I think it was probably easier for them, and I think most people would argue that there are downsides to having titles. So I think that was probably the right thing to do.
--Princess Anne, King Charles III's sister, on her title-less children Peter and Zara.
We try to bring them up with the understanding that they are very likely to have to work for a living. Hence we made the decision not to use HRH titles. They have them and can decide to use them from 18, but it’s highly unlikely.
--Sophie, Countess of Wessex, wife of King Charles III's brother Prince Edward, on her titled but HRH-less children Lady Louise and James Viscount Severn
If you're worried all this royal abstemiousness is getting out of hand, rest assured that Peter, Zara, Louise, and James remain in the line of succession. As do these folks...
Buckingham Palace said the withdrawal of the Duke of York’s honorary military roles and royal patronages by the Queenhas no “impact or bearing” on the status of his daughters. The Duke will no longer style himself HRH, but this has no effect on the princesses' HRH titles.
--inews.co.uk, on King Charles III's OTHER brother, Prince Andrew, and his daughters Beatrice (right) and Eugenie (left).
...the grandchildren of the sons of any such sovereign in the direct male line (save only the eldest living son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales) shall have and enjoy in all occasions the style and title enjoyed by dukes of these our realms.
--King George V, 1917 letters patent
So this was a big contention during the Oprah interview, because Meghan told Oprah Archie was entitled to be a prince and that the family had denied him. That was not right. That was incorrect...Archie was not yet the grandchild of the sovereign. He was the great-grandchild of the sovereign. So titles are made up there. The sovereign is the CEO with this made-up guidance memo, and they can interpret it however they want. And, at that time, that had been interpreted that Archie was not the grandchild of the sovereign...Harry's always had one and Meghan got hers when they got married because they were working royals...Their first full-time job was working royals. Using the HRH titles just enables additional privileges, like state-funded security. So that's why we no longer call Prince Harry, His Royal Highness, Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, or Her Royal Highness, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex. They're not going to take them away, but they don't use them...So Archie and Lili won't get them right now because they're not working royals, and their parents don't use them. That doesn't mean they won't ever get them. It just means, at this moment, they don't have HRH. It doesn't make any difference to their lives at all in California.
--Shannon Felton Spence, royalty expert, on Archie and Lilibet, Harry and Meghan's children, and King Charles III's grandchildren.
Today, I am proud to create [William the] Prince of Wales, Tvwysog Cymru, the country whose title I have been so greatly privileged to bear during so much of my life and duty. With Catherine beside him, our new Prince and Princess of Wales will, I know, continue to inspire and lead our national conversations, helping to bring the marginal to the center ground where vital help can be given.
--King Charles III, on his first-born son William and daughter-in-law Kate.
In school, the siblings will be known as George Wales, Charlotte Wales and Louis Wales.
--ABC News, on the three children of the Prince and Princess of Wales, who also happen to be King Charles III's grandchildren, but I bet you already knew that.
The phrase "end of an era" can get bandied around a bit too much, but in this case it seems appropriate. After all, an American born the year Elizabeth II ascended to the throne would be eligible, in fact been eligible, for Social Security by the time her royal tenure had ended. There will be a funeral, and Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, William, Harry, Peter, Zara, Beatrice, Eugenie, Louise, James, Camilla, Timothy, Sophie, Kate, Meghan, and whoever else--is the Fergie who's not a pop singer in town? --will all have to put aside their differences and show their respects, as families do at funerals. Though he's technically king right now, Charles III will get his own coronation ceremony at some point in the future, and that should be fun to watch, what with all the pomp and pageantry and catwalks. Just don't get too lost in the fairy-tale spectacle. While it's true Britain is one of the world's oldest monarchies, paradoxically, it's also one of the world's oldest...
...democracies.
And at the end of the day...
...it will be this person, and this person's successors, that matter.
