100, the King hung the portrait above the breakfast table in his Breakfast Chamber at Whitehall.”
King Charles II, Antonia Fraser, 1979.

“Jacqueline Kennedy later told Gore Vidal about the Queen’s dinner party, where she sat between Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten… ‘The Queen was only human once,’ she recalled. ‘I was telling her about our state visit to Canada and the rigors of being on view at all hours. I told her I greeted Jack every day with a tear-stained face. The Queen looked rather conspiratorial and said ‘One gets crafty after a while and learns how to save oneself.’ Then she said, ‘You like pictures.’ And she marched me down a long gallery, stopping at a van Dyck to say, ‘That’s a good horse.'”
The Royals, Kitty Kelley, 1997.

The Change.org Petitions to Sack Holly and Phil

Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield host ITV’s This Morning. They jumped the 5 mile, 25 hour long queue to see Queen Elizabeth lying in state in Westminster Hall (they say they were working), an offense made particularly egregious in light of the fact that David Beckham, Tilda Swinton, and Good Morning Britain‘s Susanna Reid queued. On September 17, a woman named Laura Harrison posted a petition on Change.org entitled “Axe Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby from ITV.” It inspired the sister petitions “Get Phil and Holly off the television” and “Sack Holly and Phil and the people that let them queue jump the queue to see the queen.” Like the proud veterans of a Reddit hate sub, every day since the original petition was posted the tabloids have reported the number of new signatures. As of September 21 there have been 50,000:

“Thousands of people are lining up overnight to pay respects to the Queen, where they will likely wait up to 24 hours.

Yet Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield, two hosts of one of the most damaging to mental health day time tv show This Morning, were able to push past those thousands and get immediate access. 

ITV should be ashamed of exploiting the situation. I’d like to see This Morning axed for good as I do believe it causes more harm than good, without people noticing. For example, like turning cost of living anxiety into a game show.* At the least though, these toxic presenters Holly and Philip should finally be removed from our TV screens. They monopolised way too long. 

If you agree please sign. If enough people sign we can show ITV that the public do matter. And these two idiots don’t deserve our time. 

Thank you, 

Laura.

PS. It doesn’t matter about your feelings on the monarchy, its about the TV show being toxic and these presenters being given privileges that deprive others, and humiliate their own viewers in the process. In the same way Jeremy Kyle’s show did.”

Charge.org petition posted September 18, 2022.

*This is true.

UK Television Schedule 08/09/2022

WOW! Signal, August 15, 1977

Narrowband radio signal detected by Ohio State University’s Big Ear radio telescope on August 15, 1977. It appeared to come from the direction of Sagittarius, and after 45 years remains the best candidate for extraterrestrial radio transmission. 
The astronomer Jerry R. Ehman reviewed the recorded data and circled the signal’s intensity on the computer printout a few days later and wrote ‘Wow!” beside it. 

 

Impressions of the Soviet Union, 1986

In 1986, the journalist and author Dylan Jones visited the Soviet Union, a trip he recounted to then-Tory leader David Cameron in his book of interviews, Cameron on Cameron: 

“Getting into the country was like a sixties movie, and the border police at the airport were hilariously scary. We’d taken all this acutely Western stuff to trade–CDs, Levi’s dozens of copies of The Face and i-D, stuff like that. I remember being irritated that these college kids from Fresno in California were being asked to trade outside the subway, and myself and my girlfriend–who were obviously dressed as trendy London urbanites– were being ignored. Of course, we were eventually asked to trade and even that became something out of a Cold War thriller, walking into this completely silent block of flats and being told to keep our voices down. When we got into this guy’s flat, his two children were sitting on their sofa reading books, and they just looked round at us, nodded hello, and then carried on reading. I remember being in the Gum department store in Moscow and joined the queue, and after about forty minutes I realized that this was a queue to look at something, not to buy something. Everything happened on the black market, which is why everyone was so paranoid. One of my most vivid memories is of no one talking on the underground, not one word out of place. We were followed from dawn till dusk, and people leaped behind buildings when you turned around to look at them following you. When we travelled from Moscow to Leningrad by train we were told we could only go at night, basically so that we didn’t see anything. Of course, when we got to Leningrad and went to this guy’s room in the Moscow Hotel to trade, it was like an Aladdin’s cave of consumer durables– CD players, ghetto blasters,, Levi’s– the right Levi’s–the lot…”

Cameron on Cameron: Conversations with Dylan Jones, Fourth Estate, 2008.
Image: A USSR stamp, Soviet-American Intermediate and Short-range Nuclear Weapons Treaty. Date of issue: 17th December 1987. Designer: Yury Artsimenev Michel catalogue number: 5779, scanned and processed by Wiki user Mariluna.