1580. 🇵🇳 Attractive Christmas Souvenir From Pitcairn.

🇬🇸 Received in the post today inside the packet containing my latest order of new issues from the Pitcairn Islands was this splendid postcard with one of the 2019 Angels Over Pitcairn Christmas stamps with a Christmas Day cancellation. This bureau delivers an excellent service and it is easy to order and pay for stamps on its website. Stamps are sent to the customer in an envelope with a real postage stamp on it and usually with a nice clear postmark. Thanks to the Pitcairn. Islands Philatelic Bureau for this seasonal item.

🇬🇬 Below are better quality illustrations of the 3 sets of Guernsey Post due to be released on 21 January 2020 which were mentioned in Blog 1555:-

21 January 2020 - inscribed ‘Guernsey’ - 250th Birth anniversary of Ludwig van Beethoven, German composer (part 1) - 1 stamp. Designed by The Potting Shed and lithographed by bpost and perforated 13.5.

21 January 2020 - inscribed ‘Alderney’ - Definitives, Birds of Alderney - 16 stamps.

21 January 2020 - inscribed ‘Alderney’ - Sealife in the Ramsar area - 6 stamps and 1 miniature sheet

🇸🇬 Singapore Post will issue a set of 6 stamps on 11 January 2020 to commemorate ‘200 Years of policing in Singapore’. The set was designed by Wong Wui Kong and lithographed by Secura and perforated 13. The designs look slick but I should dearly like to see one which features just what policing in the newly founded Singapore of 1820 looked like. Rating:- ***.

  Singapore Post has also issued a new machine-dispensed stamp in a design which ties in with the Chinese New Year, the Year Of The Rat. Rating:- ***.

1579. 🇯🇪 Coastal Flowers and Bizarre Art From Jersey.

🇯🇪 Jersey Post has revealed the designs of 2 upcoming sets of stamps due to be issued on 12 

February 2020. Firstly there is a lovely set of 6 Post and Go stamps which depict Coastal flowers of Jersey. The issue was designed by Lizzie Harper and printed digitally. Rating:- ****.

12 February 2020 - Claude Cahun, Jersey artist (no particular anniversary commemorated as far as I can see) (see Blog 1557). Lithographed with additional silver metallic ink. Rating:- **.

🇲🇼 I have not previously illustrated all 6 single value miniature sheets on the subject of ‘Domesticated birds of Malawi’ which were released by Malawi Post on 8 October 2019 (Blog 1520) and I now correct this omission:-

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧 The outline of the 2020 new issue programme for Royal Mail in Blog 1577 did not include the news that a miniature sheet will be issued to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the Declaration of Arbroath. Although Royal Mail in recent years has shown little interest in commemorating significant British medieval anniversaries it perhaps it is not surprising that in an effort to avoid criticism from Scotland, particularly the ruling Scottish Nationalist Party, it is prepared to release an item commemorating a landmark in the assertion of Scottish identity dating back to that period.
  The Declaration of Arbroath drawn up on 6 April 1320 was agreed to by Scottish nobles in the face of the English attempt to dominate Scotland which began with King Edward I’s invasion in 1296. Despite Edward’s subsequent death and the defeat of his son, Edward II, by the Scottish king, Robert The Bruce, at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, the English still claimed overlordship of Scotland. The Declaration was a form of a letter to Pope John XXII (so it’s really an early and historically important item of postal history) declaring Robert to be King of Scotland and the country to be independent. The Pope recognised The Bruce as Scottish king in 1324 and after the murder of
Edward II his son, Edward III renounced his claim to overlordship of Scotland in 1328.

  England and Scotland were subsequently uneasy neighbours until the Scottish king, James VI, was ironically offered the throne of England in 1603 when Elizabeth I died with no direct heir and, preferring  the comforts of London to the starkness of Edinburgh, moved lock, stock and barrel to England and claimed to be King of Great Britain with the 2 kingdoms eventually being united by the Act of Union of 1707 (the 300th anniversary of which was surprisingly not deemed worthy of a stamp issue by Royal Mail).
  The decision to issue a philatelic item to commemorate the 700th anniversary of The Declaration Of Arbroath is controversial but not surprising since Royal Mail, in choosing subjects to be featured on its stamps, will usually choose the road of least resistance. The item will be welcomed by Scottish
Nationalists who,having lost a referendum calling for Scottish independence in recent years, are now pressing for a second referendum in the hope of reversing the decision.
  The miniature sheet is said to include no new stamps and will presumably be made up of Scottish ‘regional’ definitives.  I wonder if the sheet will feature quotes from the Declaration including “As long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we under any conditions be brought under English rule”.
  A single stamp was issued by the British Post Office in 1970 as part of a General Anniversaries set to commemorate the 650th anniversary of the Declaration (depicted above) and it shows the then Chancellor of Scotland and Bishop of Arbroath, Bernard Of Kilwinning, signing the Declaration with various Scottish nobles looking on preparing to attach their seals to the document.

1577. 🇬🇧 Royal Mail 2020 New Issue Programme.

🇬🇧 Royal Mail has now announced some details of new issues which will be included in the 2020 programme.

21 January - British Video games of the 1980s and 1990s - 8 Stamps, 1 miniature sheet containing 4 different stamps, 1 Collectors sheet and 1 self-adhesive counter booklet containing 4 x 1st Class definitive stamps and 2 stamps from the miniature sheet. See Blog 1578.
11 February - ‘Visions of the Universe’
17 March - James Bond (spy movie series)
7 April - ‘Romantic poets’
8 May - 75th anniversary of the end of the Second World War
8 May - ‘London 2020’ philatelic exhibition
28 May - 60th anniversary of ‘Coronation Street’, British television ‘soap opera’ (see below)
18 June - Roman Britain
9 July - Queen, British popular music group
30 July - The Palace Of Westminster
18 August - ‘Sherlock’
3 September - Centenary of ‘Rupert Bear’
1 October - ‘Brilliant Bugs’
3 November - Christmas
13 November ‘Star Trek’, American television and film series. It will be interesting to see how a British spin is put on this one.

