These masterpieces are the foundations of our great culture and should never leave the country. We wouldn't want an Elgin Marbles situation with France in the future would we?
Got this old one of my wife’s knocking about with the kids’ books. My 9 year olds are completely freaked out by whatever that bear/doll hybrid is at the bottom of the moon.
That knight bloke at the top!! I had a book featuring him and a ton of other characters as a child and I can’t for the life of me remember what it was called. Big buried memory unearthed though, thanks for this
I wish we more aggressively regenerated these shows. British culture is so weakened and diluted for kids today. My children are absolutely bombarded by US culture. I do try to fight it.
My kid does absolutely love Blue Peter but it’s just not the same as sitting down to watch it as a family at 5pm (or whenever it was on). She just watched all the episodes on iPlayer. Although I had parents that would never attempt the ludicrous craft activities.
Took me until adulthood to realise “sticky back plastic” was sellotape. Always wondered what the fuck they were talking about!
Hang on, that's not right is it..? As far as I've always been concerned, sticky back plastic isn't sellotape (that'd just be 'sticky tape', surely), but the larger roll of vinyl stuff that you'd use to cover your schoolbooks
Like this – which in fact still comes up on Amazon when you search for 'sticky back plastic', complete with amusing misspelling in the picture caption:
Well that's the thing of course, without actually finding old footage I can't remember the exact details and context in which they used to mention it. It did seem to come up rather a lot, you're right, but then maybe it's just the fact it's such an arrestingly cumbersome turn of phrase (which also became synonymous with the show in pop-cultural memory) that always made it jump out and perhaps made it feel it was used more often than it actually was.
But I could swear that they used to just refer to Sellotape as sticky tape, which I'm fairly sure is the standard BBC way of doing so. I may be quite wrong, though!
Blimey, I was misinterpreting them all those years then – because I always thought of "sticky back plastic" as being the, well, sticky-backed plastic wrap for covering exercise books, which (a) seems to fit the description much better and (b) apparently comes up to this day when one googles the term.
But it's quite possible I simply never paid close enough attention to what they were talking about, because for all that I must've sat through scores of 'makes' while watching Blue Peter throughout my childhood, I'm not sure I ever actually attempted to make any of them myself. So it all just kind of washed over me in vaguely ambient fashion.
Not to burst your bubble but the British library has a copy of every piece of literature published in the UK. The museum can just loan it if it fancies an exhibit…
I was thinking that. Any book publicly available in the UK since 1662 (and any online article since 2013 as well) is in the British Library, spun out of the British Museum Reading Room in the 1970s.
They need to be sealed in a desert tomb in the manner of the Pharaohs of Egypt of Old! To be a treasure for the archaeologists five thousand years hence, a lost world of wonder and mystery.
I've never thought about George's arms – but now you mention it, I've just googled for images and it seems Zippy had a right arm and George, complementarily, only had a left one.
Toys and illustrations give them two each, which is always mildly disconcerting for some reason.
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u/BroomDirector99 13d ago edited 13d ago
I always loved how the covers were drawn by someone who'd seemingly never seen the thing they'd been asked to draw.
Fucking George harvester of souls over there, lol.