Plot
Manchester 1961 At the dawn of the space age, one man dared to be first. For 10-year-old John Thawaite, his only hero is Yuri Alexsayavich Gagarin. The first man in space. Three months after his pioneering flight Major Gagarin is due to visit Manchester and John is desperate to meet him. Trouble is, it's a school day and everyone is conspiring to stop John meeting his hero. Battling all odds, John journeys across Greater Manchester to bring back proof of his contact with a man who has touched the stars and returned to tell the tale.
Keywords: pioneer, yuri-gargarin
Every boy dreams of something
John Thwaite: What's it like up in space?::Yuri Gagarin: Big. Cold. Beautiful.::John Thwaite: Can you see my house from up there.::Yuri Gagarin: Yes. All the houses. I see.::John Thwaite: I want to be a spaceman too.
Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (Russian: Ю́рий Алексе́евич Гага́рин,Russian pronunciation: [ˈjurʲɪj ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ ɡɐˈɡarʲɪn]; 9 March 1934 – 27 March 1968) was a Soviet pilot and cosmonaut. He was the first human to journey into outer space, when his Vostok spacecraft completed an orbit of the Earth on 12 April 1961.
Gagarin became an international celebrity, and was awarded many medals and honours, including Hero of the Soviet Union, the nation's highest honour. Vostok 1 marked his only spaceflight, but he served as backup crew to the Soyuz 1 mission (which ended in a fatal crash). Gagarin later became deputy training director of the Cosmonaut Training Centre outside Moscow, which was later named after him. Gagarin died in 1968 when a MiG 15 training jet he was piloting crashed.
Yuri Gagarin was born in the village of Klushino near Gzhatsk (now in Smolensk Oblast, Russia), on 9 March 1934. The adjacent town of Gzhatsk was renamed Gagarin in 1968 in his honour. His parents, Alexey Ivanovich Gagarin and Anna Timofeyevna Gagarina, worked on a collective farm. While manual labourers are described in official reports as "peasants", his mother was reportedly a voracious reader, and his father a skilled carpenter. Yuri was the third of four children, and his elder sister helped raise him while his parents worked. Like millions of people in the Soviet Union, the Gagarin family suffered during Nazi occupation in World War II. After a German officer took over their house, the family constructed a small mud hut where they spent a year and nine months until the end of the occupation. His two older siblings were deported to Nazi Germany for slave labour in 1943, and did not return until after the war. In 1946, the family moved to Gzhatsk.
Vassilis Konstantinos "Basil" Poledouris (August 21, 1945 – November 8, 2006) was an American music composer who concentrated on the scores for films and television shows. Poledouris won the Emmy Award for Best Musical Score for work on part four of the TV miniseries Lonesome Dove in 1989. He is best known for scores such as Conan the Barbarian (1982), and RoboCop (1987).
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Poledouris was a Greek-American. He credited two influences with guiding him towards music: the first was composer Miklós Rózsa; the second his own Greek Orthodox heritage. Poledouris was raised in the Church, and he used to sit in services enthralled with the choir's sound. At the age of seven, Poledouris began piano lessons, and after high school graduation, he enrolled at the University of Southern California to study both filmmaking and music. Several short films to which he contributed are still kept in the university's archives. At USC, Poledouris met movie directors John Milius and Randal Kleiser, with whom he would later collaborate as a music composer. In 1985, Poledouris wrote the music for the movie Flesh & Blood of Dutch director Paul Verhoeven, establishing another durable collaboration in films.
Little ditty 'bout Iraq & Iran
Two very ancient kingdoms growin' up near the Holy Land
Iraq it used to be a superpower
Known as Babylon, that's the scene of that big tower
Babylon was really strong but over time would taste defeat
Iran sittin' on the Iraqis' map
They had the Persians and the Medes
Iraqis they hated Iran but they were cut off in 539 B.C.
Babylon had fallen but what would Persia do about Greece
Say, uh
Oh, yeah, life goes on
Long after the threats of little nations
Oh, yeah, life goes on
Long after the best of civilizations
Are all gone
After this happened, the Greeks would fall to the Romans
Back in a hundred and forty-six B.C.
Well, then those Romans, they had a run of sitting pretty
That ended, badly, in the 5th Century
And as we said now
CHORUS
So when they talk about control
Look at Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome
No longer sitting as strong as they can
Change can come around real soon, make us little again
CHORUS
Little ditty 'bout Iraq & Iran
You American kids do your best to understand
Revelation 11:15