According to the statistics of the European Commission, the length of the working week in Britain has increased over the past decade and is the only member state of the EU where this has happened.
Britain is one of the five member states which still has a working week exceeding forty hours. The others are Spain, Greece, Ireland and Portugal.
The report indicates that British men clock up an average of 45.1 hours per week and British women 40.2 hours per week. These figures they say include all hours normally worked and include overtime.
Considering the minimum sixty hours plus clocked up by most people working in the film industry there must be a lot of privileged workers in Britain doing much less than forty hours if the above averages are correct.
Perhaps the EC don't recognise film work as a 'real job' and therefore exclude film workers from their summary on the grounds that they enjoy their work as a hobby.
According to the British Medical Journal, the British two-finger insult is older than we think. During the French Anglo wars in the Middle Ages, English archers captured by the French had the two fingers used to draw back the bowstring cut off. Before a battle the English archers raised the appropriate fingers to taunt the enemy, showing they had not been subjected to the French mutilation.
'Above all for the purposes of historical survey, a British Cinema has happened. We can be allowed to think a moment's pride in that, at the end of six years of struggle for survival, it would not have been surprising if the British Film Industry stripped of its manpower, its studio space and its raw materials had been one of the war's natural casualties. Instead the British Film has not only survived the war but survived with honour. Major Barbra, 49th Parallel, Pimpernel Smith, The First Of The Few, In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, The Way Ahead, Thunder Rock, The Gentle Sex, San Demetrio London, Blithe Spirit, Colonel Blimp, Millions Like Us and Henry V are all wartime pictures. Through necessitous circumstances the British producer has had to work to find out what is indigenous to native art, and learn to cultivate it. I think this morning we can afford to hang out just a scrap of bunting for the British picture with the customary warning against complacency in the grim struggle ahead.'
Celebrated film Critic CA Lejune writing in the VE Day issue of The Observer
50 Years on what happened?
Most people engaged in motion picture sound recording are well aware of the part played by Thomas Edison in the development of sound recording and moving pictures. Possibly fewer will know the part he played in the development of the electric chair.
In the 1880's, Edison and George Westinghouse, the founding fathers of electricity in the United States, were trying to convince public and authorities that his particular system was best. Edison held patents pertaining to Direct Current, while Westinghouse supported Alternating Current. Edison claimed, in an effort to discredit Westinghouse, that AC was far more lethal and thus the best type of power to use in the electric chair. He figured that if the public believed Westinghouse generated AC was used to electrocute people they wouldn't want AC in their homes and so his company generating DC would become the main power suppliers.
Edison obtained a Westinghouse generator from South America and set up the first electric chair in 1888. It was considered at the time to be the quintessential Victorian invention. However, only 25 states took up this method of punishment for capital offenders and Edison failed to convince authorities that DC was safer and a better form of power transmission than AC.