Let's Look Sideways

'I Just Need a Place to Kip for a Few Nights, Stan'

2009-07-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

All the recent talk of people going 'to hell with it' and voting for celebrity candidates in the next general election is worrying, despite Esther Rantzen's sterling attempt to put paid to the whole idea with her embarrassing performance on Question Time. Celebs simply aren't suited to office - they neither know nor care about anything other than themselves. That is, in most cases, the main reason they've become celebrities.

There is a kind of public office, though, to which the stars of stage and screen are perfectly suited: the kind no-one knew existed in the first place. Called things like High Sheriffs and Lord Lieutenants, they don't appear to do much apart from turn up on the news occasionally in furry robes to mug at local businessmen or kids in a newly-built youth centre. ('Sounds like Gordon Brown! LOL!')

Celebs make ideal candidates for this job - not much paperwork, lots of getting out and about and pressing the flesh, and those robes, darling! The High Sheriff of Surrey was the benchmark for celeb dignitary action for ages, with both Richard Stilgoe and Penelope Keith holding that unaccountably sexy-sounding office over the past few years.

But now there's a new challenger, as we hear Eddie Yates off Corrie has been made Deputy Lord Lieutenant of the Isle of Wight! This is, of course, the best celebrity political appointment made thus far, and we wish Mr G Hughes (if that really is his name) all the best carrying out his many ceremonial duties, which include:

Brewing bitter in Hilda Ogden's bathtub
Failing to flog white goods of dubious provenance at the bar of the Rovers
Turning up fresh from the nick desperate for somewhere to kip with iffy mate 'Monkey'
Covering a shortfall in hookey wallpaper with an equally dodgy alpine 'muriel'
Scanning the classified ads in the Weatherfield Gazette for 'investment opportunities'
Running a book on whether or not Annie Walker will pass her driving test
Rescuing a trapped budgie from Mavis Reilly's chimney
Burning the coq-au-vin at Ken Barlow's pensioners' supper
Trying to get Bet Lynch to sell him 2/3 of a pint of bitter after he's had his benefits cut
Selling cash and carry booze out of drinking hours from an ice cream van
Pretending he lives in Mike Baldwin's flat to impress birds he's pulled over the CB radio
Storing Stan Ogden's vintage tandem in an abandoned house which is promptly knocked down while he's having a swift half in the pub over the road
Winning the council's 'cleanest dustcart' contest despite a knobbling attempt from Fred Gee
Trouncing Alf Roberts in a slimming contest

I think he'll do juuuuuust fine.

'Oh no my clothes have all fallen off, and The Clash.'

2009-06-10T04:03:00.000-07:00

The other day I was challenged - by Does That Make Sense?, no less - to say something pertinent, or even just dim, about Transvision Vamp. Panicking like Blears, I plumped for the latter. Here goes.

Transvision Vamp were, essentially, Wendy James and - one of the best rubbish pseudonyms in pop - Tex Axile, an old punk who'd been in the fag-end version of X-Ray Spex and silly controversy-mongering non-band The Moors Murderers with Chrissie Hynde and Steve Strange. Tex provided the proto-Grunge mellow chiming verses and stock power chord choruses over which Wendy would alternately pout and scream in a manner often, and not entirely unfairly, likened to Bonnie Langford throwing a wobbly in Just William. In fact, most people's first encounter with the band was via James's thcweam at the start of their first big hit, I Want Your Love. The lyrics were textbook frowny bedroom nihilism, full of clumsy rhymes ('I love your motivation/And I love your desperation') which were - perhaps fatally - mixed high enough for every word to be intelligible.

They found themselves lumped in with a load of other bands who did vaguely power-poppy songs and had a blonde frontwoman, and all appeared round about the same time, as the '80s were being smoked down to the filter. Thus James was constantly compared to Andrea off The Darling Buds and - one of the worst rubbish pseudonyms in pop - Tracy Tracy off The Primitives. I don't know if someone tried to tie them up in one of those freshly-minted micro-genres that were all over pop journalism in those days. (I'm hoping 'peroxide power pop' is something I've just made up).

For better or worse, James was ahead of her time. Let's take the worse first. There are two things about Wend that got the music press's collective goat, which just wouldn't be issues today. First, and most obvious, was her willingness to shed as much clobber as possible if there was a cover shoot in it. Actually, it was all very chaste by today's standards - arms and militaria experts on the Antiques Roadshow have cavorted in less - but back then for an actual singer, rather than some model who mimed to Loleatta Holloway, to set the controls for 'shirtless' was an invitation to be priggishly lambasted in the pages of the inkies (who illustrated their thesis with copious examples of the evidence, natch). No-one, with the possible exception of Carol Decker, had a harder time from the music press in the late '80s.

