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Music: Elvis Presley

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I have loved Elvis and his music since the 1980’s, which is when I really got into listening to him a lot.  He will ALWAYS be THE KING OF ROCK AND ROLL.

There is an index at the bottom of the page containing some of my favourite songs by him.  There are so many to choose from!

About Elvis Presley

Elvis Aaron Presley (January 8, 1935 – August 16, 1977) was an American singer and actor. Dubbed the “King of Rock and Roll”, he is regarded as one of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century.  His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style, combined with a singularly potent mix of influences across colour lines during a transformative era in race relations, led him to both great success and initial controversy.

Presley was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, with his family when he was 13 years old.  His music career began there in 1954, recording at Sun Records with producer Sam Phillips, who wanted to bring the sound of African-American music to a wider audience.  Presley, on rhythm acoustic guitar, and accompanied by lead guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, was a pioneer of rockabilly, an uptempo, backbeat-driven fusion of country music and rhythm and blues.  In 1955, drummer D. J. Fontana joined to complete the lineup of Presley’s classic quartet and RCA Victor acquired his contract in a deal arranged by Colonel Tom Parker, who would manage him for more than two decades.  Presley’s first RCA Victor single, “Heartbreak Hotel”, was released in January 1956 and became a number-one hit in the United States.  Within a year, RCA would sell ten million Presley singles.  With a series of successful network television appearances and chart-topping records, Presley became the leading figure of the newly popular sound of rock and roll.

In November 1956, Presley made his film debut in Love Me Tender.  Drafted into military service in 1958, Presley relaunched his recording career two years later with some of his most commercially successful work.  He held few concerts, however, and guided by Parker, proceeded to devote much of the 1960s to making Hollywood films and soundtrack albums, most of them critically derided.  In 1968, following a seven-year break from live performances, he returned to the stage in the acclaimed television comeback special Elvis, which led to an extended Las Vegas concert residency and a string of highly profitable tours.  In 1973, Presley gave the first concert by a solo artist to be broadcast around the world, Aloha from Hawaii.  Years of prescription drug abuse severely compromised his health, and he died suddenly in 1977 at his Graceland estate at the age of 42.

Recognized as the best-selling solo music artist of all time by Guinness World Records, Presley was commercially successful in many genres, including pop, country, R&B, adult contemporary, and gospel.  He won three Grammy Awards, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award at age 36, and has been inducted into multiple music halls of fame.  Presley holds several records, including the most RIAA certified gold and platinum albums, the most albums charted on the Billboard 200, the most number-one albums by a solo artist on the UK Albums Chart, and the most number-one singles by any act on the UK Singles Chart.  In 2018, Presley was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump.

Elvis Presley’s Life And Career

1935 – 1953: Early Years

Childhood In Tupelo

Elvis Aaron Presley was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi, to Vernon Elvis (April 10, 1916 – June 26, 1979) and Gladys Love (née Smith; April 25, 1912 – August 14, 1958) Presley in a two-room shotgun house that his father built for the occasion.  Elvis’s identical twin brother, Jesse Garon Presley, was delivered 35 minutes before him, stillborn.  Presley became close to both parents and formed an especially close bond with his mother.  The family attended an Assembly of God church, where he found his initial musical inspiration.

Presley’s father, Vernon, was of German, Scottish and English origins.  Presley’s mother, Gladys, was of Scots-Irish with some French Norman ancestry.  His mother, Gladys, and the rest of the family, apparently believed that her great-great-grandmother, Morning Dove White, was Cherokee; this was confirmed by Elvis’s granddaughter Riley Keough in 2017.  Elaine Dundy, in her biography, supports the belief.  Gladys was regarded by relatives and friends as the dominant member of the small family.

Vernon moved from one odd job to the next, showing little ambition.  The family often relied on help from neighbours and government food assistance.  In 1938, they lost their home after Vernon was found guilty of altering a check written by his landowner and sometime-employer.  He was jailed for eight months, while Gladys and Elvis moved in with relatives.

In September 1941, Presley entered first grade at East Tupelo Consolidated, where his teachers regarded him as “average”.  He was encouraged to enter a singing contest after impressing his schoolteacher with a rendition of Red Foley’s country song “Old Shep” during morning prayers.  The contest, held at the Mississippi–Alabama Fair and Dairy Show on October 3, 1945, was his first public performance.  The ten-year-old Presley was dressed as a cowboy; he stood on a chair to reach the microphone and sang “Old Shep”.  He recalled placing fifth.  A few months later, Presley received his first guitar for his birthday; he had hoped for something else—by different accounts, either a bicycle or a rifle.  Over the following year, he received basic guitar lessons from two of his uncles and the new pastor at the family’s church.  Presley recalled, “I took the guitar, and I watched people, and I learned to play a little bit. But I would never sing in public. I was very shy about it.”

In September 1946, Presley entered a new school, Milam, for sixth grade; he was regarded as a loner.  The following year, he began bringing his guitar to school on a daily basis.  He played and sang during lunchtime, and was often teased as a “trashy” kid who played hillbilly music.  By then, the family was living in a largely black neighbourhood.  Presley was a devotee of Mississippi Slim’s show on the Tupelo radio station WELO.  He was described as “crazy about music” by Slim’s younger brother, who was one of Presley’s classmates and often took him into the station.  Slim supplemented Presley’s guitar instruction by demonstrating chord techniques.  When his protégé was twelve years old, Slim scheduled him for two on-air performances.  Presley was overcome by stage fright the first time but succeeded in performing the following week.

Read more about 1935 – 1955: Early Years here.

1953 – 1956: First Recordings

Sam Phillips And Sun Records

In August 1953, Presley checked into the offices of Sun Records.  He aimed to pay for a few minutes of studio time to record a two-sided acetate disc: “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin”.  He later claimed that he intended the record as a birthday gift for his mother, or that he was merely interested in what he “sounded like”, although there was a much cheaper, amateur record-making service at a nearby general store.  Biographer Peter Guralnick argued that he chose Sun in the hope of being discovered.  Asked by receptionist Marion Keisker what kind of singer he was, Presley responded, “I sing all kinds.”  When she pressed him on who he sounded like, he repeatedly answered, “I don’t sound like nobody.”  After he recorded, Sun boss Sam Phillips asked Keisker to note down the young man’s name, which she did along with her own commentary: “Good ballad singer. Hold.”

In January 1954, Presley cut a second acetate at Sun Records—”I’ll Never Stand in Your Way” and “It Wouldn’t Be the Same Without You”—but again nothing came of it.  Not long after, he failed an audition for a local vocal quartet, the Songfellows.  He explained to his father, “They told me I couldn’t sing.”  Songfellow Jim Hamill later claimed that he was turned down because he did not demonstrate an ear for harmony at the time.  In April, Presley began working for the Crown Electric company as a truck driver.  His friend Ronnie Smith, after playing a few local gigs with him, suggested he contact Eddie Bond, leader of Smith’s professional band, which had an opening for a vocalist.  Bond rejected him after a tryout, advising Presley to stick to truck driving “because you’re never going to make it as a singer”.

Phillips, meanwhile, was always on the lookout for someone who could bring to a broader audience the sound of the black musicians on whom Sun focused.  As Keisker reported, “Over and over I remember Sam saying, ‘If I could find a white man who had the Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.'”  In June, he acquired a demo recording by Jimmy Sweeney of a ballad, “Without You”, that he thought might suit the teenage singer.  Presley came by the studio but was unable to do it justice.  Despite this, Phillips asked Presley to sing as many numbers as he knew.  He was sufficiently affected by what he heard to invite two local musicians, guitarist Winfield “Scotty” Moore and upright bass player Bill Black, to work something up with Presley for a recording session.

The session held the evening of July 5, proved entirely unfruitful until late in the night. As they were about to abort and go home, Presley took his guitar and launched into a 1946 blues number, Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right“. Moore recalled, “All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, I think, had the door to the control booth open … he stuck his head out and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And we said, ‘We don’t know.’ ‘Well, back up,’ he said, ‘try to find a place to start, and do it again.'” Phillips quickly began taping; this was the sound he had been looking for.  Three days later, popular Memphis DJ Dewey Phillips played “That’s All Right” on his Red, Hot, and Blue show.  Listeners began phoning in, eager to find out who the singer was. The interest was such that Phillips played the record repeatedly during the remaining two hours of his show. Interviewing Presley on-air, Phillips asked him what high school he attended to clarify his colour for the many callers who had assumed that he was black.  During the next few days, the trio recorded a bluegrass song, Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky”, again in a distinctive style and employing a jury-rigged echo effect that Sam Phillips dubbed “slapback”.  A single was pressed with “That’s All Right” on the A-side and “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on the reverse.

Read more about 1953 – 1956: First Recordings here.

1956 – 1958: Commercial Breakout And Controversy

First National TV Appearances And Debut Album

On January 10, 1956, Presley made his first recordings for RCA Victor in Nashville.  Extending Presley’s by-now customary backup of Moore, Black, Fontana, and Hayride pianist Floyd Cramer—who had been performing at live club dates with Presley—RCA Victor enlisted guitarist Chet Atkins and three background singers, including Gordon Stoker of the popular Jordanaires quartet, to fill in the sound.  The session produced the moody, unusual “Heartbreak Hotel”, released as a single on January 27.  Parker finally brought Presley to national television, booking him on CBS’s Stage Show for six appearances over two months.  The program, produced in New York, was hosted on alternate weeks by big band leaders and brothers Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey.  After his first appearance, on January 28, Presley stayed in town to record at the RCA Victor New York studio.  The sessions yielded eight songs, including a cover of Carl Perkins’ rockabilly anthem “Blue Suede Shoes”.  In February, Presley’s “I Forgot to Remember to Forget”, a Sun recording initially released the previous August, reached the top of the Billboard country chart.  Neal’s contract was terminated, and, on March 2, Parker became Presley’s manager.

RCA Victor released Presley’s self-titled debut album on March 23.  Joined by five previously unreleased Sun recordings, its seven recently recorded tracks were of a broad variety.  There were two country songs and a bouncy pop tune.  The others would centrally define the evolving sound of rock and roll: “Blue Suede Shoes”—”an improvement over Perkins’ in almost every way”, according to critic Robert Hilburn—and three R&B numbers that had been part of Presley’s stage repertoire for some time, covers of Little Richard, Ray Charles, and The Drifters.  As described by Hilburn, these “were the most revealing of all.  Unlike many white artists … who watered down the gritty edges of the original R&B versions of songs in the ’50s, Presley reshaped them.  He not only injected the tunes with his own vocal character but also made guitar, not piano, the lead instrument in all three cases.”  It became the first rock and roll album to top the Billboard chart, a position it held for 10 weeks.  While Presley was not an innovative guitarist like Moore or contemporary African-American rockers Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry, cultural historian Gilbert B. Rodman argued that the album’s cover image, “of Elvis having the time of his life on stage with a guitar in his hands played a crucial role in positioning the guitar… as the instrument that best captured the style and spirit of this new music.”

Read more about 1956 – 1958: Commercial Breakout And Controversy here.

1958 – 1960: Military Service And Mother’s Death

On March 24, 1958, Presley was drafted into the U.S. Army as a private at Fort Chaffee, near Fort Smith, Arkansas.  His arrival was a major media event.  Hundreds of people descended on Presley as he stepped from the bus; photographers then accompanied him into the fort.  Presley announced that he was looking forward to his military stint, saying that he did not want to be treated any differently from anyone else: “The Army can do anything it wants with me.”

Presley commenced basic training at Fort Hood, Texas.  During a two-week leave in early June, he recorded five songs in Nashville.  In early August, his mother was diagnosed with hepatitis, and her condition rapidly worsened.  Presley was granted emergency leave to visit her and arrived in Memphis on August 12.  Two days later, she died of heart failure at the age of 46.  Presley was devastated and never the same; their relationship had remained extremely close—even into his adulthood, they would use baby talk with each other and Presley would address her with pet names.

After training, Presley joined the 3rd Armored Division in Friedberg, Germany, on October  While on manoeuvres, Presley was introduced to amphetamines by a sergeant.  He became “practically evangelical about their benefits”, not only for energy but for “strength” and weight loss as well, and many of his friends in the outfit joined him in indulging.  The Army also introduced Presley to karate, which he studied seriously, training with Jürgen Seydel.  It became a lifelong interest, which he later included in his live performances.  Fellow soldiers have attested to Presley’s wish to be seen as an able, ordinary soldier, despite his fame, and to his generosity.  He donated his Army pay to charity, purchased TV sets for the base, and bought an extra set of fatigues for everyone in his outfit.

While in Friedberg, Presley met 14-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu.  They would eventually marry after a seven-and-a-half-year courtship.  In her autobiography, Priscilla said that Presley was concerned that his 24-month spell as a GI would ruin his career.  In Special Services, he would have been able to give musical performances and remain in touch with the public, but Parker had convinced him that to gain popular respect, he should serve his country as a regular soldier.  Media reports echoed Presley’s concerns about his career, but RCA Victor producer Steve Sholes and Freddy Bienstock of Hill and Range had carefully prepared for his two-year hiatus.  Armed with a substantial amount of unreleased material, they kept up a regular stream of successful releases.  Between his induction and discharge, Presley had ten top 40 hits, including “Wear My Ring Around Your Neck”, the bestselling “Hard Headed Woman”, and “One Night” in 1958, and “(Now and Then There’s) A Fool Such as I” and the number-one “A Big Hunk o’ Love” in 1959.  RCA Victor also generated four albums compiling previously issued material during this period, most successfully Elvis‘ Golden Records (1958), which hit number three on the LP chart.

1960 – 1968: Focus On Films

Elvis Is Back

Presley returned to the United States on March 2, 1960, and was honourably discharged three days later with the rank of sergeant.  The train that carried him from New Jersey to Tennessee was mobbed all the way, and Presley was called upon to appear at scheduled stops to please his fans.  On the night of March 20, he entered RCA Victor’s Nashville studio to cut tracks for a new album along with a single, “Stuck on You”, which was rushed into release and swiftly became a number-one hit.  Another Nashville session two weeks later yielded a pair of his bestselling singles, the ballads “It’s Now or Never” and “Are You Lonesome Tonight?”, along with the rest of Elvis Is Back! The album features several songs described by Greil Marcus as full of Chicago blues “menace, driven by Presley’s own super-miked acoustic guitar, brilliant playing by Scotty Moore, and demonic sax work from Boots Randolph. Elvis’ singing wasn’t sexy, it was pornographic.”  As a whole, the record “conjured up the vision of a performer who could be all things”, according to music historian John Robertson: “a flirtatious teenage idol with a heart of gold; a tempestuous, dangerous lover; a gutbucket blues singer; a sophisticated nightclub entertainer; [a] raucous rocker”.  Released only days after the recording was complete, it reached number two on the album chart.

