In Popular Culture
Roy Harper wrote a song criticising the food at the Watford Gap on his 1977 album, Bullinamingvase. The owners of Watford Gap service station objected to criticism of their food ("Watford Gap, Watford Gap / A plate of grease and a load of crap…"), as did an EMI board member who was (also) a non-executive director of Blue Boar.
In popular culture, the Watford Gap is often considered to be a dividing line that separates the north and the south of Great Britain, and during the 1960s and 1970s it was a popular stopping venue for bands such as Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones. It has been noted that the Watford Gap Services are an example of banal names that have 'become part of this distinctively national mythology'.
In July 2011, music journalist Peter Paphides presented Late Nights at the Blue Boar, a BBC Radio 4 documentary about the connection between the services and Britain's 1960s rock bands.
Read more about this topic: Watford Gap Services
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“An aesthetic movement with a revolutionary dynamism and no popular appeal should proceed quite otherwise than by public scandal, publicity stunt, noisy expulsion and excommunication.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“If you’re anxious for to shine in the high esthetic line as a man
of culture rare,
You must get up all the germs of the transcendental terms, and plant
them everywhere.
You must lie upon the daisies and discourse in novel phrases of your
complicated state of mind,
The meaning doesn’t matter if it’s only idle chatter of a
transcendental kind.”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)