The speaker considers the significance of topicality and change to the tradition of the mummers' play with reference to text characters, performance and meaning. He shows how a group of 'bullguisers' successfully reworked their traditional play in a modern idiom without the oversight of prompting of folklorists, teachers or the like. He demonstrates the importance of the comic focus to the workings of their play as well as the sense of occasion. Alex Helm wrote in his Eight Mummers' Plays that:
...had the flow of tradition continued into the 1950s, it is likely that the champions would have been renamed Churchill, Hitler or Mussolini.
In the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire borders, the tradition is unbroken, but the 'new national heroes and enemies' to which Helm refers, are overlooked in favour of the products of the mass media culture, absorbed and caricatured in much the same way as Shirley Temple and Charlie Chaplin have become part of children's playground games.