Presley returned to television on May 12 as a guest on The Frank Sinatra Timex Special—ironic for both stars, given Sinatra’s earlier excoriation of rock and roll.  Also known as Welcome Home Elvis, the show had been taped in late March, the only time all year Presley performed in front of an audience.  Parker secured an unheard-of $125,000 fee for eight minutes of singing.  The broadcast drew an enormous viewership.

G.I. Blues, the soundtrack to Presley’s first film since his return, was a number-one album in October.  His first LP of sacred material, His Hand in Mine, followed two months later.  It reached number 13 on the U.S. pop chart and number 3 in the UK, remarkable figures for a gospel album.  In February 1961, Presley performed two shows for a benefit event in Memphis, on behalf of 24 local charities.  During a luncheon preceding the event, RCA Victor presented him with a plaque certifying worldwide sales of over 75 million records.  A 12-hour Nashville session in mid-March yielded nearly all of Presley’s next studio album, Something for Everybody.  As described by John Robertson, it exemplifies the Nashville sound, the restrained, cosmopolitan style that would define country music in the 1960s. Presaging much of what was to come from Presley himself over the next half-decade, the album is largely “a pleasant, unthreatening pastiche of the music that had once been Elvis’ birthright”.  It would be his sixth number-one LP.  Another benefit concert, raising money for a Pearl Harbor memorial, was staged on March 25, in Hawaii.  It was to be Presley’s last public performance for seven years.

Read more about 1960 – 1968: Focus On Films here.

1968 – 1973: Comeback

Elvis: The ’68 Comeback Special

Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, was born on February 1, 1968, during a period when he had grown deeply unhappy with his career.  Of the eight Presley singles released between January 1967 and May 1968, only two charted in the top 40, and none higher than number 28.  His forthcoming soundtrack album, Speedway, would rank at number 82 on the Billboard chart.  Parker had already shifted his plans to television, where Presley had not appeared since the Sinatra Timex show in 1960.  He manoeuvred a deal with NBC that committed the network to both finance a theatrical feature and broadcast a Christmas special.

Recorded in late June in Burbank, California, the special simply called Elvis, aired on December 3, 1968.  Later known as the ’68 Comeback Special, the show featured lavishly staged studio productions as well as songs performed with a band in front of a small audience—Presley’s first live performances since 1961.  The live segments saw Presley dressed in tight black leather, singing and playing the guitar in an uninhibited style reminiscent of his early rock and roll days.  Director and co-producer Steve Binder had worked hard to produce a show that was far from the hour of Christmas songs Parker had originally planned.  The show, NBC’s highest-rated that season, captured 42 percent of the total viewing audience.  Jon Landau of Eye magazine remarked, “There is something magical about watching a man who has lost himself find his way back home.  He sang with the kind of power people no longer expect of rock ‘n’ roll singers.  He moved his body with a lack of pretension and effort that must have made Jim Morrison green with envy.”  Dave Marsh calls the performance one of “emotional grandeur and historical resonance”.

By January 1969, the single “If I Can Dream”, written for the special, reached number 12.  The soundtrack album rose into the top ten.  According to friend Jerry Schilling, the special reminded Presley of what “he had not been able to do for years, being able to choose the people; being able to choose what songs and not being told what had to be on the soundtrack… He was out of prison, man.”  Binder said of Presley’s reaction, “I played Elvis the 60-minute show, and he told me in the screening room, ‘Steve, it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done in my life.  I give you my word I will never sing a song I don’t believe in.'”

Read more about 1968 – 1973: Comeback here.

1973 – 1977: Health Deterioration And Death

Medical Crises And Last Studio Sessions

Presley’s divorce was finalized on October 9, 1973.  By then, his health was in major and serious decline.  Twice during the year, he overdosed on barbiturates, spending three days in a coma in his hotel suite after the first incident.  Towards the end of 1973, he was hospitalized, semi-comatose from the effects of a pethidine addiction.  According to his primary care physician, Dr. George C. Nichopoulos, Presley “felt that by getting drugs from a doctor, he wasn’t the common everyday junkie getting something off the street”.  Since his comeback, he had staged more live shows with each passing year, and 1973 saw 168 concerts, his busiest schedule ever.  Despite his failing health, in 1974, he undertook another intensive touring schedule.

Presley’s condition declined precipitously in September. Keyboardist Tony Brown remembered Presley’s arrival at a University of Maryland concert: “He fell out of the limousine, to his knees.  People jumped to help, and he pushed them away like, ‘Don’t help me.’  He walked on stage and held onto the mic for the first thirty minutes like it was a post.  Everybody’s looking at each other like, ‘Is the tour gonna happen?” Guitarist John Wilkinson recalled, “He was all gut.  He was slurring.  He was so fucked up… It was obvious he was drugged.  It was obvious there was something terribly wrong with his body.  It was so bad the words to the songs were barely intelligible… I remember crying.  He could barely get through the introductions.”  Wilkinson recounted that a few nights later in Detroit, “I watched him in his dressing room, just draped over a chair, unable to move.  So often I thought, ‘Boss, why don’t you just cancel this tour and take a year off …?’ I mentioned something once in a guarded moment.  He patted me on the back and said, ‘It’ll be all right.  Don’t you worry about it.'” Presley continued to play to sell-out crowds.  Cultural critic Marjorie Garber wrote that he was now widely seen as a garish pop crooner: “In effect, he had become Liberace.  Even his fans were now middle-aged matrons and blue-haired grandmothers.”

On July 13, 1976, Vernon Presley—who had become deeply involved in his son’s financial affairs—fired “Memphis Mafia” bodyguards Red West (Presley’s friend since the 1950s), Sonny West, and David Hebler, citing the need to “cut back on expenses”.  Presley was in Palm Springs at the time, and some suggested that he was too cowardly to face the three himself.  Another associate of Presley’s, John O’Grady, argued that the bodyguards were dropped because their rough treatment of fans had prompted too many lawsuits.  However, Presley’s stepbrother, David Stanley, claimed that the bodyguards were fired because they were becoming more outspoken about Presley’s drug dependency.

RCA, which had always enjoyed a steady stream of product from Presley, began to grow anxious as his interest in the recording studio waned.  After a session in December 1973 that produced 18 songs, enough for almost two albums, Presley made no official studio recordings in 1974.  Parker delivered RCA yet another concert record, Elvis Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis.  Recorded on March 20, it included a version of “How Great Thou Art” that would win Presley his third and final competitive Grammy Award.  (All three of his competitive Grammy wins—out of 14 total nominations—were for gospel recordings.)  Presley returned to the recording studio in Hollywood in March 1975, but Parker’s attempts to arrange another session toward the end of the year were unsuccessful.  In 1976, RCA sent a mobile recording unit to Graceland that made possible two full-scale recording sessions at Presley’s home.  Even in that comfortable context, the recording process had become a struggle for him.

Despite concerns from RCA and Parker, between July 1973 and October 1976, Presley recorded virtually the entire contents of six albums.  Though he was no longer a major presence on the pop charts, five of those albums entered the top five of the country chart, and three went to number one: Promised Land (1975), From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee (1976), and Moody Blue (1977).  Similarly, his singles in this era did not prove to be major pop hits, but Presley remained a significant force in the country and adult contemporary markets.  Eight studio singles from this period released during his lifetime were top ten hits on one or both charts, four in 1974 alone.  “My Boy” was a number-one adult contemporary hit in 1975, and “Moody Blue” topped the country chart and reached the second spot on the adult contemporary chart in 1976.  Perhaps his most critically acclaimed recording of the era came that year, with what Greil Marcus described as his “apocalyptic attack” on the soul classic “Hurt”.  “If he felt the way he sounded”, Dave Marsh wrote of Presley’s performance, “the wonder isn’t that he had only a year left to live but that he managed to survive that long.”

Read more about 1973 – 1977: Health Deterioration And Death and more about Elvis Presley here.

The above articles were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

Favourite Elvis Presley Songs Index

This list does not contain Christmas songs.   You can find Christmas music from Elvis Presley here.

The links below will take you to YouTube. 

A Little Less Conversation.

All Shook Up.

Amazing Grace.

An American Trilogy (Live).

Anything That’s Part Of You.

Are You Lonesome Tonight?

Blue Moon.

Blue Suede Shoes.

Bridge Over Troubled Water (Live).

Burning Love.

Can’t Help Falling In Love.

Crying In The Chapel.

Don’t (With The Jordanaires).

Don’t Be Cruel.

Don’t Cry Daddy.

Fame And Fortune.

Good Luck Charm.

Good Rockin’ Tonight.

Heartbreak Hotel.

Hound Dog.

Hurt (Live).

I Don’t Care If The Sun Don’t Shine.

I Forgot To Remember To Forget.

If I Can Dream.

I Got Stung.

I Just Can’t Help Believin’ (Live).

I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.

I Love You Because.

I’ll Never Let You Go (Little Darlin’).

It’s Now Or Never.

In The Ghetto.

I’ve Lost You (Live).

I Want To Be Free.

I Want You, I Need You, I Love You.

Jailhouse Rock.

Just Pretend (Live).

King Creole.

(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear.

Little Sister.

Love Me Tender.

(Marie’s The Name) His Latest Flame.

Memories.

Moody Blue.

My Boy.

Mystery Train.

My Way (Live).

(Now And Then There’s) A Fool Such As I.

One Night.

Polk Salad Annie (Live).

Return To Sender.

Separate Ways.

She’s Not You.

Stuck On You.

Suspicious Minds.

That’s All Right.

That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.

The Girl Of My Best Friend.

The Wonder Of You.

Treat Me Nice.

Tryin’ To Get To You.

Unchained Melody (Live).

Viva Las Vegas.

Way Down.

Wear My Ring Around Your Neck.

Wooden Heart.

You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me (Live).

(You’re The) Devil In Disguise).

Notes And Links

Graceland: The Home Of Elvis Presley  – You’ve heard the music, now see the place Elvis called home. Explore the beautiful mansion, walk the gardens where he found peace, tour the aircraft that he traveled on from show to show, and encounter Elvis Presley’s Memphis entertainment complex for an unforgettable experience featuring legendary costumes, artefacts, and personal mementoes from Elvis and his family.

The image shown at the top of this page is in the public domain and is found on Wikipedia. 

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English Pride: The English Language

The Cross of St. George

I am English, NOT British, Not European, ENGLISH, AND PROUD and I class myself as an English patriot. 

You can read more blog articles about England and the English, like the one on here, via my English Pride Index below and click the link to get back to the English Pride page.

The English Language

English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, originally spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England.  It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the area of Great Britain that later took their name, England.  Both names derive from Anglia, a peninsula on the Baltic Sea (which is not to be confused with East Anglia, the eastern part of England that comprises the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex).  English is most closely related to Frisian and Low Saxon, while its vocabulary has been significantly influenced by other Germanic languages, particularly Old Norse (a North Germanic language), as well as by Old Norman, French and Latin.

English has developed over the course of more than 1,400 years.  The earliest forms of English, a group of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century, are collectively called Old English. Middle English began in the late 11th century with the Norman conquest of England; this was a period in which English was influenced by Old French, in particular through its Old Norman dialect.  Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the introduction of the printing press to London, the printing of the King James Bible and the start of the Great Vowel Shift.

Modern English has been spreading around the world since the 17th century by the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the United States.  Through all types of printed and electronic media of these countries, English has become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and professional contexts such as science, navigation and law.  Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-European dependent-marking pattern, with rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order and a complex syntax.  Modern English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood, as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation.

English is the most spoken language in the world (if Chinese is divided into various variants) and the third-most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish.  It is the most widely learned second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in almost 60 sovereign states.  There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.  As of 2005, it was estimated that there were over 2 billion speakers of English.  English is the majority native language in the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand (see Anglosphere) and Ireland, an official language and the main language of Singapore, and it is widely spoken in some areas of the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Oceania.  It is a co-official language of the United Nations, the European Union and many other world and regional international organisations.  It is the most widely spoken Germanic language, accounting for at least 70% of speakers of this Indo-European branch.  English speakers are called “Anglophones”.  There is much variability among the many accents and dialects of English used in different countries and regions in terms of phonetics and phonology, and sometimes also vocabulary, idioms, grammar, and spelling, but it does not typically prevent understanding by speakers of other dialects and accents, although mutual unintelligibility can occur at extreme ends of the dialect continuum.

Classification Of The English Language

English is an Indo-European language and belongs to the West Germanic group of the Germanic languages.  Old English originated from a Germanic tribal and linguistic continuum along the Frisian North Sea coast, whose languages gradually evolved into the Anglic languages in the British Isles, and into the Frisian languages and Low German/Low Saxon on the continent.  The Frisian languages, which together with the Anglic languages form the Anglo-Frisian languages, are the closest living relatives of English.  Low German/Low Saxon is also closely related, and sometimes English, the Frisian languages, and Low German are grouped together as the Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic) languages, though this grouping remains debated.  Old English evolved into Middle English, which in turn evolved into Modern English.  Particular dialects of Old and Middle English also developed into a number of other Anglic languages, including Scots and the extinct Fingallian and Forth and Bargy (Yola) dialects of Ireland.

Like Icelandic and Faroese, the development of English in the British Isles isolated it from the continental Germanic languages and influences, and it has since diverged considerably.  English is not mutually intelligible with any continental Germanic language, differing in vocabulary, syntax, and phonology, although some of these, such as Dutch or Frisian, do show strong affinities with English, especially with its earlier stages.

Unlike Icelandic and Faroese, which were isolated, the development of English was influenced by a long series of invasions of the British Isles by other peoples and languages, particularly Old Norse and Norman French.  These left a profound mark of their own on the language so that English shows some similarities in vocabulary and grammar with many languages outside its linguistic clades—but it is not mutually intelligible with any of those languages either.  Some scholars have argued that English can be considered a mixed language or a creole—a theory called the Middle English creole hypothesis.  Although the great influence of these languages on the vocabulary and grammar of Modern English is widely acknowledged, most specialists in language contact do not consider English to be a true mixed language.

English is classified as a Germanic language because it shares innovations with other Germanic languages such as Dutch, German, and Swedish.  These shared innovations show that the languages have descended from a single common ancestor called Proto-Germanic.  Some shared features of Germanic languages include the division of verbs into strong and weak classes, the use of modal verbs, and the sound changes affecting Proto-Indo-European consonants, known as Grimm’s and Verner’s laws.  English is classified as an Anglo-Frisian language because Frisian and English share other features, such as the palatalisation of consonants that were velar consonants in Proto-Germanic.

History Of The English Language

Proto-Germanic To Old English

The earliest form of English is called Old English or Anglo-Saxon (c. year 550–1066).  Old English developed from a set of West Germanic dialects, often grouped as Anglo-Frisian or North Sea Germanic, and originally spoken along the coasts of Frisia, Lower Saxony and southern Jutland by Germanic peoples known to the historical record as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.  From the 5th century, the Anglo-Saxons settled Britain as the Roman economy and administration collapsed.  By the 7th century, the Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons became dominant in Britain, replacing the languages of Roman Britain (43–409): Common Brittonic, a Celtic language, and Latin brought to Britain by the Roman occupation.  England and English (originally Ænglaland and Ænglisc) are named after the Angles.