Secondly, and perhaps more tellingly, The Vamp wanted to be 'credible' without being 'indie'. Explaining the arcane rules of the 1980s independent music scene to anyone under 25 is like summarising pounds, shillings and pence via the medium of dance, and it really is an unquestionably Good Thing that selling a few records now and again is no longer considered an instant bar to musical worth. But back then it still - just about - was. So Wend and Tex's bangings-on about Joe Strummer in interviews were reported with a vertiginously raised eyebrow. How dare these self-confessed wannabe chart-toppers flirt with the trappings of 'proper' music? Such snobbery was on the way out, though, for the good of all concerned (the staff of Melody Maker aside). It just came a little too late for the Trannies.

Best not to go overboard with the revisionism, though - there are few pop songs feebler than Born to Be Sold, for a start. But at a time when just about everything else from the 1980s has been salvaged, polished up and stuck on an ad (Westworld on the telly in 2009? I'm all for it, but... how?) it's odd we haven't heard those workmanlike power chords and that girlish 'Waaaaaagh!' being used to flog a Kinder Bueno or a Ped-Egg... yet.

It's Not Fair and It's Really Not PG

2009-06-02T03:03:00.000-07:00

It was easy in the old days (by which I mean before 1982). For films, you had your certificate U for the whole family, your certificate AA for over 14s (or 12 year olds who felt lucky)and your certificate X for over 18s (or two vertically mounted twelve year olds sharing one man's overcoat, trilby and burnt cork around the face). For everything else, it was safely assumed that anyone likely to take offence - children, the elderly, Lord Hailsham - would be safely in bed by nine. Simple.

Then things started to get mussy. Films certificates changed into new ones which were supposed to be easier to make out but weren't, then kept being added to every couple of years. The 9PM curfew became increasingly meaningless in the face of black and white portable tellies in bedrooms, and then the advance of VCRs, Sky Plussing contraptions and, finally, the Internet. Sending junior to bed the moment Old Man Steptoe unleashed his first 'Cobblers!' of the night was no longer an option - they could be watching Derek Jarman up there, and without that all-important 'parental guidance'. ('Look Billy, those two Roman soldiers are very good friends, aren't they? You know your Uncle Alan...')

So we got a stream of hastily cobbled together own brand censorship regimes, from the phoney (Red Triangle Films) to the earnest but ridiculous (those strange boxes on the backs of DVDs, with their invocations of 'scenes of mild peril' and other abstract concepts straight from the terrified mind of Norris Cole). Worst of all is the music-related stuff, which has gone far beyond those daft 'Parental Guidance' stickers that cluttered album sleeves in the '90s.

Try listening, for instance, to Lily Allen's new single 'Ed From the Chemical Brothers Shags Like an Invalid Penguin' on a selection of radio stations. The 'difficult' content is treated in various ways. Some just censor the word 'head', which became rude in about 1991, around the time the previously untouched 'Walk on the Wild Side' started suffering a similar fate. Some censor the word 'giving' as well, probably because cutting the word 'head' on its own might sound a bit like like having your decency cake and eating it. ('Giving what, eh, lads? Not blood, I bet! Woooorgh!') Some get rid of the whole offending line. Some, even, let their faders eat into the previous line, removing 'wet patch', a totally innocuous phrase to anyone who doesn't already know what might be the cause of said spillage. There are probably versions out there which cut even more in an attempt to take the world back to a pre-Are You Being Served? state of Edenic innocence.

Meanwhile, poor old Lily's song disappears bit by saucy bit, like a sexually explicit version of 'Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes'. It's all very subtle and barely raises an eyebrow these days. Back when music censorship was full of uniformed coppers raiding branches of Our Price and Mike Read going apoplectic over some 'raunchy Scouse combo' who had probably never even heard of John Betjeman, at least we knew where we stood. Now not only do we not know, it seems the people devising these things haven't got a clue either. God knows what they'd have made of Danny La Rue.

The Duck Island LOL's a Mighty Fine LOL

2009-05-24T03:17:00.000-07:00

Not so long ago, satire was the preserve of about half a dozen men with a First in Greats from Caius College, Cambridge. Now, thanks to the internet, radio phone-ins and The Economist's Joke of the Week spot, everyone's a satirist. Which would be great, if the level of humour got significantly better as a result. Sadly, the BBC's Have Your Say pages are only 2% funnier than the whole of That Was The Week That Was, and that's not good enough.

Things looked so much more promising a year ago. Gordon Brown was a gift - a politician who acts a bit like a clown, and whose name rhymes with 'clown'! The headlines wrote, typeset and distributed themselves. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief after long, drab years of the hopeless 'Blair'/'liar' construction, which wasn't even a proper pun, and never funny in the first place. ('It's not meant to be funny. I'm really angry, actually.')

Then things got better and better. There was the Credit Crunch, which was kind of serious but didn't involve anyone actually dying, and to cap it all had a silly name. No decent gags. Then Swine Flu, which kind of involved people dying but wasn't actually serious, and to cap it all had a silly name. Still nothing. And now we've got a continuous stream of comedy expenses, each one sillier than the last, which should provide ideal conditions for a fertile coupling of indignation and comedy.

