References in News and Popular Culture
The British Rail sandwich was often ridiculed on British radio and television and in numerous books. An episode of The Goon Show entitled The Collapse of the British Railway Sandwich System was first broadcast on the BBC Home Service on 8 March 1954. In 1972, the show Milligna (or Your Favourite Spike) included spoof news items, including "Long-missing Van Gogh ear found in a British Rail sandwich".
In his book Queuing for Beginners: The Story of Daily Life From Breakfast to Bedtime, Joe Moran describes the British Rail sandwich as "a metaphor for social decline since it became a running joke on The Goon Show". Bill Bryson wrote in Notes from a Small Island: "I can remember when you couldn't buy a British Rail sandwich without wondering if this was your last act before a long period on a life-support machine."
The British Rail sandwich has been used as a negative point of comparison for other ready-to-serve meals, especially regarding transportation in the United Kingdom, and representative of the negative effects of British nationalisation of industry in the middle of the 20th century. A 1997 article in The Independent referred to the sandwich as "an indictment of statist, bureaucratic corporations" privatised by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had "swept aside James Callaghan, prices and incomes policies and the British Rail sandwich".
It has also been used as a negative point of comparison for poor service in general. In 1988, Investors Chronicle described British Telecom's quality of service as "attracting the sort of public abuse once reserved for the British Rail sandwich". In 2007, Sir Michael Bishop, then chairman of airline bmi, wrote that Heathrow Airport "now has the reputation formerly held by the British Rail sandwich".
Read more about this topic: British Rail Sandwich
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, news, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Though news be sad, yet tell them merrily;
If good, thou shamest the music of sweet news
By playing it to me with so sour a face.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“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)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)