until 1958. In his First World War autobiography Good-Bye to All That (1929), the writer Robert Graves attributes the term "Blitey" to the Hindustani word for "home". He writes: "The men are pessimistic but cheerful. They all talk about getting a 'cushy' one to send them back to 'Blitey'." The music hall artiste Vesta Tilley had a hit in 1916 with the song "I'm Glad I've Got a Bit of a Blighty One" (1916), in which she played a soldier delighted to have been wounded and in hospital. "When I think about my dugout," she sang, "where I dare not stick my mug out... I'm glad I've got a bit of a blighty one". Another music hall hit was "Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty" (1917). The song is sung by Cicely Courtneidge in the 1962 film The L-Shaped Room. The term was also referenced in the song "All American Alien Boy" by Ian Hunter ("I'm just a whitey from Blighty"), from the 1976 album of the same name. Folksinger Ian Robb's album Rose and Crown features a topical parody of the traditional song "Maggie May", about the Falklands War. The song contains the lines: "When I get back to Blighty, I'll give thanks to The Almighty / Whether Maggie's little war is lost or won". UKTV operated a digital television channel called Blighty that opened in February 2009 and closed on 5 July 2013. The subscription channel, which concentrated on British-made programming, was replaced by a Freeview channel called Drama. References External links Blighty and Sea Pie from the National Library of Scotland, with links to several issues of the magazine British slang United Kingdom in World War I Boer Wars Urdu-language words and phrases Bengali words and phrases