There was no day out for Wallace and his mute mutt Gromit on Monday, grand or otherwise, after a screening of Britain’s beloved claymation creations was cut in favour of a Covid conference.
The British cultural icons, honoured by the Royal Mint with their own celebratory coin last year, first graced the screen in 1989 in A Grand Day Out — in which the pair build a rocket to travel to the moon in search of cheese, because the shops are closed for a public holiday — with their films becoming much-loved Christmas classics over the following decades.
But it was a miserable day in for Britons who had been looking forward to a little Christmas cheer on Monday — amid tightening lockdowns, a virtual blockade of manned freight by France, and a rapidly expanding ban on European and worldwide travel — as the Wensleydale-loving pair were pushed off the television screens by another doom-laden coronavirus press conference.
“A grand day out is just rubbing our noses in it, isn’t it?” quipped one social media user, likely in reference to the fact that London and much of southern England are now subjected to a “tier four” lockdown including stay-at-home orders and a ban on people mixing outside their immediate household on Christmas day, with somewhat looser but still stringent conditions on the wider country as well as Scotland, Wales, and the British province of Northern Ireland.
“Grand Days Out are banned for the foreseeable,” joked another.
Some people appear to view the cancellation as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back, however, with comments such as “They’ve gone too far this time”, “Tell me again why we’re not rioting in the streets?” and “WE’VE SUFFERED ENOUGH” being fairly representative of public sentiment.
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