The birth of Pudsey Bear
QUESTION
How did Pudsey Bear get his name? Pudsey Bear first appeared as the official mascot for Children In Need in 1985, five years after the fund-raiser began. He was named after the small West yorkshire town of Pudsey, which is between Bradford and Leeds and mostly known for its cricketing sons Len Hutton, raymond Illingworth, Herbert sutcliffe and Matthew Hoggard.
The BBC asked graphic designer Joanna Lane (nee Ball), who had won a Bafta for her work on The singing detective, to create a logo to attract more interest in the charity.
‘It was like a light bulb moment for me,’ Joanna later said. ‘We were bouncing ideas off each other and I latched on to this idea of a teddy bear. I went to the production team and said: “We need to name it.”
‘It came from the heart. I looked to my own experience and named him in honour of my home town and my grandparents, the mayor and mayoress of Pudsey.’
The original Pudsey was brown with a red bandage on his head and buttons spelling out BBC down his front, but this changed to today’s yellow bear.
Lauren Foulsham, Witham, Essex. IN THe 1990s, working as a nursing sister, I cared for an elderly lady who always carried a large brown bear with a spotted bandage over one eye. she told me it was the original Pudsey Bear, designed by her granddaughter who worked for the BBC.
she had named him Pudsey in honour of my patient, who had been the town’s lady mayoress.
The lady was very proud of this and the bear never left her side. The BBC changed the colour to yellow, but the brown Pudsey was still her pride and joy. Hilary Preston, Leeds.
QUESTION When was the first Black Friday?
THe original Black Friday had nothing to do with shopping, but referred to a crash of the u.s. gold market.
Wall street financiers Jay Gould and Jim Fisk tried to corner the market, hoping to drive the price sky high and sell at a great profit. On Friday, september 24, 1869, the conspiracy unravelled, causing a stock market crash.
Black Friday, marking the day after Thanksgiving, first appeared in 1951. This referred to the practice of workers calling in sick on that day in order to have four consecutive days off.
‘Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects,’ said M. J. Murphy in his Tips To Good Human relations For Factory executives. soon after it became a public holiday. By 1961, Black Friday and Black saturday were used by the Philadelphia police force to describe mayhem caused by hordes of shoppers and vehicles heading for the city’s downtown stores, as well as drinking, looting and fighting.
despite this negative connotation, it came to mean the post-Thanksgiving shopping spree in the u.s. It wasn’t until 2010 that retail giant amazon brought Black Friday to Britain. Jerry Ashworth, Chard, Somerset.
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