Responses
In 2005, Ian McMillan published a poem titled Slough Re-visited using the same metre and rhyme-scheme as Betjeman's original, but celebrating Slough and rejecting mockery of the town as unfair.
Punk band Gallows (who originally formed in Slough, and whose singer Frank Carter has frequently expressed his dislike for the town in interviews) have several references to Betjeman's poem in their music: their album Orchestra Of Wolves featured a song named "Come Friendly Bombs", and an earlier song entitled "Swarm Over Death" (released on the band's 2005 demo) features the lyrics "Come friendly bombs/ And fall here now/ It isn't fit for humans now/ Swarm over death".
In the first series of The Office, which is set in Slough, Ricky Gervais, in the character of David Brent reads extracts of the poem interjected with derisive comments such as "You don't solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place". The poem is reproduced in full on the liner of the video and DVD releases of this series.
Read more about this topic: Slough (poem)
Famous quotes containing the word responses:
“Apathy is one of the characteristic responses of any living organism when it is subjected to stimuli too intense or too complicated to cope with. The cure for apathy is comprehension.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“The fantasies inspired by TB in the last century, by cancer now, are responses to a disease thought to be intractable and capricious—that is, a disease not understood—in an era in which medicine’s central premise is that all diseases can be cured.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Research shows clearly that parents who have modeled nurturant, reassuring responses to infants’ fears and distress by soothing words and stroking gentleness have toddlers who already can stroke a crying child’s hair. Toddlers whose special adults model kindliness will even pick up a cookie dropped from a peer’s high chair and return it to the crying peer rather than eat it themselves!”
—Alice Sterling Honig (20th century)