Well, here in the United States, Cook was mostly under the radar, but I hear tell in the British Isles he was pretty much a household name. His comedic career at times was intertwined with a man who did become a household name here in the United States:
All you Yanks out there, recognize the chap on the right? Foul Play? 10? Micky & Maude? ARTHUR?! That's right, it's Dudley Moore. If you'll recall, the Hollywood star originally hailed from England, and even had the accent to prove it. Cook and Moore had been members of a four-man satirical comedy stage revue titled Beyond the Fringe that premiered in 1960 and had successful runs in both the West End and on Broadway. The other two members were Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller. The four Englishmen acted in the skits that they themselves wrote. The revue's success led to an overall boom in British comedy, culminating in Monty Python's Flying Circus by decade's end. As for Cook and Moore, once the revue ran its course, they decided to continue on as a team. They had their own TV show on the BBC, put out a few comedy albums, appeared in more stage shows, and made a few movies, once of which I'll show a clip from in a bit. All of this did get them some attention on this side of the Atlantic. At least they got the attention of Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels, who had them cohost one night during that show's first season. And when American talk show host Dick Cavett did a series of shows from London, he had the two comics on as guests:
This clip is almost 50 years old. Even though William and Kate and Harry and Meghan have yet to arrive, the Queen that Cavett, Cook, and Moore refer to is the one that still sits on the throne today!
Now I'm going to go back almost 60 years, and show you a very famous (in England) sketch of Cook's and Moore's written by Cook. It made its premier in the aforementioned Beyond the Fringe revue, and the two men revived it from time to time afterwards, even doing it on Saturday Night Live. I found the SNL clip on YouTube, but this isn't it. Here's hoping you don't mind the black-and-white imagery, because I want to show you the sketch as close to its stage debut as I can get it:
Cook and Moore may never have done a Tarzan movie, but in 1967 they came out with this Faustian farce:
12How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! how art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! 13For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: 14I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. 15Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit
--Isaiah 14:12-15
Confused? Not sure what Isaiah is talking about? Cook (as the Devil) and Moore reenacts the above passage in this scene from Bedazzled:
(Now, I'm sure some of you biblical scholar nitpickers out there are going to try and tell me that King James and his ghostwriters got it wrong, that it's a famous mistranslation from the Hebrew original, that Lucifer wasn't the Devil after all, but just some king in antiquity who was full of himself. Well, if you think I'm going to remove the above funny scene from this post for that reason--and, were he here, I'm sure John Milton would back me up on this--YOU deserve to be cut down to the ground!)
OK, so far we've seen Cook with Moore, but how funny was he without him?
In 1981, Cook was lured to the U.S.--Dudley Moore's newfound success here had to have been on his mind--to appear in a situation comedy titled The Two of Us. Based on an earlier Britcom called Two'sCompany, the talented Mimi Kennedy plays Nan Gallagher, a local TV talk show host and single mother who needs someone to manage the household while she's at the studio. Despite some misgivings about working for Americans, haughty Englishman Robert Brentwood accepts the job (he probably figured, if it's good enough for Clifton Webb...) I remember finding the show very funny, and this 40-year-old clip (with subtitles, for anyone who happens to speak whatever language it is) doesn't disappoint. Along with Cook and Kennedy there's Dana Hill as Nan's 12-year-old daughter Gabby (in real life, Hill was 17, her growth unfortunately stunted by diabetes.) Watch:
As funny as the show was, and as funny as Cook was in it, The Two of Us only lasted two seasons. Cook hung around Hollywood for a while, doing small parts in movies (most notably, he was the clergyman in The Princess Bride), and then went back to England. Even on his home soil, Cook was unable to recapture his former success, and when he died in 1995 at age 57, the British press was hard on him for being unable to do so. That was then. It's now 26 years later. In the long run, careers aren't judged by how they end but by how well they did in, well, the long run. Peter Cook is increasingly seen as one of the greatest comic minds Britain has ever produced, and that island has produced a lot of great comic minds. Americans should take notice.
It's July of 1965, and we find a typical English gentleman enjoying a cup of tea. Except this particular native of the UK is Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, and he and his bandmates have just been charged with "insulting behavior"--they were caught urinating on the side of a building. OK, maybe that's not so typically gentlemanly, in England or anywhere else. But, as you can see, Richards has made himself nice and presentable for his day in court, though he probably could do with a haircut.