Nothing, though. Zilch. Perhaps the MPs overdid it, with their moats and dog food and whatnot. The joke's almost already done for us, but not quite. (What brand of dog food? Does the moat have a drawbridge? Carp? We don't know, and these things are vital for comic detail.) Unable to work with the prime material they're given, the public overdo the indignation to compensate, as if diddling the electorate out of a couple of Habitat bread bins is the most grievous thing ever to happen in the name of Parliament. That sort of approach worked for Alexei Sayle, but not the population of Luton, who haven't got enough pork pie hats to go round as it is. Can we have an election for a new Great British Public? This one's rubbish.

But perhaps it was never meant to be, and now it looks like the material's running out. "Reporters in Buckingham Palace (Slight Return)" isn't going to get anyone choking over their morning raft of viral emails. The 24th satire boom since records began is bursting. Soon everyone'll be safely back to chuckling at TV's talent trousers man and the happy-go-lucky wit of Eamonn Holmes. Still, maybe in another ten years we'll have found a funny rhyme for 'Cameron', and the cosmic ballet can continue.

"We're supposed to be intelligent people, not the London School of Economics!"

2009-05-15T08:30:00.000-07:00

The first episode of a TV series is incredibly difficult to get right, because it has to do everything. You’ve got to introduce your characters, their environment, their relationships, and the rest of the set-up for the next six/twelve/twenty episodes, while juggling a self-contained plot for that one episode which has to come to a satisfactory conclusion by the end, that conclusion summing up, if you’re doing it right, the series as a whole. A sitcom’s harder than a drama, as you’ve only got half an hour, and on top of all that you’ve got to cram in some decent gags.

With all this to do, it's small wonder few sitcoms manage to launch with a satisfactory bang, but Ever Decreasing Circles is a towering exception. Writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey hardly make things easy for themselves with the concept they have to introduce - humourless community busybody Martin Brice (Richard Briers) and his long-suffering wife Ann (Penelope WIlton) have their already crabby marriage shaken up by the arrival of suave, relaxed hairdresser Paul Ryman (Peter Egan), who possesses every redeeming feature Martin does have, from a sense of humour through to modesty. Not exactly 'fat bloke left in charge of bakery' in set-up terms, but they lay it out and sew it up in twenty-five-odd minutes without breaking into a sweat.

The performances are of course great, but it's not only Briers' one-man tornado of pointless energy that makes it. Penelope Wilton runs the gamut of Play for Today kitchen sink emotions from frustration to anger, while leaving just the occasional chink of warmth, enough to stop the viewer wondering why she didn't just pack her bags years ago. Very much in their own world are Howard and Hilda Hughes, not quite the cardboard comedy suburbanites they initially seem, but certainly full of the spaced-out detachment of people who write letters to Points of View - Stanley Lebor's Howard, in particular, talks as if he's reading out each 'frank exchange' from a previously approved crib sheet.

In the middle of all this, Peter Egan just has to act normal - easier said than done in such a madhouse. But he's not completely immune to the mania. His first encounter with Martin leaves him bemused at the torrent of unsolicited advice about British Telecom ("and the same applies to the gas people, but more about them anon!") Five minutes in, he finds himself starting to mimic Martin's OCD ticks, counting the number of steps in the hall stairway along with Ann. The freakish set-up is laced with subtle touches like this. It would be going to far to say the viewer can empathise with every character, but they're all certainly recognisable as real people, which is more than can be said for a lot of more celebrated 'realist' comedies.

Circles (well,why not?) is fairly well celebrated these days, but too often in conjunction with that dread comedy adjective, 'dark', often by punters who seem to have got their sense of humour by copying it off the boy sitting next to them in the exam room. What's really at the centre of it is a monumentally insecure, self-centered man who can't see how he drags down everyone he touches. Where Esmonde and Larbey really impress is in gradually making what starts out as a grotesque monster, cranking the duplicating machine in a maniacal frenzy, into a sympathetic, tragic figure. It's there in the first episode, in Martin's inability (or refusal) to share everyone else's jokes, and the lonely image of his one-man all-night vigil camped in front of a troublesome articulated lorry with a knackered portable telly for company.

It's something the writers have specialised in. There might not be much of it about in Brush Strokes beside the odd maudlin barside chat with Elmo, but it's there in spades in The Other One, a sitcom with Briers as a desperate bullshitter bluffing his way through a skirt-chasing package holiday - a theme made famous by John Sullivan with his medallion-toting Kirk St Moritz in Dear John (another 'before-its-time dark masterpiece' of course).

It's even there in The Good Life - both Margot and Tom are guilty of burying themselves in their own busy little worlds while real life goes on elsewhere. It's really the theme of all comedy, dark or light, noughties or forties, Avalon-approved or ENSA-affiliated - the man for whom the world's just that tiny bit too much. Or as Martin puts it in one of his stilted attempts at self expression: "I wish people wouldn't take me literally. I just mean... things."

Bolls: Over?

2009-05-09T05:08:00.000-07:00

Two Statcounter posts in short order is thunderingly bad form, but this is almost interesting. While poring over the sudden preponderance of Iranians searching for "bondage telly", this Twitter account jumped out of the listings. I'm not sure how 'official' this is - unlike this one, of course. Not that it matters, as this series of Ashes to Ashes is really cracking along now regardless, but this sort of thing seems to be standard practice now with a drama series of any decent size, so people must go for it. I can't say I'm convinced.