Old English was divided into four dialects: the Anglian dialects (Mercian and Northumbrian) and the Saxon dialects, Kentish and West Saxon.  Through the educational reforms of King Alfred in the 9th century and the influence of the kingdom of Wessex, the West Saxon dialect became the standard written variety.  The epic poem Beowulf is written in West Saxon, and the earliest English poem, Cædmon’s Hymn, is written in Northumbrian.  Modern English developed mainly from Mercian, but the Scots language developed from Northumbrian.  A few short inscriptions from the early period of Old English were written using a runic script.  By the 6th century, a Latin alphabet was adopted, written with half-uncial letterforms.  It included the runic letters wynn ⟨ƿ⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, and the modified Latin letters eth ⟨ð⟩, and ash ⟨æ⟩. 

Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand.  Its grammar was similar to that of modern German, and its closest relative is Old Frisian.  Nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms, and word order was much freer than in Modern English.  Modern English has case forms in pronouns (he, him, his) and has a few verb inflections (speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken), but Old English had case endings in nouns as well, and verbs had more person and number endings.

The translation of Matthew 8:20 from 1000 shows examples of case endings (nominative plural, accusative plural, genitive singular) and a verb ending (present plural):

Foxas habbað holu and heofonan fuglas nest

Fox-as habb-að hol-u and heofon-an fugl-as nest-∅

fox-nom.pl have-prs.pl hole-acc.pl and heaven-gen.sg bird-nom.pl nest-acc.pl

“Foxes have holes and the birds of heaven nests”

Middle English

From the 8th to the 12th century, Old English gradually transformed through language contact into Middle English.  Middle English is often arbitrarily defined as beginning with the conquest of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, but it developed further in the period from 1200 to 1450.

First, the waves of Norse colonisation of northern parts of the British Isles in the 8th and 9th centuries put Old English into intense contact with Old Norse, a North Germanic language.  Norse influence was strongest in the north-eastern varieties of Old English spoken in the Danelaw area around York, which was the centre of Norse colonisation; today these features are still particularly present in Scots and Northern English.  However the centre of norsified English seems to have been in the Midlands around Lindsey, and after 920 CE when Lindsey was reincorporated into the Anglo-Saxon polity, Norse features spread from there into English varieties that had not been in direct contact with Norse speakers.  An element of Norse influence that persists in all English varieties today is the group of pronouns beginning with th- (they, them, their) which replaced the Anglo-Saxon pronouns with h– (hie, him, hera).

With the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the now norsified Old English language was subject to contact with Old French, in particular with the Old Norman dialect.  The Norman language in England eventually developed into Anglo-Norman.  Because Norman was spoken primarily by the elites and nobles, while the lower classes continued speaking Anglo-Saxon (English), the main influence of Norman was the introduction of a wide range of loanwords related to politics, legislation and prestigious social domains.  Middle English also greatly simplified the inflectional system, probably in order to reconcile Old Norse and Old English, which were inflectionally different but morphologically similar.  The distinction between nominative and accusative cases was lost except in personal pronouns, the instrumental case was dropped, and the use of the genitive case was limited to indicating possession.  The inflectional system regularised many irregular inflectional forms,  and gradually simplified the system of agreement, making word order less flexible.  In the Wycliffe Bible of the 1380s, the verse Matthew 8:20 was written: Foxis han dennes, and briddis of heuene han nestis.  Here the plural suffix –n on the verb have is still retained, but none of the case endings on the nouns are present.  By the 12th century Middle English was fully developed, integrating both Norse and French features; it continued to be spoken until the transition to early Modern English around 1500.  Middle English literature includes Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, and Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur.  In the Middle English period, the use of regional dialects in writing proliferated, and dialect traits were even used for effect by authors such as Chaucer.

Early Modern English

The next period in the history of English was Early Modern English (1500–1700).  Early Modern English was characterised by the Great Vowel Shift (1350–1700), inflectional simplification, and linguistic standardisation.

The Great Vowel Shift affected the stressed long vowels of Middle English.  It was a chain shift, meaning that each shift triggered a subsequent shift in the vowel system. Mid and open vowels were raised, and closed vowels were broken into diphthongs.  For example, the word bite was originally pronounced as the word beet is today, and the second vowel in the word about was pronounced as the word boot is today.  The Great Vowel Shift explains many irregularities in spelling since English retains many spellings from Middle English, and it also explains why English vowel letters have very different pronunciations from the same letters in other languages.

English began to rise in prestige, relative to Norman French, during the reign of Henry V. Around 1430, the Court of Chancery in Westminster began using English in its official documents, and a new standard form of Middle English, known as Chancery Standard, developed from the dialects of London and the East Midlands.  In 1476, William Caxton introduced the printing press to England and began publishing the first printed books in London, expanding the influence of this form of English.  Literature from the Early Modern period includes the works of William Shakespeare and the translation of the Bible commissioned by King James I.  Even after the vowel shift the language still sounded different from Modern English: for example, the consonant clusters /kn ɡn sw/ in knight, gnat, and sword were still pronounced.  Many of the grammatical features that a modern reader of Shakespeare might find quaint or archaic represent the distinct characteristics of Early Modern English.

In the 1611 King James Version of the Bible, written in Early Modern English, Matthew 8:20 says, “The Foxes haue holes and the birds of the ayre haue nests.”  This exemplifies the loss of case and its effects on sentence structure (replacement with subject-verb–object word order, and the use of of instead of the non-possessive genitive), and the introduction of loanwords from French (ayre) and word replacements (bird originally meaning “nestling” had replaced OE fugol).

Spread Of Modern English

By the late 18th century, the British Empire had spread English through its colonies and geopolitical dominance.  Commerce, science and technology, diplomacy, art, and formal education all contributed to English becoming the first truly global language.  English also facilitated worldwide international communication.  England continued to form new colonies, and these later developed their own norms for speech and writing.  English was adopted in parts of North America, parts of Africa, Australasia, and many other regions. When they obtained political independence, some of the newly independent nations that had multiple indigenous languages opted to continue using English as the official language to avoid the political and other difficulties inherent in promoting any one indigenous language above the others.  In the 20th century, the growing economic and cultural influence of the United States and its status as a superpower following the Second World War has, along with worldwide broadcasting in English by the BBC and other broadcasters, caused the language to spread across the planet much faster.  In the 21st century, English is more widely spoken and written than any language has ever been.

As Modern English developed, explicit norms for standard usage were published and spread through official media such as public education and state-sponsored publications.  In 1755 Samuel Johnson published his A Dictionary of the English Language, which introduced standard spellings of words and usage norms.  In 1828, Noah Webster published the American Dictionary of the English language to try to establish a norm for speaking and writing American English that was independent of the British standard.  Within Britain, non-standard or lower class dialect features were increasingly stigmatised, leading to the quick spread of the prestige varieties among the middle classes.

In modern English, the loss of grammatical case is almost complete (it is now only found in pronouns, such as he and him, she and her, who and whom), and SVO word order is mostly fixed.  Some changes, such as the use of do-support, have become universalised.  (Earlier English did not use the word “do” as a general auxiliary as Modern English does; at first, it was only used in question constructions, and even then was not obligatory.  Now, do-support with the verb have is becoming increasingly standardised.)  The use of progressive forms in –ing, appears to be spreading to new constructions, and forms such as had been being built are becoming more common.  Regularisation of irregular forms also slowly continues (e.g. dreamed instead of dreamt), and analytical alternatives to inflectional forms are becoming more common (e.g. more polite instead of polite).  British English is also undergoing change under the influence of American English, fuelled by the strong presence of American English in the media and the prestige associated with the US as a world power.

Read more about The English Language here.

The above articles were taken from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

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The Culture Of England

The culture of England is defined by the cultural norms of England and the English people.  Owing to England’s influential position within the United Kingdom it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate English culture from the culture of the United Kingdom as a whole.  However, since Anglo-Saxon times, England has had its own unique culture, apart from Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish culture.

As the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, many of the world’s acclaimed scientists and technological advancements originated from England.  England has also played an important role in cinema, literature, technology, engineering, democracy, philosophy, music, science and mathematics.  England has long been known for the accomplishments of a wide variety of literature and poetry.

Humour, tradition, and good manners are characteristics commonly associated with being English.  The secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport is the government minister responsible for the cultural life of England.

The Architecture Of England

Many ancient standing stone monuments were erected during the prehistoric period; amongst the best known are Stonehenge, Avebury, Devil’s Arrows, Rudston Monolith and Castlerigg.  With the introduction of Ancient Roman architecture, there was a development of basilicas, baths, amphitheatres, triumphal arches, villas, Roman temples, Roman roads, Roman forts, stockades and aqueducts.  It was the Romans who founded the first cities and towns such as London, Bath, York, Chester and St Albans.  Perhaps the best-known example is Hadrian’s Wall stretching right across northern England.  Another well-preserved example is the Roman Baths at Bath, Somerset.

English architecture begins with the architecture of the Anglo-Saxons.  At least fifty surviving English churches are of Anglo-Saxon origin, although in some cases the Anglo-Saxon part is small and much-altered.  All except one timber church are built of stone or brick, and in some cases show evidence of reused Roman work.  The architectural character of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical buildings ranges from Coptic-influenced architecture in the early period, through Early Christian basilica influenced architecture, to (in the later Anglo-Saxon period) an architecture characterised by pilaster-strips, blank arcading, baluster shafts and triangular-headed openings.

Many cathedrals of England are ancient, dating from as far back as around 700.  They are a major aspect of the country’s artistic heritage.  Medieval Christianity included the veneration of saints, with pilgrimages to places where particular saints’ relics were interred.  The possession of the relics of a popular saint was a source of funds for an individual church, as the faithful made donations and benefices in the hope that they might receive spiritual aid, a blessing or a healing from the presence of the physical remains of the holy person.  Among those churches to benefit in particular were St Albans Abbey, which contained the relics of England’s first Christian martyr; Ripon with the shrine of its founder St. Wilfrid; Durham, which was built to house the body of Saints Cuthbert of Lindisfarne and Aidan; Ely with the shrine of St. Ethelreda; Westminster Abbey with the magnificent shrine of its founder St. Edward the Confessor; at Chichester, the remains of St. Richard; and at Winchester, those of St. Swithun.

All these saints brought pilgrims to their churches, but among them, the most renowned was Thomas Becket, the late Archbishop of Canterbury, assassinated by henchmen of King Henry II in 1170.  As a place of pilgrimage, Canterbury was, in the 13th century, second only to Santiago de Compostela.  In the 1170s Gothic architecture was introduced at Canterbury and Westminster Abbey. Over the next 400 years, it developed in England, sometimes in parallel with and influenced by Continental forms, but generally with great local diversity and originality.

Following the Norman Conquest, Romanesque architecture (known here as Norman architecture) superseded Anglo-Saxon architecture; later there was a period of transition into English Gothic architecture (of which there are three periods, Early English, Decorated, and Perpendicular). Norman architecture was built on a vast scale from the 11th century onwards in the form of castles and churches to help impose Norman authority upon their dominion.  Many castles remain from the medieval period, such as Windsor Castle (longest-occupied castle in Europe), Bodiam Castle (a moated castle), Tower of London, and Warwick Castle.  Expanding on the Norman base there was also castles, palaces, great houses, universities and parish churches.

English Gothic architecture flourished from the 12th to the early 16th century, and famous examples include Westminster Abbey, the traditional place of coronation for the British monarch, which also has a long tradition as a venue for royal weddings, Canterbury Cathedral, one of the oldest and most famous Christian structures in England; Salisbury Cathedral, which has the tallest church spire in the UK; and York Minster, which is the largest Gothic cathedral in Northern Europe.

The secular medieval architecture throughout England has left a legacy of large stone castles.  The invention of gunpowder and canons made castles redundant, and the English Renaissance which followed facilitated the development of new artistic styles for domestic architecture, notably Tudor, Elizabethan, Jacobean, English Baroque, Queen Anne and Palladian.  Architecture during the Tudor dynasty flourished with magnificent royal palaces, such as Nonsuch Palace, Palace of Placentia, Hampton Court Palace, Hatfield House, Richmond Palace and Palace of Beaulieu.

One of the most acclaimed English architects was Sir Christopher Wren.  He was employed by King Charles II to design and rebuild London and many of its ruined ancient churches following the Great Fire of London in 1666.  Georgian and Neoclassical architecture advanced after the Age of Enlightenment, evoking achievements in elegant architecture and city planning; the Royal Crescent at Bath is one of the best examples of this.  The Regency of George IV is noted for its elegance and achievements in architecture and urban planning.  Regency style is also applied to interior design and decorative arts of the period, typified by elegant furniture and vertically striped wallpaper, and to styles of clothing; for men, as typified by the dandy Beau Brummell and for women the Empire silhouette.  In early modern times, there was an influence from Renaissance architecture until by the 18th century.  Gothic forms of architecture had been abandoned and various classical styles were adopted.  During the Victorian era, Gothic Revival architecture developed in England and was preferred for many types of buildings and city planning.  Victorian was widespread with vast innovations and engineering achievements (bridges, canals, railway stations, etc.).

In addition to this, around the same time, the Industrial Revolution paved the way for buildings such as The Crystal Palace.  The introduction of the sheet glass method into England by the Chance Brothers in 1832 made possible the production of large sheets of cheap but strong glass, and its use in the Crystal Palace created a structure with the greatest area of glass ever seen in a building.  It astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights.  Edwardian followed in the early 20th century. Other buildings such as cathedrals and parish churches are associated with a sense of traditional Englishness, as is often the palatial ‘stately home’.  Many people are interested in the English country house and the rural lifestyle, evidenced by the number of visitors to properties managed by English Heritage and the National Trust.

Landscape gardening as developed by Capability Brown set an international trend for the English garden. Gardening, and visiting gardens, are regarded as typically English pursuits.  By the end of the 18th century the English garden was being imitated by the French landscape garden, and as far away as St. Petersburg, Russia, in Pavlovsk, the gardens of the future Emperor Paul.  It also had a major influence on the form of the public parks and gardens which appeared around the world in the 19th century.

Inspired by the great landscape artists of the seventeenth century, the English garden presented an idealized view of nature.  At large country houses, the English garden usually included lakes, sweeps of gently rolling lawns set against groves of trees, and recreations of classical temples, Gothic ruins, bridges, and other picturesque architecture, designed to recreate an idyllic pastoral landscape.  The English garden was centred on the English country house, stately homes and parks.  English Heritage and the National Trust preserve large gardens and landscape parks throughout the country.  The RHS Chelsea Flower Show is held every year by the Royal Horticultural Society and is said to be the largest gardening show in the world.