I know at times this blog can be pretty America-centric, or, if you want to be technical about it, United States-centric ("America" is more like the nation's nickname.) What can I say? My Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, and Irish ancestors chose to settle here rather than in, say, Greenland. I mean, this country is my birthplace, my homeland, my reference point, the reason I speak English--
Wait a second. English? But I'm not English, I'm American. Except there's no American or United States language to speak of, so English it is. And if I'm going to do a post about a foreign country, why not use my own vocabulary as a starting point and make it about England? Or Britain. Or Great Britain. Or Britannia. Or the British Isles. Or the United Kingdom. (See how good my English vocabulary is? I know all the names!)
More specifically, this post is about British history. Even more specifically, this post is about British history as it's been portrayed in motion pictures. I've always found movies (as well as PBSminiseries) that take place during some part of Britain's long history interesting. Of course, there's been dozens, even hundreds, made both in Hollywood and Britain itself (as well as made in Britain and financed in Hollywood--and vice-versa), but due to time constraints--mine and yours--I'm going to focus on just three very good ones that taken together cover almost a millennia. And I'll throw in a little historical research of my own to set up each clip.
The serious-looking dude pictured above is Sir Thomas More, Lord High Chancellor of England (among other duties, he was in charge of the country's judiciary) during the reign of King Henry VIII. Well, he didn't hold that position during the entire reign, as he was forced to resign. Here's what happened. Henry's wife Catherine of Aragon couldn't give him a male heir, thus raising the prospect of a war of succession once the monarch died. So Henry, who was Roman Catholic, as was most everyone else in England at the time, asked the Pope to grant him a divorce. The Pope refused, so Henry went and started his very own religion, the Church of England (Episcopalians belong to the American branch.) More was against all this, and refused to sign an Oath of Supremacy stating that a king doesn't have to defer to a Pope in matters of faith, especially holy matrimony. More's refusal to say one thing and think another was turned into a play titled A Man for All Seasons in 1960 by British writer Robert Bolt that had successful runs in both the West End and on Broadway. It was turned into a 1966 movie directed by Fred Zinneman (From Here to Eternity, High Noon), with a screenplay by the playwright. Bolt doesn't necessarily declare More the greatest or most noble person who ever lived, and presents whatever criticisms that he has through the views of More's exasperated family and friends as he steadily descends into a self-contradictory martyrdom (More agrees that the then-Pope was little more than a unprincipled shill for the Holy Roman Emperor, but supports him anyway, thinking the Bible leaves him no other choice.) However, Bolt does appreciate and sympathize with More's basic dilemma: how to be true to oneself without bringing ruin down on oneself, and that's really what A Man for All Seasons is all about. More isn't trying to overthrow the King or prevent the King from doing what he has his mind set on doing. More just doesn't want to pretend to agree with it. That's not too much to ask, is it? (Yes, as it turns out.) Bolt also puts into More's mouth several stirring speeches about the Rule of Law that play well in these increasingly corrupt times. Such as in the following scene. More (Paul Scofield in an Oscar-winning performance) has just let a man who may (and in fact does) represent a threat leave his house, much to the astonishment of his wife (Wendy Hiller), daughter (Susannah York), and daughter's suitor (Corin Redgrave) :
While More was defending the rule of law, new laws were being passed making it a crime to disagree with the King (played in the film by Robert Shaw.) More's disagreements were never stated outright, but just assumed by his unwillingness to sign or take various oaths. He refused to attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn (played by Corin's sister Vanessa) as Queen, and refused to sign the Oath of Succession, acknowledging any children Boleyn should have (a daughter, eventually) as a rightful heir to the throne. The latter was the last thing More refused, not due to any change of heart but because he was arrested and thrown into the Tower of London. He was found guilty of treason, and beheaded in 1535. It wasn't much consolation to his friends or family who by then were long gone, but in 1935, the Vatican, still smarting from the loss of one of Europe's most prominent nation-states, made More a saint, and in 2000 Pope John Paul II declared him the patron saint of statesmen and politicians. Pray to him the next time Trump tweets.
Now, for our next British history film, let us go back in time about 400 years to the 12th century and...