If Square One features in next week's episode I might change my mind, however.

Cover Aversions

2009-05-08T03:37:00.000-07:00

David Quantick, that repository of chart-oriented bile, once memorably described Menswear's Johnny Dean as something you'd get 'if you wanted Brett Anderson for Christmas, but your mum had gone to the covered market in town and bought you a crap knocked-off version with the wrong hair and a leg that fell off as soon as you got it out of the box.' While this just about summed it up for Johnny, I’ve never forgiven his slight against that bastion of loose change consumerism: the covered market.

I’m not talking about those lovely Victorian covered markets like those quaint arcades you get in Leeds and Oxford. To get to the right kind of covered market you need to take a long walk down a shallow concrete ramp. It's about 4.15PM on a Saturday, by the way, the only time to pay a visit. It'll be a heavily overcast sky above, lowering clouds scudding lazily by forever teasing with the portent of a downpour that never quite arrives.

Atmospherically oppressed from above, overcoated folk hurry about to get their 'last minute bits and bobs' before the various joys of Saturday evening are upon us. Already it's getting dark. The Grandstand teleprinter is warming up, kegs of Hemmeling Lite are being plumbed into pub cellars, and the master tape of Russ Abbott’s Madhouse is being loaded into the ITV network's central reel-to-reel player. There's no time to linger, which, on the face of it, is just as well.

If the atmosphere above deck is one of gathering storms, unsupped pints, unclaimed dividends and unspooled impressions of Mavis Riley, at the bottom end of the ramp it's altogether more intense. I'm getting concrete, I'm getting sawdust, I'm getting freshly gutted mackerel. I'm getting... yes, all right, piss.

But the olfactory overload is nothing compared with the headache engendered by the criss-cross network of strip-lighting that illuminates the scene. Council officials have diligently ensured that a mandatory thirty percent of the overhead lighting is set to a permanent wild flicker, giving certain corners a definite 'epileptics keep out' air. God knows how the old dears manage to keep body and soul together as they browse the haberdashery stalls in ambient conditions that would have been deemed 'a bit much' at Studio 54.

The concrete cavern may be solid enough, despite being only twenty years old (FACT: all covered markets were opened by either Prince Michael of Kent or Vince Hill), but the stalls themselves are permanently on the verge of collapse. The favoured building material is pegboard. All the better to hang loads of packets of wool and rawlplugs off, certainly, but it doesn't half give the impression of a Mexican shanty town, eking out a meagre existence under the feet of the mighty 'proper' shops, which hum with an assured briskness that will never be echoed in these little numbered cubicles with the proprietors’ names spelled out in one-size-fits-all municipal stick-on lettering, those council men having dislodged a regulation one character in ten.

Quantick's hypothetical mother, despite sounding like something the Large Hadron Collider should be looking for, would head straight to the toy stall, a cubicle no more or less dour than those offering fresh meat or plumbing supplies. Eschewing a cutesy nom de commerce like ‘tots’ wonderland’ for the more reliable ‘Alan’s Playthings’, the range of products crammed into this 8 x 8 foot magic kingdom is not in doubt. But they’re Johnny Deans all the way.

Where Alan really excels is in the novelty department. The kind of practical joking tat eschewed by the more respectable emporia is here in abundance, making Alan’s gaff the nearest you could get to those mythical 'joke shops' the folk of the Beano were ever dashing into. Only without the abundance of on-premises chuckles. Novelty vending is a serious business, and customers implicitly understood that any joy to be extracted from said goods is only to be done when said goods are well out of the sight of Alan.

All this surly transaction is good practice for the progress from black soap to Black Sabbath, and a trip to the second hand record stall. The intimidating atmosphere of second hand record shopsis famed in novel and film, but the stall’s an even bigger ordeal. After all, in the shop the tubby know-all with the PiL t-shirt and the thousand well-argued reasons why compilation albums are for the mentally deficient is up to six feet away. At the stall it’s more like six inches. And he knows the contents of those punnets back to front - every hesitation you make in the lengthy flicking process is read, deciphered and facially disapproved of while you sweat. Bomb disposal operatives have a more placid time of it. Inevitably you leave with nothing, pining for a fantasy future where buying music involved no human interaction whatsoever.

In fact, best to get out of the covered market altogether. The stalls are battening down their unwieldy plywood hatches and that miserable bloke is disconsolately pushing a hinged double broom arrangement in your direction - a final ‘clear off out of it’ gesture if ever there was one. Time to get back to the surface people. The Pink Panther’s on in a minute.

"kate bush home address wiltshire"

2009-05-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

It's taken me a while to get a statcounter stuck on this blog, so bear with me while I plough through the sort of schtick everyone got fed up with two years ago. Still, for the record, the following search strings led to these doors in the past couple of days. Never has mass disappointment been so varied...