Following the building of the world’s first seaside pier at Ryde, the pier became fashionable at seaside resorts in England during the Victorian era, peaking in the 1860s with 22 being built in that decade.  A symbol of the typical English seaside holiday, by 1914 more than 100 pleasure piers were located around the UK coast.  Regarded as being among the finest Victorian architecture, there are still a significant number of seaside piers of architectural merit still standing, although some have been lost, including two at Brighton in East Sussex and one at New Brighton in the Wirral.  Two piers, Brighton’s now derelict West Pier and Clevedon Pier, were Grade 1 listed.  The Birnbeck Pier in Weston-super-Mare is the only pier in the world linked to an island.  The National Piers Society gives a figure of 55 surviving seaside piers in England.

Art And Design Of England

England has Europe’s earliest and northernmost ice-age cave art.  Prehistoric art in England largely corresponds with art made elsewhere in contemporary Britain, but early medieval Anglo-Saxon art saw the development of a distinctly English style, and English art continued thereafter to have a distinct character.  English art made after the formation in 1707 of the Kingdom of Great Britain may be regarded in most respects simultaneously as art of the United Kingdom.  The two periods of outstanding achievement were the 7th and 8th centuries, with the metalwork and jewellery from Sutton Hoo and a series of magnificent illuminated manuscripts, and the final period after about 950, when there was a revival of English culture after the end of the Viking invasions.

As in most of Europe at the time, metalwork was the most highly regarded form of art by the Anglo-Saxons, but hardly any survives – there was enormous plundering of Anglo-Saxon churches, monasteries and the possessions of the dispossessed nobility by the new Norman rulers in their first decades, as well as the Norsemen before them, and the English Reformation after them, and most survivals were once on the continent.  Anglo-Saxon taste favoured brightness and colour.  Opus Anglicanum (“English work”) was recognised as the finest embroidery in Europe.  Perhaps the best known piece of Anglo-Saxon art is the Bayeux Tapestry which was commissioned by a Norman patron from English artists working in the traditional Anglo-Saxon style.  Anglo-Saxon artists also worked in fresco, stone, ivory and whalebone (notably the Franks Casket), metalwork (for example the Fuller brooch), glass and enamel.  Medieval English painting, mainly religious, had a strong national tradition and was influential in Europe.

The English Reformation, which was antipathetic to art, not only brought this tradition to an abrupt stop but resulted in the destruction of almost all wall paintings.  Only illuminated manuscripts now survive in large numbers.

There is in the art of the English Renaissance a strong interest in portraiture, and the portrait miniature was more popular in England than anywhere else.  English Renaissance sculpture was mainly architectural and for monumental tombs.  Interest in English landscape painting had begun to develop by the time of the 1707 Act of Union.  English art was dominated by imported artists throughout much of the Renaissance, but in the 18th century, a native tradition became much admired.  It is considered to be typified by landscape painting, such as the work of J.M.W. Turner and John Constable.  Portraitists like Thomas Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds are also significant.

The first famous native English portrait miniaturist is Nicholas Hilliard (c. 1537–1619), whose work was conservative in style but very sensitive to the character of the sitter; his best works are beautifully executed.  The colours are opaque, and gold is used to heighten the effect, while the paintings are on card.  They are often signed and have frequently also a Latin motto upon them.  Hilliard worked for a while in France, and he is probably identical with the painter alluded to in 1577 as Nicholas Belliart.  Hilliard was succeeded by his son Lawrence Hilliard (died 1640); his technique was similar to that of his father but bolder, and his miniatures richer in colour.

Isaac Oliver and his son Peter Oliver succeeded Hilliard. Isaac (c. 1560–1617) was the pupil of Hilliard. Peter (1594–1647) was the pupil of Isaac.  The two men were the earliest to give roundness and form to the faces they painted.  They signed their best works in monogram and painted not only very small miniatures, but larger ones measuring as much as 10 in × 9 in (250 mm × 230 mm). They copied for Charles I of England (1600–1649) on a small scale many of his famous pictures by the old masters. Samuel Cooper (1609–1672) was a nephew and student of the elder Hoskins and is considered the greatest English portrait miniaturist.  He spent much of his time in Paris and Holland, and very little is known of his career.  His work has a superb breadth and dignity and has been well called life-size work in little.  His portraits of the men of the Puritan epoch are remarkable for their truth to life and strength of handling.  His work is frequently signed with his initials, generally in gold, and very often with the addition of the date.

Pictorial satirist William Hogarth pioneered Western sequential art, and political illustrations in this style are often referred to as “Hogarthian”.   Following Hogarth, political cartoons developed in England in the late 18th century under the direction of James Gillray.  Regarded as one of the two most influential cartoonists (the other is Hogarth), Gillray has been referred to as the father of the political cartoon, with his satirical work calling the King (George III), prime ministers and generals to account.  The early 19th century saw the emergence of the Norwich school of painters, the first provincial art movement outside of London.  Its prominent members were “founding father” John Crome (1768–1821), John Sell Cotman (1782–1842), James Stark (1794–1859), and Joseph Stannard (1797–1830).

In England, landscapes had initially been mostly backgrounds to portraits.  The English tradition was founded by Anthony van Dyck and other mostly Flemish artists working in England, but in the 18th century, the works of Claude Lorrain were keenly collected and influenced not only paintings of landscapes, but the English landscape gardens of Capability Brown and others. In the 18th century, watercolour painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality, with both a buoyant market for professional works and a large number of amateur painters, many following the popular systems found in the books of Alexander Cozens and others.  By the beginning of the 19th century, the English artists with the highest modern reputations were mostly dedicated landscape painters, showing the wide range of Romantic interpretations of the English landscape found in the works of John Constable and J.M.W. Turner.

During the Baroque and Rococo periods, the first major native portrait painters of the British school were English painters Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also specialised in clothing their subjects in an eye-catching manner.  Gainsborough’s Blue Boy is one of the most famous and recognized portraits of all time, painted with very long brushes and thin oil colour to achieve the shimmering effect of the blue costume.  Gainsborough was also noted for his elaborate background settings for his subjects.

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood achieved considerable influence after its foundation in 1848 with paintings that concentrated on religious, literary, and genre subjects executed in a colourful and minutely detailed style.  Its artists included John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and subsequently Edward Burne-Jones.  Also associated with it was the designer William Morris, whose efforts to make beautiful objects affordable for everyone led to his wallpaper and tile designs to some extent defining the Victorian aesthetic and instigating the Arts and Crafts movement.  The Royal Society of Arts is an organisation committed to the arts and culture.

The Royal Academy in London is a key organisation for the promotion of the visual arts in England.  Major schools of art in England include the six-school University of the Arts London, which includes the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and Chelsea College of Art and Design; Goldsmiths, University of London; the Slade School of Fine Art (part of University College London); the Royal College of Art; and The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art (part of the University of Oxford).  The Courtauld Institute of Art is a leading centre for the teaching of the history of art.  Important art galleries in the United Kingdom include the National Gallery, National Portrait Gallery, Tate Britain and Tate Modern (the most-visited modern art gallery in the world, with around 4.7 million visitors per year).

Heritage And Tourism Of England

A number of umbrella organisations are devoted to the preservation and public access of both natural and cultural heritage, including English Heritage and the National Trust. Membership with them, even on a temporary basis, gives priority free access to their properties thereafter.

English Heritage is a governmental body with a broad remit of managing the historic sites, artefacts and environments of England.  It is currently sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. English Heritage manages more than 400 significant buildings and monuments in England.  They also maintain a register of thousands of listed buildings, those which are considered of most importance to the historic and cultural heritage of the country.

The National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty is a charity that also maintains multiple sites.  One of the largest landowners in the United Kingdom, the Trust owns almost 250,000 hectares of land and 780 miles of the coast.  Its properties include over 500 historic houses, castles, archaeological and industrial monuments, gardens, parks and nature reserves.

17 of the 25 United Kingdom UNESCO World Heritage Sites fall within England.  Some of the best known of these include Hadrian’s Wall, Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites, Tower of London, Jurassic Coast, Westminster, Roman Baths in Bath, Saltaire, Ironbridge Gorge, and Studley Royal Park.  The northernmost point of the Roman Empire, Hadrian’s Wall, is the largest Roman artefact anywhere: it runs a total of 73 miles in northern England.

London’s British Museum hosts a collection of more than seven million objects is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world, sourced from every continent, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginning to the present.  The library has two of the four remaining copies of the original Magna Carta (the other two copies are held in Lincoln Castle and Salisbury Cathedral) and has a room devoted solely to them.  The British Library Sound Archive has over six million recordings, many from the BBC Sound Archive, including Winston Churchill’s wartime speeches.

The British Library in London is the national library and is one of the world’s largest research libraries, holding over 150 million items in all known languages and formats; including around 25 million books.  The most senior art gallery is the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, which houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900.  The Tate galleries house the national collections of British and international modern art; they also host the famously controversial Turner Prize.  The Ashmolean Museum was founded in 1677 from the personal collection of Elias Ashmole, was set up in the University of Oxford to be open to the public and is considered by some to be the first modern public museum.  In 2011 there were more than 1,600 museums in England.  Most museums and art galleries are free of charge.

A blue plaque, the oldest historical marker scheme in the world, is a permanent sign installed in a public place in the UK to commemorate a link between that location and a famous person or event.  The scheme was the brainchild of politician William Ewart in 1863 and was initiated in 1866.

It was formally established by the Royal Society of Arts in 1867, and since 1986 has been run by English Heritage.  The first plaque was unveiled in 1867 to commemorate Lord Byron at his birthplace, 24 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, London.  Examples that commemorate events include John Logie Baird’s first demonstration of the television at 22 Frith Street, Westminster, W1, London, and the first sub-4-minute mile run by Roger Bannister on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University’s Iffley Road Track.

Tourism plays a significant part in the economic life of England.  In 2018, the United Kingdom as a whole was the world’s 10th most visited country for tourists, and 17 of the United Kingdom’s 25 UNESCO World Heritage Sites fall within England.  VisitEngland is the official tourist board for England.  VisitEngland’s stated mission is to build England’s tourism product, raise Britain’s profile worldwide, increase the volume and value of tourism exports and develop England and Britain’s visitor economy.  In 2020, the Lonely Planet travel guide rated England as the second-best country to visit that year, after Bhutan.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Arts, Heritage and Tourism is the minister with responsibility for over-tourism in England, including museums, art galleries, public libraries and the National Archives.

Literature Of England 

Early authors such as Bede and Alcuin wrote in Latin.  The period of Old English literature provided the epic poem Beowulf and the fragmentary The Battle of Maldon, the sombre and introspective The Seafarer, The Wanderer, the pious Dream of the Rood, The Order of the World, and the secular prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, along with Christian writings such as Judith, Cædmon’s Hymn and hagiographies.  Following the Norman conquest, Latin continued amongst the educated classes, as well as Anglo-Norman literature.

Middle English literature emerged with Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales, along with Gower, the Pearl Poet and Langland. William of Ockham and Roger Bacon, who were Franciscans, were major philosophers of the Middle Ages.  Julian of Norwich, who wrote Revelations of Divine Love, was a prominent Christian mystic.  With the English Renaissance literature in the Early Modern English style appeared.  William Shakespeare, whose works include Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, remains one of the most championed authors in English literature.

Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sydney, Thomas Kyd, John Donne, and Ben Jonson are other established authors of the Elizabethan age.   Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes wrote on empiricism and materialism, including the scientific method and social contract.   Filmer wrote on the Divine Right of Kings.  Marvell was the best-known poet of the Commonwealth, while John Milton authored Paradise Lost during the Restoration.

Some of the most prominent philosophers of the Enlightenment were John Locke, Thomas Paine, Samuel Johnson and Jeremy Bentham.  More radical elements were later countered by Edmund Burke who is regarded as the founder of conservatism.  The poet Alexander Pope with his satirical verse became well regarded. The English played a significant role in romanticism: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, William Blake and William Wordsworth were major figures.

In response to the Industrial Revolution, agrarian writers sought a way between liberty and tradition; William Cobbett, G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc were the main exponents, while the founder of guild socialism, Arthur Penty, and cooperative movement advocate G. D. H. Cole are somewhat related.  Empiricism continued through John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell, while Bernard Williams was involved in analytics.  Authors from around the Victorian era include Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells and Lewis Carroll.  Since then England has continued to produce novelists such as George Orwell, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, C. S. Lewis, Enid Blyton, Aldous Huxley, Agatha Christie, Terry Pratchett, J. R. R. Tolkien, and J. K. Rowling.

Due to the expansion of English into a world language during the British Empire, literature is now written in English across the world.  Writers often associated with England or for expressing Englishness include Shakespeare (who produced two tetralogies of history plays about the English kings), Jane Austen, Arnold Bennett, and Rupert Brooke (whose poem “Grantchester” is often considered quintessentially English).  Other writers are associated with specific regions of England; these include Charles Dickens (London), Thomas Hardy (Wessex), A. E. Housman (Shropshire), and the Lake Poets (the Lake District).  The English playwright and poet William Shakespeare is widely regarded as the greatest dramatist of all time.

The 20th-century English crime writer Agatha Christie is the best-selling novelist of all time.  Agatha Christie’s mystery novels are outsold only by Shakespeare and The Bible.  Described as “perhaps the 20th century’s best chronicler of English culture”, the non-fiction works of George Orwell include The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the north of England.  Orwell’s eleven rules for making tea appear in his essay “A Nice Cup of Tea”, which was published in the London Evening Standard on 12 January 1946.

In 2003 the BBC carried out a UK survey entitled The Big Read to find the “nation’s best-loved novel” of all time, with works by English novelists J. R. R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, Philip Pullman, Douglas Adams and J. K. Rowling making up the top five on the list.  In 2005, some 206,000 books were published in the United Kingdom and in 2006 it was the largest publisher of books in the world.  The Royal Society of Literature was founded in 1820, by King George IV, to “reward literary merit and excite literary talent”.  The society is a cultural tenant at London’s Somerset House.

The Music Of England

England has a long and rich musical history. In the United Kingdom, more people attend live music performances than football matches.  The traditional folk music of England is centuries old and has contributed to several genres prominently; mostly sea shanties, jigs, hornpipes and dance music.  It has its own distinct variations and regional peculiarities.  Ballads featuring Robin Hood, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in the 16th century, are an important artefact, as are John Playford’s The Dancing Master and Robert Harley’s Roxburghe Ballads collections.

Some of the best-known songs are Greensleeves, Pastime with Good Company, Maggie May and Spanish Ladies amongst others.  Many nursery rhymes are of English origin such as Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Roses Are Red, Jack and Jill, London Bridge Is Falling Down, The Grand Old Duke of York, Hey Diddle Diddle and Humpty Dumpty.  Traditional English Christmas carols include We Wish You a Merry Christmas, The First Noel, I Saw Three Ships and God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen.

