Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Meet the "Traffic Warden" from THREADS (1984), Michael Beecroft...



WoW, they managed to find him in record time.

Traffic warden in BBC film Threads has been found

Documentary makers wanted to track down the warden from BBC film Threads, which was aired on BBC2 for the first time 40 years ago this September.

Now aged 84, Michael Beecroft was an actual traffic warden who dabbled in a bit of work as an extra at the time.

He said filming was "just a day's work" and was unaware of the image's impact.

Written by Kes author Barry Hines, the film showed in graphic detail the unrelenting impact of a thermonuclear blast on ordinary people in Sheffield.

Mr Beecroft, who has lived in Barnsley all his life, said at the time he was on the club scene, travelling around Yorkshire and the north of England for gigs.

But work was "drying up" so he took on a job as a traffic warden for South Yorkshire Police as well as doing extras work.

Then aged 44, he recalls it was a "very cold, wet, sleety February Sunday" when he went along to filming.

He said: "My agent rang me up and said there's this job available so I went down and was picked out and made up as a traffic warden.

"I didn't do anything other than the 30 second shot of me with the rifle shouting some swear words.

"Afterwards, they took some pictures of me and I went home and didn't think anything else of it. It was just a day's work as far as I was concerned."

Mr Beecroft said he didn't think anything else about the day until he got another call from his agent several months later asking if it was his picture in the Radio Times.

He recalls: "I said I don't know, but then when I looked I realised it was me.

"I didn't think it was that important. I suppose you don't at the time."

The image, used to publicise the film's release, depicts Mr Beecroft as an injured traffic warden - the injuries were in fact stuck on cornflakes - whose job was to keep the desperate people seeking medical help or food contained in tennis courts.

Craig Ian Mann, who is working on a documentary about Threads to accompany its release on Blu-ray in the US, said the picture had "become the iconic image of the film" and made a plea to trace the then-unknown traffic warden to speak to him about the role.

However, unbeknown to Mr Mann and his co-writer Robert Nevitt, BBC Radio Sheffield managed to track down Mr Beecroft with the three men meeting for the first time on the breakfast show on Thursday.

Mr Beecroft said he was unaware people were trying to find him and was "gobsmacked" by the interest in his role.

He said over the years, he had not spoken much about the part he played, other than to a few of his friends who had known about it.

Asked by Mr Mann whether he had any idea how iconic his character had become and the fact he had been made into an action figure, he replied: "Wow, I didn't know that. I'm totally amazed at the reaction people have had over it."

Running for almost 40 years, Harris’s List was an annual digest aimed at reviewing and cataloguing sex workers in 18th-century London, a bizarre melange of travel guides, yellow pages, and cheap erotica:

As historical documents, the surviving editions of Harris’s List — originally published in print-runs of roughly ten thousand copies — offer today’s readers a rare (though partial) glimpse into the sex trade of eighteenth-century London.

While the Scottish statistician Patrick Colquhoun once estimated that 50,000 women, either partly or wholly, “resorted to Prostitution as a livelihood” by 1800, the British Library puts the number closer to six or seven thousand. The lists’ authorship remains opaque: it is possible that Jack Harris, a tavern waiter at the Shakespeare’s Head — who styled himself “The Pimp General of All England” — began the project, while Samuel Derrick took over the task in later years, continuing to use the Harris name for titillation.

Published annually between 1757 and 1795, Harris’s List had precursors, such as The Wandering Whore (1660), which included a list of London’s “Crafty Bawds”, “Common Whores”, “Maiden-sellers”, “Night walkers”, and others who, according to this text, abided by the dictum that “mony and Cunny are good Commodities”. Yet Harris’s List proved the most popular example of this genre and has had a considerable afterlife: leading to spinoffs in other British cities, such as Ranger’s Impartial List of the Ladies of Pleasure in Edinburgh (1775), and inspiring, by way of Hallie Rubenhold, BBC’s Harlots.

Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies (1757–95)



Happy AMERIKA Day! May 16, 1987, the first annual AMERIKA Day was held in Tecumseh, Nebraska. The purpose of the event was to celebrate the filming of the ABC miniseries of the same name. The *last* annual AMERIKA Day was held the following year.




I know @NightskyeB4Dawn will probably hate me for this, but May 16, 1986: TOP GUN premiered. We are still waiting for TOP GUN Day to be proclaimed a national holiday.






The cultural impact of TOP GUN is reflected in this Diet Pepsi commercial included on the 1987 videocassette release. The ad allowed the video to sell for $26.95 when many new releases retailed for $80. It became the best-selling video in history at that time.




It's National BBQ Day! During a joint U.S.-Canadian scientific expedition in the Central Arctic Ocean in 1994, US Coast Guard Polar Sea (WAGB-11) heavy icebreaker and Canadian flagship Coast Guard Louis S. St-Laurent encountered the Russian nuclear icebreaker Yamal near the North Pole. The crews of the three ships marked the chance meeting by gathering on the ice to have a BBQ and play softball.



Both the Russian & Canadian icebreakers are currently in active service. Meanwhile, "Polar Sea" has been out of service since 2010 due to failure of not one but five of her six Alco main diesel engines. Seven years later the bean counters decided it would be cannibalized for parts to support her sister Polar Star.


May 16, 1999: part one of ATOMIC TRAIN aired on NBC. Spoiler: The city of Denver does not survive part 2, but FEMA camps serve great coffee.


Well, there's your problem. The head vampire is the President. LOL.



The Vatican is finally going to admit it has been baptizing aliens in secret for over a decade. I feel a new religion coming forth.


Pope Set To Hold Press Conference on Aliens and the Supernatural

Gotta be Martians...and ancient aliens too. Who can up with that old narrative?


Pope Francis: Church Would Baptize Aliens


May 16, 2179: According to the novel Alien: River of Pain, this is the day that Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, was discovered after drifting in hypersleep for 57 years.




"Cleared Hot"...BRrrrrrrrrr