"80's chinese letter hat turn sideways"
Lord knows what mental process led to this. Something to do with Wang Chung, perhaps? As sought after from picturesque Everett, Massachusetts, no less - a town that ceremonially re-enacts Cuddly Ken's Bee Gees sketch on an annual basis, hopefully.

"lost art of bodging"
I'd have thought this blog was proof enough that the craft was very much alive and well, so hopefully this individual (from traditional US comedy hick town Boise, Idaho) left a happy man.

"milf derivation"
*cough*

"bertice reading poster"
Well, why not? Landscape format, presumably.

"peter lorimer marriage"
If you like Leeds United so much, why don't you..?

"tesco mirrored sunglasses"
"cellophane bags cwmbran"
Sometimes the glamour of it all just gets too much.

"how old is a r whites bottle with a quarter shilling deposit"
From an employee of financial giant JP Morgan Chase in New York, this one. There's a terrible credit crunch gag in there somewhere.

"chas and dave supermarket"
It's a delightful notion, certainly. And the fact it comes from an employee of BSkyB bodes well for the future of digital television. How much rabbit will they have in stock? Find out tonight, on Sky1!

"roy castle big nose"
A consummate entertainer, singer, trumpet player, comedian, dancer and record breaker, and that's the attribute you're most interested in? Shame on you, unidentified bloke from Ilford!

"where can buy a woolworths charm"
A very good question. Not sure how lucky such an item would be, mind.

"pam st clement in caravan being gassed 1980s"
Self-explanatory, really.

When Man 2 Man met Man Parrish

2009-05-05T05:34:00.000-07:00

There’s just over half the year left before a new decade dawns - seven months to enjoy the last of those 1980s revivals we all thought would have given up and gone away by 2003. As it would be, even by modern standards, a bit much to go on celebrating the ‘80s for longer than they actually lasted in the first place, so retro festivities will be officially wound up on New Year’s Eve, before ‘90s nostalgia is inaugurated by Toby Anstis and Guru Josh on January 1st, 2010. In the meantime, here’s a handy social calendar of those revivals still to come.

Music channels receive a shot in the arm in June when scratch video makes a comeback. The forgotten craft of taking some old black and white film and cutting it up so the little men go backwards and forwards very quickly is lovingly revived by a new generation of artisans. All comedy programmes beginning in September feature at least one clip of Ronald Reagan going 'Look buster, b-bus-b-bus buster!' Classier broadcasts overlay all this with some abstract animated magenta triangles. The revival is deemed 'played out' when the Queen's Christmas Day speech is presented by HM sat on the floor in front of a bank of TV monitors, before the picture folds up into the rough shape of a saxophone and bounces around the screen for slightly too long to be interesting.

As the long hot summer (citation needed) rolls on, Saturday afternoons see the return of British wrestling. Not the glory years of Kendo Nagasaki and Jackie Pallo in the '60s, but the early 1980s fag-end, when Big Daddy had become more interested in appearing on the cover of the Buster summer special than giving the Kids his perfunctory two minute 'splashdown' appearance in the ring, and promoters looked to the third division likes of 'Cyanide' Sid Cooper and 'Gaylord' Steve Peacock to make up the tag team numbers. Panorama makes three earnest documentaries in a row suspecting that the matches might possibly be fixed. All bouts to be held in the Civic Centre, Aylesbury.

After what all pundits agree was A Bad Summer for Pork, the autumn sees the airwaves packed with old-style meat awareness advertisements. Shane Ritchie, Phil Daniels and Shaun Williamson (the amusingly tubby one on the end) line up for a series of cockney oompah hip-hop numbers where they burst into an undernourished wedding reception catered by militant vegans and demand the installation of a big plate of British pork, which has, of course, 'still got the lot'. All colours and creeds are whimsically represented in the commercials, including a sneezing Mexican in a big sombrero who's amusingly bundled out of the door by a nervous-looking Ritchie in a face mask. The trend catches fire in October, with the 'Do-It-All Three' reunited for a string of sell-out gigs, John Barrowman appearing in Very Very Tasty, a musical based on the Kellogg's Bran Flakes campaign, and Lily Allen tipped for the Christmas number one with her plaintive and moving interpretation of Laughing All the Way to the Leeds (Recession Edit).

By mid-October revivals are appearing so thick and fast there isn't the time to do many of them properly, so dozens get swept under the carpet, including: a line of designer paint-splattered Doc Martens launched by Paul King; 'sassy' girls from South London having about two cheeky pop-rap hits about snogging and then vanishing forever; chunky knitwear for men who know a lot about computers; The Mac Band featuring the McCampbell Brothers; song titles with more than one set of brackets in them; Trimphone impersonators; monogrammed pound coin holders; power ballads sung by women with their eyes screwed shut sat on a plinth in a completely empty white room in front of net curtains billowing through a set of open French windows; jokes about Channel Tunnel diggers surfacing in Catford by accident; Belouis Some.

