It’s Guy Fawkes’ Night on the Fifth, and people have been having fireworks parties all week. We take them really seriously in Sussex, bonfires and fireworks have been taking place all over the county over the past month. The big one happens in Lewes on Wednesday. Hastings traditionally celebrates its own bonfire night on the Saturday nearest the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings, and this year’s effigy was of a bus, because we don’t want the bus services around town to be cut. Yes. If there’s anyone out there who understands the logic of that please let me know what it is…
Guy was part of a Catholic plot to blow up James I and restore a Catholic monarch to the throne. Yes, even then terrorist nutters were using religion as an excuse for killing people.
Guy (or Guido to use the name he adopted when fighting for the Spanish in the Eighty Years War) has become a romantic figure of late – helped by the film of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta. His mask has since become the millennial equivalent of a Che Guevara t-shirt – it’s what you wear when you want to vent a half formed political opinion against the powers-that-be. Well, it’s either that or join UKIP. To be honest I think I prefer the mask…
The dog behind the mask is the perennial activist Beebee from ‘Sooky Rottweiller’. And that’s the last guest star I’ll be using for a while – I feel I’ve been overdoing them lately.
Potted biographies of the pariahs Smith mentions in frame 4: