Choose an editorial from a newspaper or magazine.
choosing words that you think are important and convey the meaning of the piece overall, then produce an illustration for your text.
Excerpts from the Daily Mail article:
Fans will be delighted to know that there is another series of Downton Abbey coming up in the autumn.
Sanitised vision of society: The cast of hit ITV series Downton Abbey outside Highclere, the stately pile where it is filmed
And not only this programme, but the many other ‘nostalgic’ films and plays that sanitise the past and try to make out that life in the old days was better for the people of Britain.
Hugh Bonneville, who plays the wooden and unconvincing Lord Grantham in the Downton Abbey series, has been musing aloud as he films the new episodes on the historical and political implications of the series.
He says the Edwardian aristocracy exercised a ‘benign dictatorship’. He has praised the simple values of dignity and mutual respect which apparently existed in those times.
‘This country is currently in a complete mess, and the pre-World War I era, rightly or wrongly, was one in which the structure of society worked.’
That would seem to suggest that Mr Bonneville thinks the ‘complete mess’ of our country would be resolved if we went back to pre-1914 Britain. Does he really mean this?
Benign dictatorship? Hugh Bonneville has praised the simple values of dignity and respect that apparently existed in Edwardian times...
... but life expectancy of the working class (including Downton Abbey servants) was lower in Edwardian Britain than the poorest Third World countries today
Does he want to abolish votes for women, or limit the franchise to men over 21? Or send homosexuals to prison? Or dismantle the Welfare State, or abolish the National Health Service?
The actor even seems to suggest that the popularity of programmes like Downton Abbey was one reason why the country voted in favour of an Old Etonian toff Conservative to become the Prime Minister — perhaps with the hope that we could all return to those jolly old days when the servants knew their place and where Mrs Bridges and Hudson the butler were camping it up Upstairs and Downstairs.
If Mr Bonneville is even a tiny bit right, and there does exist in any viewer’s mind the idea that things were better in those days, then we are surely right to think the cult of such nostalgia dramas is not merely silly but sinister.
The appeal of Downton Abbey, Upstairs Downstairs and the innumerable sanitised costume-dramas with which television audiences and cinemagoers like to feast themselves is surely that they are pure escapism.
The last thing fans of these programmes want is to be confronted with the cruel reality of what life was like in late Victorian and Edwardian England, where there were children dying of starvation on the streets of most big cities, where 80,000 prostitutes, most of them riddled with incurable syphilis, plied their trade on the streets of London, and where the average age of death for a working-class man was 35.
No, these programmes, which supposedly depict life for the upper classes and their good-humoured servants, bear as much relationship to reality as Pirates Of The Caribbean does to the real world of rum, sodomy and the lash of 18th century life at sea.
Hellish: Shows such as Downton Abbey (above), which supposedly depict life for the upper classes and their good-humoured servants, bear as much relationship to reality as Pirates Of The Caribbean does to the real world of rum, sodomy and the lash of 18th century life at sea
The class system was deplorable: The reality of Edwardian times is glossed over in historical fantasies such as Downton
Read more:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1365467/The-Downton-Delusion-We-love-dramas-upstairs-downstairs-life-real-Edwardian-England-saw-pampered-exploiting-poor-majority.html#ixzz1MX8HxSiI
The Downton Delusion
A3 paper, pantone markers, pencil,ink & adobe illustrator.
In the picture I am trying to illustrate, how when we see a beautiful Victorian/Edwardian lady, there was a whole 'dirty' secret of what life was like for the majority in those times. I've shown it as a thought bubble, as perhaps she is thinking about it on her way back to a stately home.
