The Road in Popular Culture
Kula Shaker performed their first impromptu gig at the Glastonbury Festival, which can be reached via the A303. They used this as the title of their song 303 on the album K. It was also mentioned in the Levellers' song Battle of the Beanfield, about the attack by police on travellers celebrating the Solstice at Stonehenge (1 June 1985): "Down the '303 at the end of the road, Flashing lights, exclusion zones".
In an episode of the popular BBC comedy panel show Mock the Week, comedian John Oliver responded to the prompt "Things A Frenchman would never say" with "My favourite road? Now that's got to be the A303. In many ways it's quicker than the M4, and you get to go past Stonehenge. If you're going along to the West Country it's the A303 for me every time. What a road, what a road!". Oliver mentions the A303 with some frequency on The Bugle, a satirical podcast he co-hosts with Andy Zaltzman, where Zaltzman has also referred to the A303 calling it "Britain's greatest trunk road."
Prior to the broadcast of Series 15 of Top Gear, the cast of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May were spotted and recorded driving along the A303 in what appeared to be house cars. The video was recorded and put on YouTube. The show was broadcast in the summer of 2010 as the first episode of season 15. The road was also used to test the Bentley Continental GT by Jeremy Clarkson in 2003, and also to test the Jaguar XJ in 2011.
The BBC broadcast a documentary about the A303 on 19 May 2011 on BBC Four, called "A303 Highway to the Sun". The writer Tom Fort drove the length of the A303 in a Morris Traveller, making various stops.
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Famous quotes containing the words road, popular and/or culture:
“The road to the Other World all ages can travel.”
—Chinese proverb.
“What is saved in the cinema when it achieves art is a spontaneous continuity with all mankind. It is not an art of the princes or the bourgeoisie. It is popular and vagrant. In the sky of the cinema people learn what they might have been and discover what belongs to them apart from their single lives.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
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