
"How the British have mined popular culture to make sense of the South."
At the end of 1997, a series of advertisements for a new “One-2-One” mobile telephone service began to appear on televisions and in cinemas around Britain. Most of these adverts took the form of a British celebrity explaining why he or she would especially like the opportunity to have a one-to-one conversation with a particular figure from history. Two of the first three featured icons from the modern South. Supermodel Kate Moss chose a young Elvis Presley, cinematically embalmed in his 1956 pomp. Ian Wright, a black England soccer player at the forefront of a national “Kick It Out” campaign to end racism on the terraces, chose Martin Luther King Jr.