The United Kingdom has, like most European countries, undergone a roots revival in the last half of the 20th century.  English music has been an instrumental and leading part of this phenomenon, which peaked at the end of the 1960s and into the 1970s.  The English Musical Renaissance was a hypothetical development in the late 19th and early 20th century, when English composers, often those lecturing or trained at the Royal College of Music, were said to have freed themselves from foreign musical influences, to have begun writing in a distinctively national idiom, and to have equalled the achievement of composers in mainland Europe.

The achievements of the Anglican choral tradition following on from 16th-century composers such as Thomas Tallis, John Taverner and William Byrd have tended to overshadow instrumental composition.  The semi-operatic innovations of Henry Purcell were significant.  Classical music attracted much attention from 1784 with the formation of the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, which was the longest running classical music festival of its kind until the final concerts in 1912.  George Frideric Handel found important royal patrons and enthusiastic public support in England.  He spent most of his composing life in London and became a national icon, creating some of the most well-known works of classical music, especially his English oratorios, The Messiah, Solomon, Water Music, and Music for the Royal Fireworks.  One of Handel’s four Coronation Anthems, Zadok the Priest (1727), composed for the coronation of George II, has been performed at every subsequent British coronation, traditionally during the sovereign’s anointing.  The Royal Academy of Music is the oldest conservatoire in the UK, founded in 1822 by John Fane and Nicolas-Charles Bochsa.  It received its royal charter in 1830 from King George IV with the support of the first Duke of Wellington.  Famous academy alumni include Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sir Elton John and Annie Lennox.

The emergence of figures such as Edward Elgar and Arthur Sullivan in the 19th century showed a new vitality in English music.  In the 20th century, Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett emerged as internationally recognised opera composers, and Ralph Vaughan Williams and others collected English folk tunes and adapted them to the concert hall.  Cecil Sharp was a leading figure in the English folk revival.  The Proms, an annual summer season of daily classical music concerts, is a significant event in British musical life.  The Last Night of the Proms features patriotic music.

A new trend emerged from Liverpool in 1962.  The Beatles became the most popular musicians of their time, and in the composing duo of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, popularized the concept of the self-contained music act.  Before the Beatles, very few popular singers composed the tunes they performed.  The “Fab Four” opened the doors for other acts from England such as The Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Cream, The Kinks, The Who, Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Queen, Elton John, The Hollies, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Genesis, Dire Straits, Iron Maiden, The Police to the globe.  Many musical genres have origins in (or strong associations with) England, such as British invasion, progressive rock, hard rock, Mod, glam rock, heavy metal, Britpop, indie rock, gothic rock, shoegazing, acid house, garage, trip hop, drum and bass and dubstep.  The Sex Pistols and The Clash were pioneers of punk rock.  Some of England’s leading contemporary artists include George Michael, Sting, Seal, Rod Stewart, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Oasis, Blur, Radiohead, The Cure, Depeche Mode, Coldplay, Def Leppard, Muse, Arctic Monkeys, Amy Winehouse, Adele and Ed Sheeran.

The Cinema Of England

England (and the UK as a whole) has had a considerable influence on the history of the cinema, producing some of the greatest actors, directors and motion pictures of all time, including Alfred Hitchcock, Charlie Chaplin, David Lean, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, John Gielgud, Peter Sellers, Julie Andrews, Michael Caine, Gary Oldman, Helen Mirren, Kate Winslet and Daniel Day-Lewis.  Hitchcock and Lean are among the most critically acclaimed of all time.  Hitchcock’s first thriller, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1926), helped shape the thriller genre in film, while his 1929 film, Blackmail, is often regarded as the first British sound feature film.

Major film studios in England include Pinewood, Elstree and Shepperton.  Some of the most commercially successful films of all time have been produced in England, including two of the highest-grossing film franchises (Harry Potter and James Bond).  Ealing Studios in London has a claim to being the oldest continuously working film studio in the world.  Famous for recording many motion picture film scores, the London Symphony Orchestra first performed film music in 1935.

The BFI Top 100 British films include Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979), a film regularly voted the funniest of all time by the UK public.  English producers are also active in international co-productions and English actors, directors and crew feature regularly in Hollywood films.  Ridley Scott was among a group of English filmmakers, including Tony Scott, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and Adrian Lyne, who emerged from making 1970s UK television commercials.  The UK film council ranked David Yates, Christopher Nolan, Mike Newell, Ridley Scott and Paul Greengrass the five most commercially successful English directors since 2001.  Other contemporary directors from England include Sam Mendes, Guy Ritchie and Steve McQueen.  Current actors include Tom Hardy, Daniel Craig, Benedict Cumberbatch and Emma Watson.  Acclaimed for his motion-capture work, Andy Serkis opened The Imaginarium Studios in London in 2011.  The visual effects company Framestore in London has produced some of the most critically acclaimed special effects in modern film.  Many successful Hollywood films have been based on English people, stories or events.  The ‘English Cycle’ of Disney animated films include Alice in Wonderland, The Jungle Book, Robin Hood and Winnie the Pooh.

The Theatre Of England

The peak of English drama and theatre is said to be the Elizabethan Age; a golden age in English history where the arts, drama and creative work flourished.  Morality plays emerged as a distinct dramatic form around 1400 and flourished in the early Elizabethan era in England.  Characters were often used to represent different ethical ideals.  Everyman, for example, includes such figures as Good Deeds, Knowledge and Strength, and this characterisation reinforces the conflict between good and evil for the audience.  The Castle of Perseverance (c. 1400–1425) depicts an archetypal figure’s progress from birth through to death.  Horestes (c. 1567), a late “hybrid morality” and one of the earliest examples of an English revenge play, brings together the classical story of Orestes with a Vice from the medieval allegorical tradition, alternating comic, slapstick scenes with serious, tragic ones.  Also important in this period were the folk dramas of the Mummers Play, performed during the Christmas season.  Court masques were particularly popular during the reign of Henry VIII.  The first permanent English theatre, the Red Lion, opened in 1567.  The first successful theatres, such as The Theatre, opened in 1576.  The establishment of large and profitable public theatres was an essential enabling factor in the success of English Renaissance drama.

Archaeological excavations on the foundations of the Rose and the Globe in the late 20th century showed that all the London theatres had individual differences, but their common function necessitated a similar general plan.  The public theatres were three stories high and built around an open space at the centre.  Usually polygonal in plan to give an overall rounded effect, although the Red Bull and the first Fortune were square.  The three levels of inward-facing galleries overlooked the open centre, into which jutted the stage: essentially a platform surrounded on three sides by the audience.  The rear side was restricted for the entrances and exits of the actors and seating for the musicians.  The upper level behind the stage could be used as a balcony, as in Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, or as a position from which an actor could harangue a crowd, as in Julius Caesar.

The playhouses were generally built with timber and plaster.  Individual theatre descriptions give additional information about their construction, such as flint stones being used to build the Swan.  Theatres were also constructed to be able to hold a large number of people.  One of the main uses of costume during the Elizabethan era was to make up for the lack of scenery, set, and props on stage.  It created a visual effect for the audience, and it was an integral part of the overall performance.   Since the main visual appeal on stage were the costumes, they were often bright in colour and visually entrancing.  Colours symbolised social hierarchy, and costumes were made to reflect that.  For example, if a character was royalty, their costume would include purple.  The colours, as well as the different fabrics of the costumes, allowed the audience to know the status of each character when they first appeared on stage.

The growing population of London, the growing wealth of its people, and their fondness for spectacle produced a dramatic literature of remarkable variety, quality, and extent. Genres of the period included the history play, which depicted English or European history.  Shakespeare’s plays about the lives of kings, such as Richard III and Henry V, belong to this category, as do Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II and George Peele’s Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First.  History plays dealt with more recent events, like A Larum for London which dramatizes the sack of Antwerp in 1576.  Tragedy was a very popular genre.  Marlowe’s tragedies were exceptionally successful, such as Dr. Faustus and The Jew of Malta.  The audiences particularly liked revenge dramas, such as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.  The four tragedies considered to be Shakespeare’s greatest (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth) were composed during this period.

Costumes were collected in inventory.  More often than not, costumes wouldn’t be made individually to fit the actor.  Instead, they would be selected out of the stock that theatre companies would keep.  A theatre company reused costumes when possible and would rarely get new costumes made.  Costumes themselves were expensive, so usually, players wore contemporary clothing regardless of the time period of the play.  The most expensive pieces were given to higher class characters because costuming was used to identify social status on stage.  The fabrics within a playhouse would indicate the wealth of the company itself.  The fabrics used the most were: velvet, satin, silk, cloth-of-gold, lace, and ermine.

Comedies were common.  A subgenre developed in this period was the city comedy, which deals satirically with life in London after the fashion of Roman New Comedy.  Examples are Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday and Thomas Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside.  Though marginalised, the older genres like pastoral (The Faithful Shepherdess, 1608), and even the morality play (Four Plays in One, ca. 1608–13) could exert influences.  After about 1610, the new hybrid subgenre of the tragicomedy enjoyed an efflorescence, as did the masque throughout the reigns of the first two Stuart kings, James I and Charles I.

The re-opening of the theatres in 1660 after the Restoration of Charles II signalled a renaissance of English drama.  With the restoration of the monarch in 1660 came the restoration of and the reopening of the theatre.  English comedies written and performed in the Restoration period from 1660 to 1710 are collectively called Restoration comedy.  Restoration comedy is notorious for its sexual explicitness, a quality encouraged by Charles II (1660–1685) personally and by the rakish aristocratic ethos of his Royal court.  For the first time, women were allowed to act, putting an end to the practice of the boy-player taking the parts of women.  Socially diverse audiences included both aristocrats, their servants and hangers-on, and a substantial middle-class segment.  Its dramatists stole freely from English Jacobean and Caroline plays, and even from Greek and Roman classical comedies, combining the various plotlines in adventurous ways.

Restoration audiences liked to see good triumph in their tragedies and rightful government restored.  In comedy, they liked to see the love-lives of the young and fashionable, with a central couple bringing their courtship to a successful conclusion (often overcoming the opposition of the elders to do so).  Heroines had to be chaste, but were independent-minded and outspoken; now that they were played by women, there was more mileage for the playwright in disguising them in men’s clothes or giving them narrow escape from rape.  These playgoers were attracted to the comedies by up-to-the-minute topical writing, by crowded and bustling plots, by the introduction of the first professional actresses, and by the rise of the first celebrity actors.  This period saw the first professional woman playwright, Aphra Behn.  In the mid-1690s, a brief second Restoration comedy renaissance arose, aimed at a wider audience.

The unsentimental or “hard” comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege reflected the atmosphere at Court and celebrated with frankness an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest.  The Earl of Rochester, real-life Restoration rake, courtier and poet, is flatteringly portrayed in Etherege’s The Man of Mode (1676) as a riotous, witty, intellectual, and sexually irresistible aristocrat, a template for posterity’s idea of the glamorous Restoration rake (actually never a very common character in Restoration comedy).  The single play that does most to support the charge of obscenity levelled then and now at Restoration comedy is probably Wycherley’s masterpiece The Country Wife (1675), whose title contains a lewd pun and whose notorious “china scene” is a series of sustained double entendres.

During the second wave of Restoration comedy in the 1690s, the “softer” comedies of William Congreve and John Vanbrugh set out to appeal to a more socially diverse audience with a strong middle-class element, as well as to female spectators.  The comic focus shifts from young lovers outwitting the older generation to the vicissitudes of marital relations.  In Congreve’s Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (1700), the give-and-take set pieces of couples testing their attraction for one another have mutated into witty prenuptial debates on the eve of marriage, as in the latter’s famous “Proviso” scene. Vanbrugh’s The Provoked Wife (1697) has a light touch and more humanly recognisable characters, while The Relapse (1696) has been admired for its throwaway wit and the characterisation of Lord Foppington, an extravagant and affected burlesque fop with a dark side.

As a reaction to the decadence of Charles II era productions, sentimental comedy grew in popularity.  This genre focused on encouraging virtuous behaviour by showing middle-class characters overcoming a series of moral trials.  Playwrights like Colley Cibber and Richard Steele believed that humans were inherently good but capable of being led astray.  Through plays such as The Conscious Lovers and Love’s Last Shift they strove to appeal to an audience’s noble sentiments so that viewers could be reformed.  The Restoration spectacular hit the London public stage in the late 17th-century Restoration period, enthralling audiences with action, music, dance, moveable scenery, baroque illusionistic painting, gorgeous costumes, and special effects such as trapdoor tricks, “flying” actors, and fireworks.

Today there are a variety of theatres in London’s West End. Andrew Lloyd Webber dominated the West End for many years; his musicals also conquered Broadway and were made into films.  The prestigious Royal Shakespeare Company operates out of Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon and performs primarily, but not exclusively, his works.  Important modern playwrights are Alan Ayckbourn, John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard and Arnold Wesker.

Read more about The Culture Of England here.

The above articles were taken from Wikipedia and are subject to change. 

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Jokes: Christmas Jokes

Image © of TheDigitalArtist via Pixabay

Here are some Christmas jokes from Uncle Amon worthy of any Christmas cracker that kids will like and they make great Dad jokes too.

About Uncle Amon

Uncle Amon began his career with a vision.  It was to influence and create a positive change in the world through children’s books by sharing fun and inspiring stories.

Whether it is an important lesson or just creating laughs, Uncle Amon provides insightful stories that are sure to bring a smile to your face! His unique style and creativity stand out from other children’s book authors because he uses real life experiences to tell a tale of imagination and adventure.

Christmas Jokes

Image © of Uncle Amon

What was the monkey’s favourite Christmas song?

Jungle Bells!

Where does the snowman keep his money?

In the snow bank!

Who delivers cat presents?

Santa Paws!

What are Santa’s helpers taught at an early age?

The elf-abet!

What do elf students do?

Gnome work?

Who delivers presents to sharks at Christmas?

Santa Jaws!

What songs to Santa’s gnomes sing to him when he comes home freezing on Christmas night?

Freeze a jolly good fellow!

What do you call a man that claps at Christmas?

Santaplause!

Did you hear about Dracula’s Christmas party?

It was a scream!

What do snowmen do on the weekend?

Chill out!

Which bug does not like Christmas?

A humbug!

Who brings the Christmas presents to police stations?

Santa Clues!

What do you get when you cross a famous singer and one of Santa’s helpers?

Elfis Presley!

What do you get if deep fry Santa Claus?

Crisp Cringle!

Why is it so cold at Christmas?

Because it is Decembrrr!

What do snowmen like most about school?

Snow and tell!

Who is never hungry at Christmas?

The Turkey because he’s always stuffed!

What’s Santa called when he takes a rest while delivering presents?

Santa Pause!

Is it true that mummies love Christmas?

Yes! Because of all the wrapping!

Why couldn’t the skeleton go to the Christmas Party?

He had no body to go with!

What is the snowman’s favourite snack?

Ice crispies!

Blog Posts

Blue Peter: An Advent Crown For Christmas.

Books: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens.

Christmas: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens – Screen Versions.

Christmas: Nostalgic Christmas Adverts. 

Music: Christmas Music. 

Poetry: A Visit From St. Nicholas By Clement Clarke Moore.

