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, views and/or island:
“The universe is wider than our views of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The absolute things, the last things, the overlapping things, are the truly philosophic concerns; all superior minds feel seriously about them, and the mind with the shortest views is simply the mind of the more shallow man.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“I ... would rather be in dependance on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation upon earth, or than on no nation. But I am one of those too who rather than submit to the right of legislating for us assumed by the British parliament, and which late experience has shewn they will so cruelly exercise, would lend my hand to sink the whole island in the ocean.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)