The death of Queen Elizabeth II puts the Sex Pistols in a suddenly distant past. Twinned in life, twinned in death. Elizabeth’s silver jubilee of 1977 was, like her state funeral on Sept. 19, one of those great British ceremonials that, punctuating public life and the bubbles of contemporary distraction, announce the end of one era and the opening of another. The soundtrack of 1977, by popular demand if not royal assent, was the Sex Pistols’s God Save the Queen.
A NEW stage adaptation of a hit Radio 4 series sends up the works of Charles Dickens while still respecting his campaigning for social justice. Bleak Expectatio.