Culture
The town hosts the annual Minehead and Exmoor Festival, a week-long classical music festival that has been running since 1963. Richard Dickins has held the post of artistic director for the festival since 1982.
The wooded bluffs above Minehead feature as the Hermit's abode "in that wood which slopes down to the sea", in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poet lived nearby, at Nether Stowey (between Bridgwater and Minehead). His statue can be seen at the nearby harbour at Watchet. He and Wordsworth (who lived nearby at Alfoxton House) would often roam the hills and coast on long night walks; leading to local gossip that they were 'spies' for the French. The Government sent an agent to investigate, but found they were, indeed, "mere poets". Cecil F. Alexander wrote the popular Anglican hymn All Things Bright And Beautiful in Minehead and in nearby Dunster the verse:
"The purple headed mountain, The river running by, The sunset and the morning, That brightens up the sky;−" Refers to Grabbist hill and the River Avill that runs near it through the popular tourist location Snowdrop Valley on Exmoor
Minehead was the subject of a parody skit as the fictional target of a takeover in Monty Python's infamous "Mr. Hilter" sketch, where barely concealed caricatures of Hitler, von Ribbentrop and Heinrich Himmler conspire at a local rooming house. There, the "National Bocialist" party wish to unite Minehead and Taunton in a manner similar to the Anschluss between Germany and Austria in 1938.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Education must, then, be not only a transmission of culture but also a provider of alternative views of the world and a strengthener of the will to explore them.”
—Jerome S. Bruner (20th century)
“Both cultures encourage innovation and experimentation, but are likely to reject the innovator if his innovation is not accepted by audiences. High culture experiments that are rejected by audiences in the creator’s lifetime may, however, become classics in another era, whereas popular culture experiments are forgotten if not immediately successful. Even so, in both cultures innovation is rare, although in high culture it is celebrated and in popular culture it is taken for granted.”
—Herbert J. Gans (b. 1927)