November, and '80s nostalgia really nears the bottom of the barrel with the revival of '80s-style '50s nostalgia, as interpreted by advertising agencies at their yappy, annoying worst. So it's Day-Glo pink frocks and outsize beehives for the women; massive, American football player-style cardboard zoot suits and two-foot quiffs for the men. Somewhere along the line the two decades become hopelessly confused, and a generation of history pupils grow up convinced that the 1950s was full of cheery song-and-dance numbers set around a pink cardboard Cadillac about instant tea, the Brook Street job agency and going down to the Shell garage to get a scotch egg. Chris Moyles launches The Golden Oldie YouTube Channel which nobody visits.

Midnight, December 31st: Someone, somewhere, listens to Camouflage by Stan Ridgway and smiles a small smile to themselves.

Poetry Today

2009-05-02T09:14:00.000-07:00

Eyebrows have been raised across the costlier postcodes of west London at the appointment of Carol Ann Duffy as the new poet laureate, but I’m not surprised, as I fondly recall her sterling work as ‘script associate’ on Square One, Granada Television’s oddball 1981 daytime game show presented by Joe Brown.

This pre-teatime Tuesday treat is largely forgotten now, which is a bit of a shame. (Although the Queen - a woman of refined taste - was obviously a fan.) The premise was simple. “The action-packed quiz in which members of the public join forces with celebrities to win money for charity” paired two ordinary shlubs with two A-list stars - Magnus Pyke and Barbara Woodhouse, say, or Willie Rushton and Diana Dors. We’re talking the pinnacles of fame here, the centre seat on Celebrity Squares.

The ordinaries answered comedy questions, and the celebs, in a masterful touch, were reduced to acting as human counters on a giant floor-sized board, frequently called upon to balance objects, Crackerjack-style, on top of one another, do silly accents and other whimsical ’forfeits’ in order to chase that giddy prize of 250 quid’s worth of wallpaper for Great Ormond Street or neck braces for abandoned donkeys.

In between, Joe would banter away in full cockney verbal regalia (supplied, of course, by the future laureate) and take part in some self-deprecating shtick about his less-than-immortal showbiz career, tell a few ancient jokes ("Are you having that lobster for tea?" "No, he's had his tea, now he wants to go to the pictures!") and embark on an epic attempt to tell a meandering, endless gag about some geezer who goes into a boozer. No doubt these will all resurface once the Eng Lit dons get on her case - expect to see a fully annotated selection of Square One banter in next month's Times Literary Supplement.

In the meantime, I’m taking bets on the contents of the first Royally commissioned poem: ‘Enery the Eighth 7-1, ‘Walkies!’ 4-1, ‘There’s this geezer, an’ ‘e walks into this boozer…’ evens favourite.

Mighty Moments in TV History

2009-03-22T02:38:00.000-07:00

“Wednesday, January 10th 1979

4.40PM Take Hart
The new Arts Centre caretaker visits Tony for the first time and is disturbed by what he finds!”

- Radio Times.

Cue a nation of pastel and poster paint-crazed children screaming to the heavens: “Why? Why did they think The Master needed comedy interruptions to his sacred creative process from a comedy, accident-prone clown with a bucket on his foot?” But even the most committed bubble paint fanatic gradually grew to love (or at least grudgingly accept) the inevitable off-screen crash and anguished cry of ‘the council aren’t going to like this, Mr Hart!' And anyway, Mr Bennett got more complex as a character as his storyline developed. (January 24th: “Tony invites two of the Why Don’t You..? Gang to help with a painting; the caretaker calls and puts his foot in it!”)

(Mr B was also, coincidentally, one of the last manifestations of the ‘meddling council’ in British children’s entertainment, after a decade of Clive Dunn’s Grandad facing similar official woes, and endless films wherein Ronnie Barker in a bowler hat threatening to knock down the lovely old stately home where two stripy-pullovered kids passed the time innocently with bickering 17th century ghosts.)

I’ve always liked Colin Bennett. Like the inestimable Brian Trueman, he’s one of those TV figures who’s never quite been centre stage, but the more you find out about them, the more impressive they get. He co-wrote the barking teatime sci-fi comedy Luna, which boasted its own Clockwork Orange-lite dialect and posited that Patsy Kensit was artificially grown from a batch of green slime, as well as the decidedly odd semi-drawn sci-fi drama-cum-whodunnit-game-show Captain Zep - Space Detective, which would take another post to explain.

He was also Vince Purity, oleaginous mainstay of You Should Be So Lucky!, a sort of fairground stall/snakes and ladders/talent show hybrid, which took that already universally hated tribe, the stage school graduate, and made them seem appreciably more repellent. A weird attempt to make the most obnoxious children’s programme ever, it bombed abysmally. That is to say, it was a perfect success. Then he spent the early 1990s running round town centres in the middle of the night interviewing emergency glaziers and night-watchmen for the mystifying late night schedule filler Night Shift.

As you might have gathered, our Mr B has an affinity with the high concept and the oddball. He adapted Harry Nilsson’s offbeat fantasy LP The Point (about the round-headed outcast of a pointy-headed race and his dog) for the stage, and runs a production company called Acquired Taste TV. It’s a given that anyone operating in those sorts of backwaters is never going to achieve star status, but thank God they don’t seem to care. As TV fills up more and more with rigidly career-oriented types, it becomes a much, much duller place.

