Village Green thread
"Vaudeville is not characteristically English, having developed in North America, and the prominence given to Donald Duck is similarly telling. It is both ironic (incongruous with an English village green) and comic, suggesting a Disneyesque fantasy -

a green that might appear in cartoons, or the caricature of a village green that might be pastiched at a theme park. Yet the song's cartoon surface is undercut by a more profound and pessimistic sensibility.

'The Village Green Preservation Society' draws from a neo-pastoral tradition of music, poetry, and fiction in which anxieties about the present (urbaniza- tion, rational town planning, modernist architecture, state bureaucracy, and surveillance)

are sublimated through a retreat into an idealized pastoral simplicity: an enduring aesthetic legacy, traced by Raymond Williams, in which 'the peace of country life' is contrasted with 'the political chaos of the cities'."

From AUTHORSHIP AND THE POPULAR SONG By Keith Negus* Oxford University press