...Eleanor of Aquitaine. Aquitaine is actually a region of France, where Eleanor was from originally. In fact, she was queen consort of France for a while, and actually participated in the Second Crusade. But her marriage to King Louis VII was doomed for a variety of reasons, including an inability to give him a male heir (that again), her unpopularity with some of the barons of France, and the fact that she didn't seem to like Louis all that much. So they divorced, Louis got the kids, and Eleanor got land, a lot of land, that, as the Duchess of Aquitaine, had been hers originally. In fact, these lands made her quite a catch. More than that, it made her a potential kidnapping victim, as that was a not uncommon form of marriage proposal back in the 12th century (and you think male privilege is bad now.) This is where British history comes in. To protect herself, Eleanor married Henry II, soon-to-be King of England. Now, Henry had one of British history's more interesting reigns. I almost chose another film about him concerning Thomas à Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, of whose murder Henry may been complicit. It seems Henry and Becket disagreed on the limits of papal authority (wasn't I just talking about that?) But the film I chose instead deals with Henry and Eleanor's children, two of whom went on to become king, the Crusades-happy Richard the Lionhearted, and John II, who, under duress, issued the Magna Carta, which started England (and eventually its offshoot, the United States) on the long and winding road to democracy. However, 1968's The Lion in Winter, based on James Goldman's Broadway play (though, unlike A Man for All Seasons, this one closed early), takes place before all that. If Henry VIII's problems arose because of the lack of a male heir, Henry II (played in the film by Peter O'Toole) had far too many, and that proved a problem. One son, also named Henry, led a revolt against him! For some odd reason, he was made king while his father was still alive, and still king himself, but in name only. Henry the Younger wanted more than just a title, and that's where the trouble started. Eleanor supported her son's revolt, which turned out to be the wrong side of the revolt, and spent the next 16 years in prison. She did sometimes get a holiday furlough, and that's starts this movie off. The film opens with Katherine Hepburn, as Eleanor, returning to Henry's French getaway (originally the estranged wife's getaway.) The son that had revolted was now dead from dysentery, a common battlefield ailment throughout most of recorded history (even as recent as World War II), and that left Richard and John in competition for the kingdom, even though the guy who it belonged to was still alive! Eleanor supports Richard, Henry supports John, and that forms the basis of the plot. I should say plots, counter-plots, and general skullduggery, not all of it historical in nature, but given the dog-eat-dog nature of medieval politics, is hardly out of place. Also, in this version of history, Richard is gay. Actually, that's the subject of much debate among non-Hollywood historians (LGBTQ scholars likely finding it more believable than those who may feel history and homosexuality are mutually exclusive terms.) What's missing from A Lion in Winter, missing from the movie (though not the stage) version of A Man for All Seasons, missing from most movies about royalty, missing from most movies about any kind of leader, even a democratically elected one, are the people the rulers, and would-be rulers, want to rule over. At best, they're afterthoughts. But that's not so surprising. As anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and, yes, historians, have long known, rank is everything, even if one doesn't much care for the responsibilities that come with rank. In the following scene, it's the loss of rank that's got Eleanor bummed:
She might as well be singing, nobody knows the troubles I've seen...
The movie ends with Eleanore on her way back to the pokey. But it's not the end of her life. After Henry II died, Richard the Lionhearted, who won the succession battle, sprung her from prison, and she actually ruled England while her son was off fighting a Crusade. When Richard was kidnapped by the Holy Roman Emperor on his way back (as chronicled in Ivanhoe and numerous Robin Hood movies), she helped raise the ransom and negotiate his release. She survived Richard, and lived well into the reign of her other monarch-son, John. When she was almost 80, she became a prisoner of a war between England and France (royals in one country owning so much property in another is bound to cause tensions.) This time it was John's turn to spring her from prison, which he did with help from his army. Eleanore eventually retired to, of all places, a convent in France, Fontevraud Abbey. She took the vows and died a nun. After her death, she was entombed next to her estranged husband on the Fontevraud grounds. No longer an abbey today but instead a tourist attraction, you'll find next to the tomb her effigy (not the bad kind but a statue lying on its back.) Eleanore is shown reading the Bible, though the drama of her own life matches anything she's likely to find in that book. As for Katherine Hepburn, she picked up her third Oscar (and she wasn't done yet!)
Now I'm going to jump ahead about 800 years to...
