Influences? Certainly not the Daily Wail or other similar rags My opinion is just as valid as yours Hugh but it is my opinion. Please don't pontificate about research or facts though !
You did state that "the true memorials are not the blocks of stones but the war cemeteries which are the final resting places of our 'flower of youth'."
Have you any idea of the vast number of Soldiers, Sailors and Airman that don't have a final resting place. Where is their epitaph Hugh?
That's why the Cenotaph is so important today, not just the First World War but all subsequent wars thereafter and forms the centrepiece for the Remembrance Sunday Parade.
So being open and honest about my influences then (it doesn't stem from reading the Daily Mail or the Sun). I do find this this stunt quite distasteful. I have family who died in both WW1 and WW2 and I have taken part in remembrance parades at the Cenotaph when I served and also as a veteran. I have lost friends who have died in recent battles and I see the results of PTSD and hear the accounts which still haunt servicemen and women today through my voluntary work with the Royal British Legion.
To be honest I am angry that the BBC has sanctioned this, maybe I shouldn't be but I do take the whole thing very personally. I'm not in isolation, so do many other veterans which is quite apparent on 'closed' military forums and groups.
People either understand this or they don't, but if they don't then that's okay by me. We are all influenced by something in our lives and that comes from our past and that also shapes our future. What may seem as something extremely trivial or insignificant to one individual, could be quite important to another person.
If you want to discuss what I know about those who gave their lives serving our country in more than jus 2 world wars but in conflicts and other actions then I am more than willing to take the conversation off-line. I may surprise you as it is no flippant subject but one that has touched my family over the centuries.
The Cenotaph is but a focal point for a date and time in 1918 that has been expanded to cover all and everything military. I worked for many years just yards away in the Ministry of Defence and I saw and understood it daily as I did in 1959 as a 5 year old. There is nothing trivial or insignificant about what it respresents but it is derisory in the wider scale of rememberance of ALL that should be, but rarely is, remembered.
I, as many, offer my thanks for your service and, through my family and their service have affinity with the RBL.
Since VE Day there has only been 1 year when a British Serviceman has not died 'in action' and as you will know, most will have gone unreported.
Your anger at the BBC is trite when seen as a backdrop of disrespect to our fallen. My anger is directed at the fools that sit behind a gate merely yards away from the Cenotaph and blithely send our youngest and fittest off to die or be maimed in unecessary conflicts. I won't fall into the blah of 'illegal' wars but history alone should have informed the folly of Afghanistan - a country that has never been subjugated and where a multi billon dollar industry cannot deliver an answer to a man on a donkey with a Tefal pressure cooker with £5 worth of explosive in it.
So be as disgusted as you feel you must about the BBC but my disgust is aimed at the stupid ba*tards who occupy a building just up the road who can, but do not, resist the urge to destroy it's youngest and fittest in wars across the globe but who turn up one Sunday a year to lay a wreath.
My offer stands if you want an off line conversation.