And have you tried getting hold of an R186 signal box lately?

'What Rhymes with "Sauces"?'

2009-01-25T03:40:00.000-08:00

In response to Kitten in a Brandy Glass's late-'80s women's mag nostalgia rush, I make only small apologies for airing this classic again:

Tailors to Trust

2009-01-23T02:12:00.000-08:00

The past is like a foreign country - their currency's worth a lot more. They don't do things differently there, though. Leafing through some ancient magazines (how old does something be before you 'leaf' through it rather than 'flicking'? Got to be at least twenty years, I think) a while back turned up any number of adverts for the sort of gruff, practical, Suez-era clobber you'd buy from a respected 'gent's outfitters', hawked in treble-starched prose it's impossible to read without imagining it being barked at you by a retired naval commander who's seen a fair bit of action in the South Seas in his time and therefore clearly knows what's best for your trousers. Try this, for the Swift zip-fly:

"A Swift exclusive self-locking zip-fastener ensures complete masculine piece-of-mind, since its self-springing lock safeguards against any accidental opening. Research and experiment produced this guaranteed new trouser-fly fastener with the absolute security of closure."

It's all there - the bluff, clipped, 'Now, here's the matter in hand' tone, the forthright yet still coyly euphemistic anatomical references, the invocation of the white heat of sartorial technology. All that's missing is a pretend chemical band name like Ziplax or Fastenol bunged in somewhere.

All so different to our sophisticated advertising world now, of course. Except: well, no, it isn't. You'll find stuff almost exactly like the above in most newspapers, whether for mad commemorative plates (you'd thing commemorating things with plates would have been the first activity to go under Wilson's Swinging Junta), shoes whose chief selling point seems to be that you can bend them in half with one hand, and comically cheap trousers, as Radcliffe and Maconie highlighted on their radio show the other night, with a great ramble through an ad in the Sun for five pairs of leisure slacks (in charcoal, navy and 'lovat') for £29.98 all in, featuring frog-mouth pockets with coin-resistant linings. We may scoff, but any delusions about our modern 'sophisticated' age should be knocked on the head right now .The days of Chilprufe thermal undergarments will never go away.

Vision Off

2009-01-18T03:29:00.001-08:00

Another day, another not-exactly-surprising-but-still-a-shock celebrity passing over. Tony Hart was one of those children’s entertainers who occupied a unique post, probably because he fell into the job almost by accident, as so many children’s TV stars did back then, when the Italia Conti conveyor belt was still under construction.

His first BBC gig was on Saturday Special, one of those 1950s children’s programmes which, by its cast list alone, gives the lie to the idea that everything pre-’60s was a thin gruel of patrician women trilling Onward Christian Soldiers at the piano to a forbidding menagerie of rough hewn, clanking puppet animals. A sort of semi-scripted melange of songs, sketches and recipes, it was presented by husband-and-wife team Janet Brown and the actor Peter Butterworth, and can therefore have been little short of fantastic. Hart provided illustrations to stories, some done on camera, although the programme’s graphic mainstay was the old-school Reginald ‘Billy Bean’s Funny Machine’ Jeffryes. You get the impression that Tony, though his trademark cravats were to come later, was very much the ‘next generation’ of talent in this mixture.

He spent the next decade as a jobbing ‘creative’ man-about-the-Beeb: Playbox (appearing alongside that other mainstay of children’s televised art, the Stones to his Beatles, Rolf Harris), Titch and Quackers (operating Quackers to Ray Allen’s Titch) and the enticingly named Ask Your Dad. Then came Vision On, starting a solid run of thirty years (via Take Hart and Hartbeat) with Tone at the front of a largely unchanging format - the gallery, interstitial Aardman animations, pastel cityscapes created before your very eyes, cartoon elephants dashed off with a line-marking machine in an abandoned car park, unwelcome intrusions from resident manic comedy relief (‘Now, where was I? Ah yes, glitter!’), Tony drawing a wild animal which disappears from the picture when his back’s turned and starts terrorising the studio, and that casual, almost cavalier, way he had of deciding a picture was finished, tossing a cardboard frame over the top with a few last strokes of the pastel (‘And I think… we’ll call that… a day!’)

That’s at least three generations who’ve grown up watching the master quietly, diligently at work to the strains of the easiest listening to be found in the Beeb’s record library (all in the prescribed viewing position for ’thoughtful’ kids’ telly - lying prone on the floor two feet in front of the set, chin resting on hand, gazing upward in rapt concentration). Three generations forlornly hoping their badly-traced dinosaur panorama would make it to the gallery, three generations cursing the fact it was usurped for some talent less six year old’s gimmicky construction with movable cotton wool flaps. (Of course, Tony was teaching us a valuable lesson there about ‘passing off’ and the nature of genuine creativity, but did we listen? No, we just fumed indignantly at the thought of those coloured pencils going to someone who’d probably end up eating most of them.)