Poetry: Harley Davidson Christmas Poem By Unknown.

Notes And Links

TheDigitalArtist on Pixabay – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of TheDigitalArtist.  You can find more great work from the creator Pete and lots more free stock photos at Pixabay.

Uncle Amon – Kindle page.  The Christmas Stories image is the copyright of Uncle Amon and his from his book Christmas Stories: Christmas Stories For Kids.  These jokes, and more, are in there too and you can get your copy here.

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E-Books: Free Horror E-Books

Image © of BruceEmmerling via Pixabay

In the Index below is a selection of FREE Horror E-Books for your reading pleasure.

They come in PDF format and if you don’t have a PDF reader you can download one from here.  To get Epub and Kindle format versions become a member of Free-ebooks.net by clicking the link below.

Free Horror E-Books Index

Dracula by Bram Stoker.  Count Dracula is a vampire who terrifies the countryside in his quest for human blood, but the residents soon learn his real identity and vow to destroy him.

The Phantom Of The Opera by Gaston Leroux.  A disfigured musical genius haunts the catacombs under the Paris Opera and terrifies the community until he falls in love with Christine, a budding young singer. 

Blog Posts

Books: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens.

Notes And Links

BruceEmmerling on Pixabay – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of BruceEmmerling.  You can find more great work from the photographer Bruce and lots more free stock photo’s at Pixabay.

Free-eBooks.net – Official website.  Free-eBooks.net is the internet’s number one source for free e-book downloads, e-book resources & e-book authors.  Read and download e-books for FREE – anytime. 

Use the link above to sign up and enjoy five free e-books each and every month with a Standard Account or upgrade to V.I.P. status for unlimited e-book and audiobook downloads.  

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Jokes: More Adult Jokes (Part Two)

Image © of VHV.RS

Adult jokes are just that, aimed at adults and I take no credit for any on this page.  Their original source or words belong to whoever and started wherever.  I tell them my way.  If they make you smile or chuckle like they originally did to me then that is great.  If not then I hope you find your sense of humour one day.

As defined by Collins Online Dictionary: “An adult is a mature, fully developed person.  An adult has reached the age when they are legally responsible for their actions”.  Generally, that means 18 and over but if you are under 18 or easily offended then you are on the wrong page.

Prostitute Parrots 

A lady approaches her priest and tells him, “Father, I have a problem.  I have two female talking parrots, but they only know how to say one thing!”

“What do they say?” the priest inquired.

They only know how to say, “Hi, we’re prostitutes.  Do you want to have some fun?”

“That’s terrible!” the priest exclaimed, “but I have a solution to your problem.  Bring your two female parrots over to my house and I will put them with my two male talking parrots whom I taught to pray and speak passages from the bible.  My parrots will teach your parrots to stop saying that terrible phrase and your female parrots will learn to praise and worship like them.”

“Thank you, Father!”  the woman responded.  The next day she brought her female parrots to the priest’s house.   His two male parrots are holding rosary beads and praying in their cage.  The lady puts her two female parrots in with the male parrots.  Immediately, the female parrots say, “Hi, we’re prostitutes.  Do you want to have some fun?” One male parrot looks over to the other male parrot and exclaims, ” Put your beads away.  Our prayers have been answered!”

Poor Pussy Cat

Little Nancy was in her back garden filling in a hole when her neighbour peered over the fence.

“What are you up to there Nancy? she said.

“My goldfish died,” replied Nancy tearfully, without looking up, ” and I’ve just buried him.”

The neighbour was concerned, ” That is an awfully big hole for a goldfish isn’t it?”

Nancy patted down the last heap of earth then replied, “That’s because he’s inside your fucking cat!”

Sex Education

Johnny, a 9-year-old boy, came home from school one day and his mom asks him what the lesson was that day.  “Sex” he replies.

“I didn’t study that subject until I  was in secondary school,” said his mom.  “For lying to me you can go up to your room and stay there!”

His older sister gets back from school shortly after that time and her mom tells her what happened.  “Johhny wasn’t lying” she said, ” When I was 9 years old we had a sex education lesson.  Things have changed since you were at school mom.”

Feeling guilty the mom says ” I better go and apologise to Johhny.”

She goes up to his room and through the partially closed door she sees Johnny wanking.   “When you are through with your homework son you can come down for your supper,” She tells him.

Oh Dear

Two couples were playing cards one day.  Bob accidentally dropped some cards on the floor.  When he bent down under the table to pick them up, he noticed that Larry’s wife wasn’t wearing any underwear! Shocked by this, Bob hit his head on the table and emerged red-faced.   

Later, Bob went to the kitchen to get some refreshments.  Larry’s wife followed him in and asked, “Did you see anything that you liked under the table?” Bob admitted that, well, yes, he did.  She replied, “You can fuck it, but it will cost you £100.”  After a minute or two of thinking hard, Bob indicates that he is interested.  She tells him that since Larry works Friday afternoons and Bob doesn’t, Bob should come to her house around 2:00 pm the next Friday. 

Friday came and Bob went to her house at 2:00 pm, as arranged.  After paying her £100 they went into her bedroom, had sex and then Bob left.

Larry came home about 6:00 pm.  He asked his wife, “Did Bob come by this afternoon?” Reluctantly, she replied, “Yes, he did stop by for a few minutes.”

Next Larry asked, “Did he give you £100?”

She thinks, “Oh shit, he knows!” 

“Good,” Larry says.  “Bob came by the office this morning and borrowed £100 from me.  He said that he would stop by our house on his way home and pay me back.”

Hand Job

A guy walks into a pub and sees a sign hanging over the  bar which reads:

Cheese Sandwich: £1.50
Chicken Sandwich: £2.50
Hand Job: £10.00

Checking his wallet for the necessary payment, he walks up to the bar and beckons one of the three attractive blondes serving drinks to an eager looking group of men.  “Yes?” she enquires with a knowingly smile, “can I help you?

“I was wondering,” whispers the man, “are you the one who gives the hand jobs?”

“Yeah Baby,” she purrs, “I am.” 

The man replies, “Well wash your fucking hands, I want a cheese sandwich!” 

Holy Water

A train hits a busload of nuns and they all perish.  They are all in heaven trying to enter the pearly gates past St. Peter.  He asks the first nun, “Sister Karen, have you ever had any contact with a penis?”

The nun giggles and slyly replies, ” Well once I touched the head of one with the tip of my finger.”

St. Peter says, “OK, dip the tip of your finger in the holy water there and then you can pass through the gate.  He then asks the next nun the same question, “Sister Elizabeth, have you ever had any contact with a penis?”

The nun is a little reluctant but replies, “Well once I fondled and stroked one. 

St. Peter says, “OK, dip your whole hand in the holy water there and then you can pass through the gate.

All of a sudden there is a lot of commotion in the line.  One nun is pushing her way to the front of the line.  When she reaches the front of the line St. Peter says, “Sister, Sister, what seems to be the rush?

The nun replies, “If I am going to have to gargle that holy water, I want to go before Sister Bernadette sticks her ass in it!”

More Hose

A fireman comes home from work one day and tells his wife, “You know, we have a wonderful system at the fire station.  Bell one rings and we all put on our jackets.  Bell two rings and we slide down the pole.  Bell three rings and we’re ready to go on the engines.”

“That’s great love,” says his missus. 

“From now on,” he continues, “we are going to run this house the same way.  When I say Bell one I want you to strip naked.  When I say Bell two I want you to jump into bed.  When I say Bell three we are going to fuck all night!”

So the next night the fireman comes home from work and yells “BELL ONE!” and his wife takes off all her clothes.  “BELL TWO!” he shouts and she jumps into bed.  “BELL THREE!” he barks and they begin to have sex but after just a couple of minutes his wife yells “BELL FOUR!”

“What is the need for Bell four?” her husband asks.

“More hose” she replies “You’re nowhere near the fire!”

Ouch

A Christmas meal at an expensive restaurant is disturbed when a woman starts screaming, “My Son is choking” she cries, “He’s swallowed the coin in the Christmas pudding.  Please, can anyone help him?”

Without speaking a man stands up at the nearby table and walks over nonchalantly.  Smiling pleasantly he grips the boy by his balls and squeezes them.  The boy coughs and out pops the coin.

“Thank you so much” beams the relieved mom, “are you a paramedic?”

“No” replied the man, “I work for the Inland Revenue!”

Dumb Blonde

A blonde arrived for her first golf lesson and the professional tutor asked her to take a swing at a ball to see how she would do.  The blonde did so and completely fucked up her shot. 

The pro said, “Your swing is good but you are gripping the club too hard.  Grip the club gently as you would your husband’s cock.”

The blonde took another shot and nailed the ball 275 yards, straight down the fairway.

The pro said, “That was excellent! Let’s try again, only this time take the club out of your mouth!”

The American Soldier

There was once an American soldier, returning from war, on a train that was very over crowded.  He walked down the length of the train, looking for an empty seat.  The only unoccupied seat was directly adjacent to a posh, well dressed middle-aged lady and was being used by her little dog.  The weary soldier asked, “Please ma’am, may I sit in that seat?”

The woman looked down her nose at the soldier, sniffed and said, ” You American’s! You are such a rude class of people.  Can’t you see my little Fifi is using that seat?” 

The soldier walked away, determined to find a place to rest, but after another trip down to the end of the train, found himself again facing the posh woman.  Again he asked, “Please, lady.  May I sit there? I’m very tired.”

The snobby wrinkled her nose and snorted, “You Americans! Not only are you rude, but you are also arrogant.  Imagine!”

The soldier didn’t say another word.  He leaned over, picked up the little dog, tossed it out of the train window and sat down in the empty seat.

The woman shrieked and demanded that someone defend her and chastise the soldier.

An English gentleman sitting across the aisle spoke up, “You know, sir, you Americans do seem to have a penchant for doing the wrong thing.  You are bad at holding the fork in the wrong hand.  You drive your cars on the wrong side of the road, and now, sir, you have thrown the wrong bloody bitch out of the window!”

Blog Posts

Jokes: More Adult Jokes (Part One).

Jokes: More Adult Jokes (Part Three).

Links

GDJ on Pixabay – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of GDJ.  You can find more great work from the artist Gordon and lots more free stock photo’s at Pixabay.

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Jokes: More Adult Jokes (Part One)

Image © of VHV.RS

Adult jokes are just that, aimed at adults and I take no credit for any on this page.  Their original source or words belong to whoever and started wherever.  I tell them my way.  If they make you smile or chuckle like they originally did to me then that is great.  If not then I hope you find your sense of humour one day.

As defined by Collins Online Dictionary: “An adult is a mature, fully developed person.  An adult has reached the age when they are legally responsible for their actions”.  Generally, that means 18 and over but if you are under 18 or easily offended then you are on the wrong page.

Old Friend

An old man is lying in bed one day and looks down at his dick, “We have been through a lot together old friend” He sighs, “We were born together, we played together, we got married together, we had kids together but why did you have to go and die before me?!

No Onions

A woman goes to a farmers market. She comes upon a fruit and vegetable stand.  She asks the man at the stand, “Do you have any onions?”

The man replies, “No.” The woman continues her shopping at the farmers market and comes back to his stand ten minutes later. “Do you have any onions?” she asks.

 “No!” the man said.  She leaves the stand and continues her shopping.  She comes back ten minutes later and asks the man “Do you have any onions?”

The man says, “NO! Listen, how do you spell the ‘Straw’ in

Strawberry?”

The lady says, “S-t-r-a-w”.

The man asks, “How do you spell the ‘Rasp’ in raspberry?”

The lady replies, “R-a-s-p”.

The man asks, “How do you spell the ‘Fuck’ in onions?”

The lady replies, “There is no ‘Fuck’ in onions”

The man says, “THAT’S WHAT I’VE BEEN TRYING TO TELL YOU!!!”

Sex Education

Johnny, a 9-year-old boy, came home from school one day and his mom asks him what the lesson was that day.  “Sex” he replies.

“I didn’t study that subject until I  was in secondary school,” said his mom.  “For lying to me you can go up to your room and stay there!”

His older sister gets back from school shortly after that time and her mom tells her what happened.  “Johhny wasn’t lying” she said, ” When I was 9 years old we had a sex education lesson.  Things have changed since you were at school mom.”

Feeling guilty the mom says ” I better go and apologise to Johhny.”

She goes up to his room and through the partially closed door she sees Johnny wanking.   “When you are through with your homework son you can come down for your supper,” She tells him.

The Heimlich Manouvere 

Two blokes were seated at the end of a bar when a young lady seated a few stools away began to choke on some peanuts.  She was turning blue and obviously in serious respiratory distress.  One said to the other, “That bird over there is having a bad time!” The other agreed and said, ” Do you think we should go and help her?”

“You bet,” said his mate, and with that, he ran over and said, ” Can you breathe?” She shook her head no.  He said, ” Can you speak?” She again shook her head no.  With that, he pulled up her shirt and licked her on her arse.  She was so shocked, she coughed up the obstruction and began to breathe.  With relief, the good samaritan goes back to his friend and says, ” It is funny how that hind lick manoeuvre always works!”

The Drunk

This guy is sitting in a bar drunk, he asks the barman where’s the toilet at? The barman told him to go down the hall and make a right.  Well all of a sudden, everybody at the bar hears this loud scream and wonders what is going on in the toilet? A few minutes go by again and everybody at the bar hears another loud scream that came out of the toilet again.  This time the barman goes to the toilet to investigate what the drunk is screaming about.  He opened the door and asked the drunk, ” What’s all the screaming about in here? You are scaring all my customers away.”

The drunk said, ” I’m sitting on the toilet and every time I go to flush it, something comes up and squeezes the hell out of my balls.”  With that, the barman opens up the door and looks in and says, “No wonder, you’re sitting on my mop bucket!”

Swearing

A seven-year-old boy and his four-year-old brother were upstairs in their bedroom,  “You know what?” said the seven-year-old, ” I think it’s about time we start swearing.”  The four-year-old nodded his head in approval.  “When we go downstairs for breakfast, I’m going to say shit, and you say arse, OK?” The four-year-old agreed with enthusiasm and they both went downstairs to the kitchen.  Their mom walked in and asked the seven-year-old what he wanted for breakfast.  “Oh shit mom, I guess I’ll have some cornflakes.” WHACK! He flew out of his chair, tumbled across the floor, got up and ran upstairs crying his eyes out.

The mom then looked at the four-year-old and asked with a stern voice, “And what do you want for breakfast young man?”

“I don’t know,” He blubbered, “but you can bet your arse it won’t be those fucking cornflakes!”

A Glass Of Cider

A little girl came running into her house bawling her eyes out and cradling her hand.  “Mommy, quick! Get me a glass of cider!” she wailed.

“Why do you want a glass of cider?” asked her mom.

“I cut my hand on a thorn, and I want the pain to go away! said the little girl.  Confused, but weary of her child’s whining, the mom obliged and poured her a glass of cider.  The little girl immediately dunked her hand in it.  “Ouch! It still hurts! This cider doesn’t work!” she whined.

