Television
In the episode "Full Frontal Nudity" (episode 8, season 1) of Monty Python's Flying Circus, produced in 1969, it is "Jerusalem" that must be sung to get a salesman to remove a bag over his head. Also, it is used repeatedly in the episode "Owl-Stretching Time" (Episode 4, Season 1) as Eric Idle sings it from the Cardiff rooms, Libya (although he replaces the word "feet" with "teeth"). After singing the line about "England's mountains green...." it cuts to a "Rustic monologue", which is broken up by the Colonel. Also, in the sketch "Salvation Fuzz/Church Police", when they arrest a man for murder, they "conclude this arrest with a hymn", and they proceed to sing this song. The song is also used in many other episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, and appears in The Fairly Incomplete And Rather Badly Illustrated Monty Python Song Book as "Jerusalem".
Jack Shepherd's stage play In Lambeth dramatised a visit by Thomas Paine to the Lambeth Home of William and Catherine Blake in 1789, first performed at the East Dulwich Tavern in July 1989. The play was later adapted for television in the BBC Two Encounters series - which featured similar fictionalised meetings between historical figures - and was first broadcast on 4 July 1993. It was directed by Sebastian Graham-Jones, and featured Mark Rylance as William, Bob Peck as Paine, and Lesley Claire O'Neill as Katherine (sic).
In "Red Sky in the Morning", the May 2010 second-season finale of The Mentalist, Patrick Jane's nemesis Red John quotes Blake's illustrated poem "The Tyger". "Red Sky at Night", which opened the third season in Sept. 2010, finds Jane reading a text-only version of Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience, specifically the poem "The Divine Image". The Songs collection contains both poems.
Read more about this topic: William Blake In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)
“All television ever did was shrink the demand for ordinary movies. The demand for extraordinary movies increased. If any one thing is wrong with the movie industry today, it is the unrelenting effort to astonish.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)
“Never before has a generation of parents faced such awesome competition with the mass media for their children’s attention. While parents tout the virtues of premarital virginity, drug-free living, nonviolent resolution of social conflict, or character over physical appearance, their values are daily challenged by television soaps, rock music lyrics, tabloid headlines, and movie scenes extolling the importance of physical appearance and conformity.”
—Marianne E. Neifert (20th century)