Views of The Island
The Isle of Wight has traditionally seen as a place for retirees and holiday makers. The Beatles song When I'm Sixty-Four mentions 'every summer we could rent a cottage on the Isle of Wight'.
This non-threatening image is also used to comic effect by the Monty Python team in their 1976 sketch Mr Neutron:
- Commander: OK. We'll bomb Neutron out. Get me Moscow! Peking! and Shanklin, Isle of Wight!
- Cut to stock film of B52s on a bombing raid.
- Voice Over: And so the Great Powers and the people of Shanklin, Isle of Wight, drew their net in ever-tightening circles around the most dangerous threat to peace the world has ever faced. They bombed Cairo, Bangkok, Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Harrow, Hammersmith, Stepney, Wandsworth and Enfield... But always it was the wrong place.
Today the island maintains this image, while also being seen nationally as a destination for the 'sea and sandcastles' style of family holiday. In an episode of the TV panel game QI, Alan Davies describes the Isle of Wight as still stuck in the 1950s, with quaint shops and so forth. However Mr. Davies is not known as a frequent visitor, if ever.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of The Isle Of Wight
Famous quotes containing the words views of the, views and/or island:
“It is even more grim and wild than you had anticipated, a damp and intricate wilderness, in the spring everywhere wet and miry. The aspect of the country, indeed, is universally stern and savage, excepting the distant views of the forest from hills, and the lake prospects, which are mild and civilizing in a degree.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Parents must begin to discover their children as individuals of developing tastes and views and so help them be, and see, themselves as thinking, feeling people. It is far too easy for a middle-years child to absorb an over-simplified picture of himself as a sloppy, unreliable, careless, irresponsible, lazy creature and not much more—an attitude toward himself he will carry far beyond these years.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
““Our island home
Is far beyond the wave;we will no longer roam.””
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)