“What are you talking about?” asked her increasingly perplexed parent. “Why did you ask for a glass of cider then?

The little girl replied, “Well, I overheard my big sister say that whenever she gets a prick in her hand, she can’t wait to get it in cider!”

Bank Policy

A crusty old man walks into a bank and says to the lady at the window, “I want to open a fucking account.”  To which the astonished woman replies, “I beg your pardon, sir; I must have misunderstood you.  What did you say?”

Listen up, shit head.  I said I want to open a pissing account right now!”

“I’m very sorry sir, but we do not tolerate that kind of language in this bank.” So without saying anything else the lady leaves the window and goes over to the bank manager to tell him about the situation.  They both return and the manager asks the old man, “What seems to be the problem here, sir?”

There is no bastard problem, you wanker!” the man replies, “I have just won 50 million pounds in the fucking lottery and I want to open a fucking account in this fucking bank!”

“I see,” says the manager excitedly, “and this fucking bitch here is giving you a hard time?”

Bullets

A woman pregnant with triplets is walking down the street one day when a masked robber runs out of the bank and shoots her three times in the stomach.  Luckily her babies were OK.  The surgeon seeing to her decides to leave the bullets in her because it is too risky to operate.  All is fine for the next 16 years and then one daughter walks into the room in tears.  “What’s wrong?” asks her mom.

“I was having a wee and this bullet came out!” replied her daughter.  Her mom tells it’s OK and explains what happened 16 years ago.  About a week later the second daughter walks into the room in tears.  “Mom, I was having a wee and this bullet came out!”  Again the mom tells her not to worry about it and explained what happened 16 years ago.  A week later the only boy of the family walks into the room in tears.  “It’s OK,” said his mom, “I know what happened, you were having a wee and the bullet came out, yes?”

“NO!” shouted the boy, ” I was wanking off and I shot the dog!”

Tarzan Nookie

One day Jane met Tarzan in the jungle.  She was very attracted to him during her questions to him about his life she asked him how he managed for sex.  “What is sex? he asked.   Jane explained to him what sex was and he said, ” Me use hole in tree trunk.”  Horrified, she replied, “Tarzan you have it all wrong but I will show you how to do it properly.”  She took off all her clothes, laid down on the ground and spread her legs wide open for him.  “Here,” she told him, “You must put it in here.  Tarzan removed his loincloth, stepped closer and then gave her an almighty kick in her fanny.  Jane rolled around in agony.  Eventually, she managed to gasp, “What the hell did you do that for?” To which Tarzan replied, “Me checking for bees!”

Blog Posts

Jokes: More Adult Jokes (Part Two).

Jokes: More Adult Jokes (Part Three).

Notes And Links

GDJ on Pixabay – The image shown at the top of this page is the copyright of GDJ.  You can find more great work from the artist Gordon and lots more free stock photo’s at Pixabay.

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Blue Peter: An Advent Crown For Christmas

Image © BBC / Octopus Publishing Group

Blue Peter, the world’s longest-running children’s television programme, is known for its famous ‘makes’ – creative projects which transform everyday household objects into toys and gifts. 

The make featured on this page is taken from “Here’s One I Made Earlier”, a book I got from The Works at a bargain price of 75p!

The collection in this book reproduces some of Blue Peter’s most memorable designs and has a foreword by Valerie Singleton and contributions from former presenters and the ‘Queen of Makes’, Margaret Parnell.

An Advent Crown For Christmas

Blue Peter - Here's One I Made Earlier Front Cover: Image © BBC / Octopus Publishing Group
An Advent Crown for Christmas: Image © BBC / Octopus Publishing Group
An Advent Crown for Christmas: Image © BBC / Octopus Publishing Group
Blue Peter - Here's One I Made Earlier Back Cover: Image © BBC / Octopus Publishing Group

About Blue Peter

You can read all about Blue Peter here.

Blog Posts

Books: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens.

Christmas: A Christmas Carol By Charles Dickens – Screen Versions.

Christmas: Nostalgic Christmas Adverts.

Jokes: Christmas Jokes.

Music: Christmas Music. 

Poetry: A Harley Davidson Christmas Poem By Unknown.

Poetry: A Visit From St. Nicholas By Clement Clarke Moore.

Television: Blue Peter.

Notes And Links

Blue Peter – Official page on CBBC. 

You can read about Valerie Singelton here.

You can read about John Noakes here.

The images on this page are copyright of the BBC and Octopus Publishing Group.

Go To Blue Peter
Go To Christmas

Television: Blue Peter

Image © of Max Rahubovskiy via Pexels

Although started in 1958, I associate Blue Peter in my life mainly to the 1970’s and 1980’s for it is in these decades I watched it the most.  I wouldn’t say I was a fan of the show, I preferred Magpie more,  but I watched it sometimes as a school kid back in the day when the mood took me.

When Jnr and Deb were kids I may have watched a few then but it was more on in the background and I never paid much attention to it as the nostalgia for it had gone for me by then.

Image © of BBC via CBBC

Blue Peter Logo.

About Blue Peter

Blue Peter is a British children’s television magazine programme created by John Hunter Blair.  It is the longest-running children’s TV show in the world, having been broadcast since October 1958.  It was broadcast primarily from BBC Television Centre in London until September 2011, when the programme moved to dock10 studios at MediaCityUK in Salford, Greater Manchester.  It is currently shown live on the CBBC television channel on Thursdays at 5 pm.

Following its original creation, the programme was developed by a BBC team led by Biddy Baxter; she became the programme editor in 1965, relinquishing the role in 1988.  Throughout the show’s history, there have been 40 presenters; currently, it is hosted by Richie Driss, Mwaksy Mudenda, and Adam Beales.

The show used a nautical title and theme.  Its content, which follows a magazine/entertainment format, features viewer and presenter challenges, competitions, celebrity interviews, popular culture and sections on making arts and crafts items from household items.  The show has had a garden in both London and Salford, known as the Blue Peter Garden, which is used during the summer and for outdoor activities.  The programme has featured a number of pets that became household names, such as dogs Petra, Shep, and Goldie, as well as other animals such as tortoises, cats, and parrots.  The longevity of Blue Peter has established it as a significant part of British culture and British heritage.

Blue Peter Theme Music

Click here to hear every Blue Peter opening theme from 1958 to the present day.

Blue Peter Content

Blue Peter‘s content is wide-ranging.  Most programmes are broadcast live but usually include at least one filmed report.  There will also often be a demonstration of an activity in the studio, or a music or dance performance.  Between the 1960s and 2011 the programme was made at BBC Television Centre, and often came from Studio 1, the fourth-largest TV studio in Britain and one of the largest in Europe.  This enabled Blue Peter to include large-scale demonstrations and performances within the live programme.  From the September 2007 series, the programme was broadcast from a small fixed set in Studio 2.  However, from 2009 the series began to use the larger studios once more; also more programmes were broadcast in their entirety from the Blue Peter Garden.  The show is also famous for its “makes”, which are demonstrations of how to construct a useful object or prepare food.  These have given rise to the oft-used phrase “Here’s one I made earlier”, as presenters bring out a perfect and completed version of the object they are making – a phrase credited to Christopher Trace, though Marguerite Patten is another possibility.  Trace also used the line “And now for something completely different”, which was later taken up by Monty Python.  Time is also often given over to reading letters and showing pictures sent in by viewers.

Over 5,000 editions have been produced since 1958, and almost every episode from 1964 onwards still exists in the BBC archives.  This is unusual for programmes of that era.  Editor Biddy Baxter personally ensured that telerecordings and, from 1970, video recordings were kept of each episode.

Many items from Blue Peter‘s history have become embedded in British popular culture, especially moments when things have gone wrong, such as the much-repeated clip of Lulu the baby elephant (from a 1969 edition) who urinated and defecated on the studio floor, appeared to tread on the foot of presenter John Noakes and then proceeded to attempt an exit, dragging her keeper along behind her.  Although it is often assumed to have been broadcast live, the edition featuring Lulu was one of the rare occasions when the programme was pre-recorded, as the presenters were en route to Ceylon for the summer expedition at the time of transmission.  Other well-remembered and much-repeated items from this era include the Girl Guides’ campfire that got out of hand on the 1970 Christmas edition, John Noakes’s report on the cleaning of Nelson’s Column, and Simon Groom referring to a previous item on the production of a facsimile door knocker for Durham Cathedral which was displayed alongside the original, with the words ‘what a beautiful pair of knockers’.

Blue Peter History

Early Years

Blue Peter was first aired on 16 October 1958.  It had been commissioned to producer John Hunter Blair by Owen Reed, the head of children’s programmes at the BBC, as there were no programmes for children aged between five and eight.  Reed got his inspiration after watching Children’s Television Club, the brainchild of former radio producer, Trevor Hill, who created the latter show as a successor to his programme Out of School, broadcast on BBC Radio’s Children’s Hour; Hill networked the programme from BBC Manchester and launched it aboard the MV Royal Iris ferry on the River Mersey, Liverpool with presenter Judith Chalmers welcoming everyone aboard at the bottom of the gangplank.

It was subsequently televised about once a month.  Hill relates how Reed came to stay with him and his wife, Margaret Potter, in Cheshire and was so taken with the “Blue Peter” flag on the side of the ship and the programme in general, that he asked to rename it and take it to London to be broadcast on a weekly basis (see Reed’s obituary).  The “Blue Peter” is used as a maritime signal, indicating that the vessel flying it is about to leave, and Reed chose the name to represent ‘a voyage of adventure’ on which the programme would set out.  Hunter Blair also pointed out that blue was a popular colour with children, and Peter was a common name of a typical child’s friend.

The first two presenters were Christopher Trace, an actor, and Leila Williams, winner of Miss Great Britain in 1957.  The two presenters were responsible for activities that matched the traditional gender roles.  As broadcasting historian, Asa Briggs expressed it in 1995: “Leila played with dolls; Chris played with trains”.  They were supported on occasion by Tony Hart, an artist who later designed the ship logo, who told stories about an elephant called Packi (or Packie).  It was broadcast every Thursday for fifteen minutes (17.00–17.15) on BBC TV (which later became BBC One).  Over the first few months, more features were added, including competitions, documentaries, cartoons, and stories.  Early programmes were almost entirely studio-based, with very few filmed inserts being made.

1960 – 1969

From Monday 10 October 1960, Blue Peter was switched to every Monday and extended from 15 minutes to 20 minutes (17.00–17.20).  In 1961, Hunter Blair became ill and was often absent.  After he produced his last edition on 12 June 1961, a series of temporary producers took up the post.  Hunter Blair was replaced the following September by Clive Parkhurst.  He did not get along with Leila Williams, who recalled “he could not find anything for me to do”, and in October, Williams did not appear for six editions, and was eventually fired, leaving Christopher Trace on his own or with one-off presenters.  Parkhurst was replaced by John Furness, and Anita West joined Trace on 7 May 1962.  She featured in just 16 editions, making her the shortest-serving presenter, and was replaced by Valerie Singleton, who presented regularly until 1972 and on special assignments until 1981.  Following the departure of Furness, a new producer who was committed to Blue Peter was required, so Biddy Baxter was appointed.  At the time she was contracted to schools’ programmes on the radio, and therefore unable to take up her new post immediately.

It was suggested that Edward Barnes, a production assistant, would temporarily produce the show until Baxter arrived, at which point he would become her assistant.  This suggestion was turned down, and a more experienced producer, Leonard Chase, was appointed, with Barnes as his assistant.  Baxter eventually joined Blue Peter at the end of October 1962.

During this period, many iconic features of Blue Peter were introduced.  The first appeal took place in December 1962, replacing the practice of reviewing toys that children would ask for themselves.  Blue Peter‘s first pet, a brown and white mongrel dog named Petra, was introduced on 17 December 1962.  The puppy soon died of distemper, and having decided against upsetting young viewers over the news, Barnes and Baxter had to search London pet shops for a convincing clandestine replacement.  Features such as “makes” (normally involving creating something such as an advent crown, out of household junk) and cooking became regular instalments on Blue Peter and continue to be used today.  The Blue Peter badge was introduced in 1963, along with the programme’s new logo designed by Tony Hart.  Baxter introduced a system that ensured replies sent to viewers’ letters were personal; as a girl, she had written to Enid Blyton and twice received a standard reply, which had upset her.

The next year, from 28 September 1964, Blue Peter began to be broadcast twice weekly, with Baxter becoming the editor in 1965, and Barnes and Rosemary Gill (an assistant producer who had joined as a temporary producer while Baxter was doing jury service) becoming the programme’s producers.  The first Blue Peter book, an annual in all but name, was published that year, and one was produced nearly every year after that, until 2010.  A third presenter, John Noakes, was introduced at the end of 1965 and became the longest-serving presenter.  A complete contrast to Trace, Noakes set the scene for “daredevil” presenters that have continued through the generations of presenters.  Trace left Blue Peter in July 1967, and was replaced by Peter Purves in November.  The trio of Valerie Singleton, John Noakes and Peter Purves lasted five years, and according to Richard Marson were ‘the most famous presenting team in the show’s history.  In 1965, the first Summer Expedition (a filming trip abroad) was held in Norway, and continued every year (except 1986 and 2011) until 2012, all over the world.

1970 – 1999

The first colour edition of Blue Peter aired on 14 September 1970, and the last black and white edition on 24 June 1974.  A regular feature of the 1970s was the Special Assignments, which were essentially reports on interesting topics, filmed on location.  Singleton took this role, and in effect became the programme’s “roving reporter”.   Blue Peter also offered breaking news on occasion, such as the 1971 eruption of Mount Etna, as well as unique items such as the first appearance of Uri Geller on British television.  In May 1976, presenter Lesley Judd interviewed Otto Frank, father of Anne Frank, after he had agreed to bring his daughter’s diaries to Britain.  From 1971 the summer expedition from the previous year was edited into special programmes broadcast under the title Blue Peter Flies The World, televised during the summer break when the team were recording the latest expedition.  The first was shown in July 1971 and featured the expedition to Jamaica.

In 1974, the Blue Peter Garden was officially opened in a green space outside the Television Centre restaurant block.  By this time, Blue Peter had become an established children’s programme, with regular features which have since become traditions.  In 1978, the show celebrated its twentieth anniversary with a nationwide balloon launch from five regional cities during a special edition of the programme when Christopher Trace, Leila Williams, Valerie Singleton and Peter Purves returned.  John Noakes contributed a message pre-recorded on film.  At this time, Trace introduced the Blue Peter Outstanding Endeavour Award.   Its theme music was updated by Mike Oldfield in 1979, and at the end of the decade a new presenting team was brought in, consisting of Simon Groom, Tina Heath and Christopher Wenner. They were overshadowed by the success of the previous two decades and failed to make as much of an impact.  Heath decided to leave after a year when she discovered she was pregnant but agreed to have a live scan of her baby, something which had never been done on television before.  Blue Peter was praised for this by the National Childbirth Trust who told the BBC that in ‘five minutes, Blue Peter had done more to educate children about birth than they’d achieved in ten years of sending out leaflets’.  Wenner decided to leave along with Heath on 23 June 1980.