Despite the speculation, and my efforts to link the subject with the United Kingdom, there does not
appear to be a Beethoven issue after all. The programme is busy and expensive and heavily weighted in subject matter still on popular contemporary British (but not solely) culture.

  The announcement of an issue to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the hoary old British television programme, Coronation Street, is only surprising in that Royal Mail has not found some way to feature the programme on stamps before now. When a set of 5 stamps was released on 15 September 2005 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Independent Television (ITV) a public vote was held to choose which soap opera would represent the genre in the commemoration and it was taken for granted that Coronation Street (urban and set in Lancashire) would be chosen by popular acclaim and so it was something of a shock when Emmerdale  (originally Emmerdale Farm) (rural and set in Yorkshire) was chosen instead. The Yorkists had won the television equivalent of the War of the Roses.
  Now Coronation Street is the longest-running television soap opera in the world (though not the longest-running soap opera the title of which falls to another British institution - the radio programme The Archers, set in a Midlands village where the middle class are still generally respectable and the working class provide the comedy elements just as they did in Shakespeare’s day - which was first broadcast in 1950, 10 years before Coronation Street made its earliest appearance on television).
  With the exception of The Archers which is still popular with the English middle class to whom television soap operas are viewed as being intellectually and socially infra dig possibly because they
generally feature characters with northern or Cockney (the BBC’s Eastenders) accents and working class lifestyles. That may be why soap operas have so far been so rarely featured on British stamps even though Coronation Street and Eastenders still play a far more important role in contemporary English culture than does Marvel comics for instance.
  The broadcast soap opera is an American invention and dates back to 1930 when Painted Dreams, an ongoing radio broadcast for 15 minutes daily firstly in Chicago, told the story of an Irish-American widow, Mary Moynihan, and her unmarried daughter and their trials and tribulations. The actress who created this then moved to a rival station in 1932 to create Today’s children. The broadcasts were sponsored by soap producing manufacturers and the term ‘Soap opera’ was first used in 1938 as a result of this sponsorship.
  The Emmerdale stamp of 2005 was sold in ordinary sheets and in a Smilers sheet of 20 stamps with attached labels which featured information about the history of British soap operas including Coronation Street, “Granada’s Tony Warren set it up at the age of 23 - life in the rough in Manchester’s Weatherfield (aka Salford). Although it was originally considered too parochial for networking, today it now shows, frequently, from Nigeria to Thailand”.
  The phrase “Life in the rough” reflects perfectly the patronising attitude towards soap operas that prevailed at the time among those who considered themselves to be socially and intellectually superior to the people represented by the characters featured in Coronation Street. The programme did not depict ‘Life in the rough’ at all but normal northern working class lifestyles which naturally were dramatised to make the programme worth watching from the entertainment point of view (in the early decades of the programme there was not a preponderance for every character to be either a murder victim or a murderer as is the case in the more recent approach to British soap opera).
  It also pinpoints reasons for more recent social and political changes in England - the vote in the north and the Midlands firstly for Brexit and then, almost shockingly, for the Conservative party in the 2019 general election - a resistance to a perceived self-regarding, sneering Southern elite whom the northern and Midlands working class view as having long looked down on them and who view them as people who live ‘life in the rough’.
  So, perhaps a set of stamps commemorating Coronation Street may be more relevant to telling the story of England philatelically than is first realised.

1578. 🇬🇧 Video Games To Feature On First Royal Mail Issue Of 2020.

🇬🇧 Royal Mail’s first stamp issue of 2020 will be released on 21 January in the form of a colourful set depicting British video games of the 1980s and 1990s. The issue is made up of 8 stamps, 1 miniature sheet containing 4 different stamps, a Collectors Sheet containing 10 stamps with attached labels and a counter booklet containing 4 x 1st Machin Head definitives and 2 of the  stamps from the miniature sheet. It is a lightweight set but rather interesting at the same time showing as it does the rather primitive graphics of the early video games. The miniature sheet is devoted to the depiction of the Tomb Raider games and the character of Lara Croft. The issue was designed by Supple Studio and Bitmap Books and lithographed by International Security Printers and perforated 14.  Rating:- ***.

  The news that Royal Mail’s first stamp issue of the year will be on the subject of ‘video games’ should not really come as such a great surprise as this medium of entertainment is an important feature of modern British culture especially among the young. Indeed the UK game industry contributed $3.9 billion in GVA (gross value added which measures the contribution made to an economy by one individual producer, industry, sector or region) to the British economy in 2016. In 2018 games accounted for more than half of the entire UK entertainment market (51.3%) outselling video and music combined for the first time.
 In 2016 when collectors were waiting to have revealed to them what exactly was to be featured on a set of stamps which preannouncement were codenamed Project Atlas I suggested that the issue would be on the subject of computer games (Blog 771) only to be proven miserably wrong when the set was revealed to be on the subject of, of all things, the Mr Men (with the choice of codename remaining unexplained). It seems perfectly reasonable for Royal Mail to commemorate this burgeoning British industry though I can’t see the issue appealing to young people (who generally don’t collect stamps) or older people (who generally don’t play video games) or, frankly, anyone in between.