Sir Edmund – God bless the man – came from a simpler, earlier age. His subsequent mission to the Antarctic with Vivien Fuchs, incidentally, provided The Times with its most inadvertently entertaining headline ever, for which we might also remember him: “Hillary Fuchs off to the Pole”.
Wasn’t that the expedition where Hillary was supposed to providing only support to Fuchs on tractors, with Fuchs aiming for some sort of record, and Hillary decided to hell with the support role and cracked on to the pole, getting the record for himself.
I don’t believe for one second that headline was ‘inadvertent’
CEEFAX had a similar headline a few years ago when a footballer called Uwe Fuchs was playing for Middlesbrough and got sent off in the last minute. The CEEFAX headline was “Fuchs Off”.
The New York Post has “Ike beats Tina to death” recently.
Eighth Army push bottles up Germans.
During the North Africa campaign…
“Monty flies back to front” .
If you don’t think that’s clever, try doing it yourself.
Don’t know which paper it was.
Can we hope for a repeat with a slight change to the spelling of Hillary and Fuchs? And I don’t mind if they say “Littlerock” instead of “the Pole”.
Coarsening of language in public discourse has almost entirely deprived a certain class of jokes or funny stories of the very essence of their humor.
Immortals like “Oh, got ya right in the cunt, ‘eh
Ma?” or “Nein, nein, nein, frauleins–dose fokkers vas Messerschmidts!” simply disappear,
eviscerated of their raison de etre.
No crystal ball needed to foresee a dull future. It’d be enough to make Mario Savio cry.