...George VI, on the throne from 1937 to 1952, from the British Empire to the British Commonwealth. George never expected to become king. That position was reserved for his older brother Edward, who did indeed sit on the throne for about a year before he decided he'd like to marry an American divorcee and was forced to abdicate (Edward probably could have gotten away with it today as the royal family and its supporters look more kindly upon American divorcees than it once did.) So George got the job. But what exactly was this job? The Magna Carta had finally come to full fruition, and George was what they call a "constitutional monarch", the head of state but not the head of government. Under this system, a monarch has very limited powers. Among them, the power to select the Prime Minister, the power to strike down a law passed by Parliament, the power to dissolve Parliament, and, what we'll get to in a moment, the power to declare war. Actually, that sounds like a LOT of power to have! But in reality a king or queen would be reluctant to do any of those things without Parliament's OK for fear of provoking renewed calls for the abolishment of the monarchy, rioting, maybe even a civil war (go watch the 1970 movie Cromwell to see how the last one turned out for the crown head.) Let's face it, if since the late 19th century the main argument in favor of royalty is that it ensures stability, it behooves a royal not to do anything destabilizing. So George's job was mainly ceremonial, inspecting the troops, laying down wreaths, working the scissors at ribbon-cutting ceremonies, that kind of thing. Then one day, for the second time in a quarter of a century, Britain found itself in a war with Germany. Somebody had to go on the radio and rally the English people. Of course, Winston Churchill would be doing quite a bit of that in the next few years, but he was not yet Prime Minister. The man who was, Neville Chamberlain, did go on the radio, but doubts were beginning to be raised about him (doubts that would soon hit the stratosphere.) So the duty fell upon George. And besides, Britain technically wasn't at war until the King said it was at war. But there was a problem: George's stutter. Stuttering (also called stammering) is today believed to be a neurological condition, one that's very difficult to control, especially if the stutterer is an adult. But back in the 1930s, many people still saw it as a character flaw. More to the point, stuttering made a person seem nervous, frightened even. George understandably did not want to go on the radio sounding like this: "I ask th-them to s-stand c-c-c-c-calm, f-f-firm, and uni-ni-nit-ted in this t-time of t-t-t-t-t-trial..." If that had gone out over the airwaves, the entire population might have fled to the Arctic Circle! So George (played in this clip from The King's Speech by Colin Firth, who won an Oscar--British history certainly comes in handy at awards time) and his speech therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush) went to work:
Though a highly acclaimed film, The King's Speech has had some criticisms directed toward it. Like any historical movie, it contains historical inaccuracies. For instance, the prominence of Winston Churchill. At that particular point in time, Churchill was still seen as a has-been politician, and wouldn't have been at the King's side on the royal balcony (though later on he was more than welcome there.) And then there's the film's very premise. George's stammer is made to seem central to world events of the day, when in fact it really was no more than an interesting sidelight (a sidelight that many didn't even know about.) Still, the King did go on the radio, and people were rallied. And he rallied the country in other, equally impressive ways as well. Instead of watching the war play out on a Canadian newsreel, George, his wife, and two daughters remained in London, and barely escaped being killed when a couple of bombs fell on Buckingham Palace (he and his family were eventually persuaded to spend at least their nights at Windsor Castle, outside of London, though this was kept a state secret.) George subjected himself to food rationing, even bathwater rationing, and went without central heating for extended periods of time, in a successful effort to show the English people that they were all in this thing together. Overcoming his shyness (practically a symptom of stuttering), he made morale-boosting visits to the troops in war zones, and took regular tours of London's heavily bombed East End. As with Churchill (the original comeback kid) during those dark days, George became a symbol of the national will, the epitome of the famed British stiff upper lip. Royalty really is the luck of the draw. Had Wallis Simpson not flirted her way into Edward VIII's heart, a man who many believed to be a Nazi sympathizer would have sat on the throne of England (maybe Wallis should have been knighted for her service toward the nation.) George VI, an egalitarian at heart, got everything back on track again. British history could have easily ended in 1940 or so, but didn't. In fact, British history persists to this very day. Speaking of which...
Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, died about two weeks ago. Her politics weren't my politics, nor her country my country, so I just planned on ignoring the whole thing. But then I read something online that referred to her as a "pop culture figure." No, she wasn't! She was a political figure. Just because someone's on TV a lot doesn't qualify them as pop culture. The woman lived at 10 Downing Street, not Graceland!
