Speakers' Corner - Media References

Media References

• Bill Maher appeared at the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, London, impersonating a Scientologist while filming his 2008 comedy/documentary film Religulous.
• BBC 3 produced a program with Tony Allen on heckling as a lost art for the election in 2005. It was based around teaching two people how to heckle at Speakers' Corner.
• Episode 24 of Season 6 of the comedy TV series Married... with Children had the Bundy family paying a visit to Speakers' Corner.
• In Omen III: The Final Conflict, the adult Damien passes through Speakers' Corner, hears a priest there speaking of the Antichrist, and looks uneasy as the priest seems to recognise him.
• Karl Pilkington interviews a man who regularly attends Speakers' Corner, claiming to have discovered "the secret to eternal youth". The interview is an extra, featured on Ricky Gervais's DVD entitled FAME.
• Speakers' Corner appears in one of the early issues of the Grant Morrison comic book The Invisibles (later reprinted at the first Invisibles graphic novel, Say You Want A Revolution).
• The BBC produced a program on the Park Police.
• On 2 April 2007 Garry Cobain of The Future Sound of London posted a video onto his YouTube account of him arguing with a lady at Speakers Corner in London about God entitled "the GOD WARS – An Argument I Had At Speaker's Corner". It is edited in a humorous way by him with the intro title "COMIC BELIEF presents..."
• The lyrics of British rock group Dire Straits' song "Industrial Disease" (from the Love Over Gold album) refer to Speakers' Corner: "I go down to Speakers' Corner, I'm thunderstruck; they got free speech, tourists, police in trucks. Two men say they're Jesus; one of them must be wrong. There's a protest singer, he's singing a protest song..."
• Episode 3 season 1 BBC The Speaker contestants have to speak at Speakers' Corner to prove their public speaking skills.
• In Half a Life: A Novel by V. S. Naipaul, the main character, visiting London for the first time, expects to see large, radical, excited crowds at Speakers' Corner. Instead he encounters "an idle scatter of people around half a dozen talkers, with the big buses and the cars rolling indifferently by all the time" and speakers with odd, "very personal religious ideas," such that their families "might have been glad to get them out of the house in the afternoons."