Sarah Greene and Peter Duncan both joined in 1980, and a new producer, Lewis Bronze, joined in 1982.  The 1980s saw the Blue Peter studio become more colourful and bright, with the presenters gradually wearing more fashionable outfits, in contrast to the more formal appearance of previous decades.  Several videos of Blue Peter were made available from 1982, the first being Blue Peter Makes, and an omnibus comprising the two weekly editions appeared in 1986 on Sunday mornings.  Ahead of the show’s 25th anniversary in October 1983, BBC1 ran a series Blue Peter Goes Silver, revisiting previous summer expeditions.  The 25th anniversary itself was commemorated by a documentary presented by Valerie Singleton shown on BBC1 on Sunday, 16 October 1983.  This was followed the next day by a special edition of the programme when Christopher Trace presented the annual Outstanding Endeavour Award and Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves, Christopher Wenner, Tina Heath and Sarah Greene returned to celebrate the show’s birthday with the current presenting trio of Simon Groom, Peter Duncan and Janet Ellis who launched a national balloon treasure hunt.  On 27 June 1988, Baxter took part in her final show, after nearly 26 years of involvement, and Bronze took her place as editor.  Around this time, Blue Peter became distinctively environmentally aware and introduced a green badge in November 1988 for achievements related to the environment.  Shortly before, in October 1988, the show celebrated its thirtieth anniversary with a competition to design the cover of a commemorative issue of the ‘Radio Times’ and Valerie Singleton presented the Outstanding Endeavour Award on the birthday show itself.  The following year, the award was presented for the last time.

On 13 September 1984, Champion trampolinist and professional performer Michael Sundin presented for the first time, as a replacement for Peter Duncan.  He had been talent-spotted by the Blue Peter team when they filmed an item on the set of “Return to OZ” (Sundin was playing the part of Tik-Tok.)  After 77 appearances as a Blue Peter presenter, his contract was not renewed.  It has since been explained by Biddy Baxter, that he attracted complaints from viewers, stating in her Autobiography that homophobia was not the reason for his departure, “he came across as a whinger….and an effeminate whinger to boot”, “… it was nothing to do with his sexual proclivities”.  Sundin successfully continued his performing career but lost his life to an AIDS-related illness in 1989.

In 1989 (and again in 1992 and 1994), new arrangements of the theme tune were introduced.  Due to falling ratings in BBC children’s programming, BBC1 controller Alan Yentob suggested airing a third edition of Blue Peter each week from 1995.  This meant that it was sometimes pre-recorded; Joe Godwin, the director, suggested that the Friday edition should be a lighter version of Blue Peter, which would concentrate on music, celebrities and games.  Helen Lederer presented a documentary on BBC2 to celebrate the show’s 35th anniversary Here’s One I Made Earlier, with a special edition of the regular programme featuring the returns of Leila Williams, John Noakes and Lesley Judd amongst many other presenters. Neither Noakes nor Judd had appeared in the studio since leaving the programme and Williams was returning for the first time in 15 years.  A fourth presenter, Katy Hill, was introduced in 1995, but unlike earlier decades, there was little stability in the line-up, with resignations and new additions made almost every year of the decade.  The 1990s also saw many more live broadcasts on location, with many shot entirely away from the studio.  Blue Peter was also one of the first television series to launch a website.  Oliver Macfarlane replaced Bronze as editor in 1996.

1998 marked the 40th anniversary of the TV show.  Apart from two summer proms concerts, the most talked about event to celebrate the milestone was a trip behind LNER Peppercorn Class A2 60532 Blue Peter on an Edinburgh to London rail tour.  The special train in question was Days out Limited’s “Heart of Midlothian” from London Kings Cross to Edinburgh Waverley on Sun 19 April 1998, with 60532 working the train from Edinburgh.  Due to safety rules, none of the presenters was supposed to ride onboard the footplate during the trip.  Peter Kirk, who was in charge onboard the train and who was presenting from the footplate, however, allowed Stuart Miles to travel onboard the footplate between Newark-on-Trent and Peterborough.  This was the stretch of track which, on 3 July 1938, saw the world speed record for steam locomotives of 126 mph (203 km/h) set by LNER A4 Locomotive no. 4468 Mallard.

In October 1998, Richard Bacon was sacked, following reports in News of the World that he had taken cocaine.  This incident followed shortly after the show’s 40th anniversary when previous presenters returned for a special programme.  Those returning included Leila Williams, Valerie Singleton, John Noakes, Peter Purves, Diane Louise Jordan, Anthea Turner, John Leslie, Tim Vincent, Yvette Fielding, Caron Keating, Mark Curry, Janet Ellis, Peter Duncan, Sarah Greene, Tina Heath, Simon Groom and Christopher Wenner.  Steve Hocking then replaced Macfarlane as editor, at what was regarded as a difficult period for the programme.  He introduced a further re-arrangement of the theme tune and a new graphics package in September 1999.

2000 – 2010

The 2000s began with the opening of two previously buried time capsules.  Former presenters including Singleton, Purves and Noakes were invited back to assist, and the programme also looked at life in the 1970s when the first capsule was buried.  With Hill’s departure and replacement by Liz Barker in 2000, the new team of herself, Konnie Huq, Simon Thomas, and Matt Baker were consistent for the next few years.  The Friday edition, as in the previous decade, featured games, competitions and celebrities, but additionally, there was a drama series, The Quest, which featured cameos of many former presenters.

It was at this time that the new Head of the BBC Children’s Department, Nigel Pickard, asked for Blue Peter to be broadcast all year round.  This was achieved by having two editions per week instead of three during the summer months and using pre-recorded material.  The early 2000s also introduced Christmas productions, in which the presenters took part.  In 2003, Richard Marson became the new editor, and his first tasks included changing the output of Blue Peter on the digital CBBC.  The first year of the channel’s launch consisted of repeated editions, plus spin-off series Blue Peter Unleashed and Blue Peter Flies the World.  This new arrangement involved a complex schedule of live programmes and pre-recorded material, being broadcast on BBC One and CBBC. Marson also introduced a brand new set, graphics and music.

In September 2007, a new editor, Tim Levell, took over.  At the same time, budget cuts meant that the programme came from a smaller studio.  In February 2008 the BBC One programme was moved from 5 pm to 4.35 pm to accommodate The Weakest Link, and as a result, Blue Peter‘s ratings initially dropped to as low as 100,000 viewers in the age 6–12 bracket, before steadily improving.

As with the previous decade, numerous presenters joined and left the programme.  This included the exits of Thomas, Baker and Barker and the additions of Zöe Salmon, Gethin Jones and Andy Akinwolere.  Early 2008 saw the departure of Huq, who had become the longest-serving female presenter with over ten years on the show.  Later that year, Salmon and Jones both left and the presenting team of Akinwolere with new additions Helen Skelton and Joel Defries was introduced.

On 16 October 2008, Blue Peter celebrated its 50th Anniversary with a reception at Buckingham Palace hosted by Queen Elizabeth II and featuring several former presenters.  There was a special live edition of the show broadcast to celebrate the anniversary with many returning presenters and a 60-minute documentary on BBC1 featuring interviews with many previous presenters and production staff, including Edward Barnes, Biddy Baxter and Rosemary Gill.

Writing in the BBC’s in-house magazine, Ariel, in 2009, BBC Children’s Controller Richard Deverell announced plans to re-invent the show to be more like the BBC’s motoring programme Top Gear.  Deverell hopes that by adding “danger and excitement”, Blue Peter will achieve the same “playground buzz” among children as Top Gear.

2011 – 2017

In January 2011 Barney Harwood was introduced to the programme as a replacement for Defries, who had departed in late 2010 after two years.  Unusually, Harwood was no stranger to Blue Peter viewers, having appeared as a presenter on CBBC for many years, on shows including Prank Patrol and Bear Behaving Badly.

On 29 March 2011 Blue Peter became the first programme in the UK to broadcast an entire show in 360 degrees on the web.  Viewers were able to watch the programme via their TVs and simultaneously interact with the television studio in front of and behind the cameras on the website.   Viewers were also challenged to play a game where they had to find particular crew members and staff dressed up in distinctive costumes.

The final edition of Blue Peter to broadcast from the BBC’s Television Centre in London was broadcast on 28 June 2011, before a move to the BBC’s new facilities at Dock10, MediaCityUK.  The set left behind at BBC Television Centre was subsequently purchased and installed at Sunderland University’s David Puttnam Media Centre in August 2013.

When the new series started on 26 September 2011, after the usual summer break, Harwood and Skelton revealed the new look Blue Peter studio along with the new music and title sequence.  Departed presenter Andy Akinwolere was not initially replaced, and for the first time in 50 years, only two presenters remained on the programme.  The new Blue Peter Garden, located outside the studios, was officially opened by Princess Anne in February 2012.

From 12 January 2012, Blue Peter has been broadcast all year round (with no break for summer) once a week, its original premiere being on CBBC on Thursdays at 5.45 pm, changed to 5.30 pm from April 2013 then 5:00 pm from March 2015.  It was usually repeated on Fridays on BBC One, although this ceased in December 2012.  A repeat airs at 9.00 am on Sundays. At this time, Levell left to work at BBC Radio 5 Live; he was replaced (initially in an acting capacity) as editor by Ewan Vinnicombe, who had worked on the programme as a producer since 2007.  The reformatted Blue Peter occasionally also included specials and spin-offs such as “Helen’s Polar Adventure” or the Stargazing Live special on other days of the week.

In 2013 Lindsey Russell was voted the 36th presenter via Blue Peter – You Decide!, a series of five programmes hosted by Dick and Dom, where ten aspiring presenters were set a number of challenges to prove that they were worthy of the position.  Judges Cel Spellman, Eamonn Holmes and Myleene Klass decided the final three before viewers were given the chance to vote online.  Russell joined Blue Peter in September of that year, shortly before Skelton’s departure and the introduction of her replacement Radzi Chinyanganya.

From October 2013, the team consisted of Harwood, Russell and Chinyanganya.  The format adapted with slightly different branding and a more classic take on the show, as well as beginning Blue Peter Bites, which are five-minute clips showing just one challenge or video from episodes broadcast on CBBC.  Blue Peter guide pup Iggy joined the team in 2014 and Shelley the Tortoise continues to make occasional appearances.  The Blue Peter Garden is currently maintained by child gardener George who appears throughout the year.  The team made more use of the website with more quizzes and videos such as ‘Blue Peter VS…’ and ‘Ultimate Challenges’ as well as holding a fan club hour after the show where fans could leave comments as to the answers of riddles or headline suggestions and ask guests questions.  A popular game on the programme, Spot Shelley was also introduced, where, in most episodes, an animated version of Shelley the tortoise is hiding somewhere/on something and viewers must leave a comment on the website during the show, the first person to spot her wins a shout-out (or some more expensive or weird prizes as Harwood would often joke, such as a house in Spain or a unicorn called Eric).  From April 2017, the show reverted to 5:30 pm.  In September 2017, Harwood left the show, again leaving just two presenters.

In the summerBlue Peter often challenges its viewers to earn all of their Blue Peter badges (with the exception of orange and gold) through five weeks, where the team look at each individual badge for a week, finishing with the limited time Sports badge which appears every summer with a different design.  In the show before these weeks, the team show viewers how to make something to keep their badges in/on and continue the theme through the weeks, these have included the Badge Baton Relay in 2016, where badges stored within a baton tube and the Big Badge Boat Bonanza in 2017, where badges displayed on the iconic BP ship, a 2D model that can be made from paper.

Ahead of their Jubilee celebrations, Blue Peter introduced its first-ever Guest Editor to the show on 19 October 2017 which was children’s author Dame Jacqueline Wilson.  Guest Editors have control for the day and plan what they what to show on their edition, as well as taking control behind the scenes.

2018 – Present

A special programme broadcast on 1 February 2018, marked Blue Peter’s 5000th edition.  A brand new Diamond badge was revealed for the first time, designed by Henry Holland.  This was only to be awarded within the special 60th year of 2018.

On 12 October 2017, it was revealed that outside of MediaCityUK, a Hollywood style walk of fame would be created with the names of famous people who have received a Gold Blue Peter badge.  The walkway would lead up to the front of the studios and would help to mark 60 years of Blue Peter.

There were various celebrations across the UK for “The Big Birthday Year”.  In January, a competition was launched to design Blue Peter‘s second birthday balloon to be flown.  In May, the Millennium Time Capsule formally buried under the Millennium Dome, which was dug up accidentally in 2017 by builders went on tour with various past presenters around the country.  A play, “Once Seen On Blue Peter”, ran at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August, with six former presenters appearing in it.

On 16 October 2018, a special one-hour live edition of the programme, entitled Blue Peter: Big 60th Birthday, was broadcast on CBBC.  Guests included The Vamps, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Ed Sheeran, who was presented with a gold Blue Peter badge.  Former presenters returned for the show and contributed to the broadcast, including Leila Williams, Anita West, Valerie Singleton, Peter Purves, Lesley Judd, Sarah Greene, Peter Duncan, Janet Ellis, Yvette Fielding, John Leslie, Diane-Louise Jordan, Anthea Turner, Tim Vincent, Stuart Miles, Katy Hill, Romana D’Annunzio, Richard Bacon, Konnie Huq, Simon Thomas, Liz Barker, Zöe Salmon, Andy Akinwolere, Helen Skelton, Joel Defries and Barney Harwood.  Matt Baker contributed a pre-recorded message and Mark Curry was represented by a lego model as he had to cancel his contribution due to ill health.  The programme was repeated on BBC Two on 20 October.  The celebration was also marked by other BBC programming, including The One Show hosted by Matt Baker and former Blue Peter contributor Gabby Logan, which featured Sarah Greene, Mark Curry, Simon Thomas and Konnie Huq; ITV’s Lorraine, where Greene appeared with Leila Williams and Anthea Turner; and BBC Breakfast which featured Lesley Judd.  A documentary entitled Happy Birthday Blue Peter was broadcast that evening on BBC Radio 2.  It was hosted by Barney Harwood and featured interviews with past and present presenters, as well as members of the production team.  As part of the birthday celebrations, a new plant species was named “Blue Peter”.  In February 2019 a gritter was named and decorated “Blue Peter”, unveiled by Russell.

On 3 June 2021, the show received a refresh with a new logo, title sequence, music and studio.  This was the first major refresh since the show’s move to Salford in 2011.  The studio is environmentally-friendly and is composed of upcycled materials from past studios.

On 24 June 2021, Russell announced that she would be leaving the show, after eight years.  Her final show aired on 15 July 2021.

Read more about Blue Peter here.

The above articles were sourced from Wikipedia and are subject to change.

Blog Posts

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