Hollywood likes to see people pushed off precipices. In the cartoon violence bear-fest that is 300, the spectacle of an overweening Persian embassy propelled into a (very large) well thrilled all those nostalgic for Fukuyama’s end of history who now believe well-throwing is the only language menacing foreigners understand. This memorable scene also led indirectly to children up and down this fair land shouting, at every available opportunity: This Is Sparta!
In Braveheart, with notably less historical justification, the character based on Edward II’s favourite Piers Gaviscon (see last week’s story), gets pushed off some battlements. If you want to push people of battlements, and you are not on a film set, one of the best places to go, of course, is a castle. Please note: Bankstone News does not recommend or advocate that you should push anyone off battlements or indeed any other high place – regardless of the satisfying opportunity this may provide to bellow: This Is Sparta!
And speaking of castles, have we mentioned that Bankstone is planning to visit 10 of these (assuming you count Castle Howard, which is more of a stately pile really, and from whose roof, disappointingly, neither Anthony Andrews nor Jeremy Irons was summarily launched during the filming of classic TV series Brideshead Revisited) over the summer on monkeybikes to raise money for charity Yorkshire Air Ambulance? One of these is Scarborough Castle, where the aforementioned Gaviscon did indeed come to grief, albeit in a rather unspectacular and delayed way, when he was captured by enemies of the king and taken South to Morse country, there to be quietly dispatched without so much as a murmur of This Is Sparta!
Want to know more about Scarborough Castle? Click here.
Want to know more about Medieval Monkeys 2011? Click here.
Want to know more about Sparta? Click here: This Is Sparta!
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