Still, I wondered, is there some pop culture angle here I'm missing? Meryl Streep played Thatcher a couple of years ago in a movie, but that was long after she left office. How about when she was still serving the British public or whomever? I seemed to remember a Maggie Thatcher imitator popping up on TV and movies in the 1980s. Or it was it imitators, plural? I did some research and found out it was indeed the same woman, a Scottish actress by the name of Janet Brown.
Born in 1923, Janet Brown appeared in many stage, movie and TV productions, without much notice until Margaret Thatcher was elected head of the Conservative Party in 1975. Brown had no political ax to grind; she simply felt Thatcher was now a celebrity (pop culture figure?) and worthy of impersonation. As you can see in the above picture, Brown didn't look much like Thatcher. Of course, when she was actually doing her impersonation, she wore her hair like Maggie's, but this couldn't hide the fact that she was a more attractive and seemingly younger woman (in fact, she was two years older.) No, the key to Brown's success was not how she looked but sounded. Thatcher had a highly theatrical, low-pitched, pause-filled speaking style (originally piercing and provincial, she had taken voice lessons from none other than Laurence Olivier.) To compare the two, here's the Prime Minister in 1979 on her first day on the job:
All right, now here's Janet Brown from around the same time. I know the various political references will be a bit obscure to most Americans (actually, this was so long ago, they're probably a bit obscure to most Brits under the age of 40), but for my purposes, I'd like you just focus on the mannerisms. Brown has them down...quite pat:
Man, did you see the name of the web site at the end of that clip? Janet Brown may not have had a political ax to grind, but someone else sure did! Remember, folks, there was no Internet in 1979, so that was added on long after. Stiff upper lips notwithstanding, some Brits really know how to hold a grudge (more about that later.)
Janet Brown eventually put out her own comedy album:
In 1981, Brown-as-Thatcher popped up at the end of the James Bond movie For Your EyesOnly. Whoever originally put the following clip on YouTube posted the punchline without the setup. So I'll provide you the setup myself. Bond has successfully wrapped up another assignment, and he and his latest girlfriend have decided to celebrate by going for a swim. However, at the exact moment they take the plunge, Bond's two-way radio wristwatch (Ian Fleming by way of Chester Gould) goes off, with only a pet parrot around to answer it:
Even if you don't feel like watching the video, look closely at the still picture above. See that box of Kellogg's Bran Flakes right behind the phony Thatcher's bouffant? Would it be highly irregular of me to suggest that the film's art director thought the real Maggie might benefit from adding such to her diet?
Janet Brown's Maggie Thatcher finally made her American TV debut in 1983 (the accompanying video says 1985, but various sources I've cross-referenced say otherwise.) The occasion was a prime-time special titled Johnny Carson's Practical Jokes, a forerunner to the popular TV Bloopers and PracticalJokes, which in turn was a forerunner to Punk'd, a show that plays Candid Camera-like stunts (another forerunner--whew!--a lot of forerunning around, huh?) on celebrities, in this instance Joan Rivers, who'd been making fun of the Royal Family. The faux Maggie Thatcher took Rivers to task:
That slap at the end was all staged. Johnny Carson and Joan Rivers remained close friends for another, oh, six, seven, eight months, until she got her own, ultimately ill-fated talk show opposite his.
After Thatcher was ousted as Prime Minister in 1990 (by her fellow Conservatives; they do things differently there), Janet Brown's star generally faded, though she continued to be a working actress well into her 80s. When she died two years ago, it made the BBC evening news:
As I don't live in Britain I can't say for sure, but I suspect, talented as she may have been, Janet Brown will soon fade into obscurity. But what about the person who inspired her act?
Here's a clue. For a couple days last week the song "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead" sat at number 2 on the British pop charts. Why is something that originally debuted in a 1939 MGM musical suddenly so popular? It's all part of a coordinated effort among left-leaning Brits to infuriate right-leaning Brits on the eve of the Iron Lady's funeral. The infuriation seems to be working. Though no lyrics were changed and it's sung by Judy Garland, who died in 1969 not knowing or caring about Margaret Thatcher, the BBC has refused to play anything more than a seven second snippet of the song until passions cool.
Unlike Janet Brown, Margaret Thatcher won't be forgotten anytime soon. Though her admirers may wish some people would forget about her.
