The Day Today titles - giant UK visual gag

[Captain Z]

I can't remember exactly where this was, but during some retrospective/article/commentary about The Day Today somebody specifically pointed out the visual gag of making the UK much larger on the globe graphics.

Well, I've just spotted that Harry Enfield did the same gag 2 years earlier:

[benjitz]

The UK - and its then dependencies - are also magnified (well, except North England) in The Tory Atlas of the World in the Spitting Image book, published in 1985. Enfield may have got the idea from that (he supplied voices for the show at least). Or it may be a common British satirical trope, reflecting our jingoism.

My mum told me as a child that most atlases we saw (back in the 1980s) magnify Great Britain slightly compared to other countries, I should ask her source for that. Perhaps it's parodying that.

[TW: many racial slurs]

[Theoretical Dentist]

My mum told me as a child that most atlases we saw (back in the 1980s) magnify Great Britain slightly compared to other countries, I should ask her source for that. Perhaps it's parodying that.

Not sure about magnifying Britain specifically (although I guess it would be quite easy to do since it's an island), but a lot of common world map projections, like the Mercator projection, exaggerate the area of high latitudes (including Europe and North America) relative to places nearer the equator. It's not done for purely political reasons – the Mercator projection has some properties that are useful for navigation – but it has the effect of diminishing the size and perceived importance of the global south, and cartographers in the global north have probably been happier to go along with it than they would have been if the effect was the other way round. There are equal-area projections like the Gall–Peters projection that avoid this and are sometimes deliberately used when people want to present a more accurate view of the relative size (but not shape) of different parts of the world.

[Theoretical Dentist]

Of course if we're talking about humorously distorted geography we have to mention the New Yorker cover View of the World from 9th Avenue from 1976:



The Wikipedia article has some other examples, both predating this cover and inspired by it.

[benjitz]

Not sure about magnifying Britain specifically (although I guess it would be quite easy to do since it's an island), but a lot of common world map projections, like the Mercator projection, exaggerate the area of high latitudes (including Europe and North America) relative to places nearer the equator. It's not done for purely political reasons – the Mercator projection has some properties that are useful for navigation – but it has the effect of diminishing the size and perceived importance of the global south, and cartographers in the global north have probably been happier to go along with it than they would have been if the effect was the other way round. There are equal-area projections like the Gall–Peters projection that avoid this and are sometimes deliberately used when people want to present a more accurate view of the relative size (but not shape) of different parts of the world.

Thanks TD: yeah, I'm aware of different projections (even had a Gall-Peters poster on my wall a few years later), but I'm thinking she may have been specifically to GB, and perhaps Ireland being magnified, presumably to inflate our importance in the world, given our history. She would tell me that GB is a lot smaller than depicted on most maps. (I had a keen interest in maps as a child, which I guess she was trying to nurture).

[TheAssassin]

Well if the tide is out, Britain would be bigger on a map, no conspiracy or ego.

[Poirots BigGarlickyCorpse]

@benjitz I love how the Republic of Ireland's just missing. Sadly accurate.

[Mr_Simnock]

@benjitz I love how the Republic of Ireland's just missing. Sadly accurate.

so is most of the north too