It’s not just because he’s still sadly fresh in the memory that it’s tempting to compare his amazing pre-teen influence to Oliver Postgate, but the pair have always seemed somehow alike - quietly creative, self-contained, greatly magnanimous and bursting with more ideas in a day than a Nickelodeon boardroom could rustle up in eight collective lifetimes.

Now, where did I put that Indian ink?

Lett's go!

2009-01-02T02:28:00.000-08:00

Monday 1 January 1979
Snowed in at Stansgate. Melissa is writing something called ‘Fight Sexism in the Benn Family’ in which she denounces the men for leaving all the work to Caroline.

I’ve never kept a diary and not really understood why other people do, but I love stuff like that. We buy published diaries of the famous for behind-the-scenes insights and no small amount of dirt, but an incidental pleasure is the inevitable presence of mundane, do-nothing days which the great and good experience just like we do. Naturally, the first day of the year is a magnet for this sort of tellingly dreary inaction, as exemplified by Good Old Tony Benn above (and I like to think he was using his brand new Lett's Muppet Show 1979 Diary for that purpose).

What to do? Brian Eno was inspired on the first to compile his 1995 diary by his dad’s example, though whereas Eno’s was stuffed with highbrow whimsy and big names dropped from the stout end of rock, his father went for the more traditional ‘Shopping and walk to Rotary Club fete. Bought waffle maker: 45p’. For his own part, Eno watched The Red Shoes and put up a bird feeder.

Workaholic Michael Palin failed to enjoy January 1st’s enforced leave in 1975: ‘No newspapers, no letters. A bank holiday and all that that entails […] I should have started a play, Ian [Davidson] should have been writing for The Two Ronnies […] but somehow twelve and a half hours, four bottles of wine, three or four beers, several games of Scrabble and one Indian take-away meal later, we were all still in the sitting room.’

(Palin was experiencing only the second New Year bank holiday in the country, as Ted ‘The Death’ Heath had only inaugurated the thing in 1974. It could have been worse. When Samuel Pepys was scribbling his diary, the year didn’t legally begin until 25th March, for some reason, though the tradition of mundane occurrence was already in place by January 1662: ‘Waking this morning out of my sleep on a sudden, I did with my elbow hit my wife a great blow over her face and nose, which waked her with pain, at which I was sorry, and to sleep again.')

Perhaps inevitably, it's up to Alan Bennett to take the prize for the most humdrum start to the year. Bennett began 1993 logging the appearance of his own name as a clue on Paul Coia’s BBC2 daytime roustabout Catchword. ('Nobody guesses it.') More eventful than the kick-off to 1980, where he just sat at the window of his Camden house looking out of the window. (‘A nun passes.’)

Happy New Year!

[Mundane New Year bulletin: just taken delivery of the Reader's Digest Prize Draw mailout for 2009, and even by that benighted company's own try-hard standards, it's a doozy. Every official-looking stamp and sticker you see on the right is, naturally, drawn on. The small letter explains that the big packet contains an 'FAQ' to help you deal with the coming 'weeks and months of exhilaration' which will inevitably follow when you lay your hands on those great wodges of cash. The usual comedy cheques are present and correct, but sadly the free pens have dried up, and they seem to have decommissioned cheery old Tom Champagne in favour of a dull-sounding 'Prize Draw Manager' whose signature appears to read 'N. Smelly.' Good luck with that one, Smelly.]

The Night They Drove Old Rigsby Down

2008-12-16T01:43:00.000-08:00

Mention 'comedy' and 'ITV' together and you're guaranteed a laugh, though sarcasm is likely to be its main driving force. The commercial behemoth has never had a reputation as a comedic powerhouse, and things are as bad as ever at the moment, with a balding ex-doctor making catty remarks about Pam St Clement being the only thing on its books worth even mentioning, laughs-wise.

As it happens, I've done summat on the vexed topic of ITV comedy – concentrating on its Sunday output – for the latest edition of Kettering, the ever-loving magazine of elderly British comedy, available now from here, and you should get it for the vast amount of ace stuff I haven't been involved in, like the in-depth foray into Morecambe and Wise's Christmas specials, and the appraisal of the long-obscured World in Ferment. No salesman will call.

But delving into ITV's comedy output got me thinking – if, as everyone seems to agree, situation comedy is pretty much dead on the independent channel, what thoughtless action from Them Upstairs killed it off, and when? Here are a few suspects.

7.15PM May 17th 1981 – Bernard Cribbins comes out of his caravan

Lew Grade's never knowingly undersold ATV, by now not long for this world, decided to go for broke and plough everything – money, stars, technical talent – into Shillingbury Tales, a series of hour-long comedy films set in the eponymous chocolate box village, in which not-very-outrageous rock star Robin Nedwell and Diane Keen turned up to arouse the suspicions of locals Trevor Howard, Bernard Cribbins and Jack Douglas, but not for very long as they find out they all get along just fine in the end. And very lovely it was too – the perfect early evening, let-it-wash-over-you accompaniment to Shipham's potted meat spread sarnies, Mr Kipling French Fancies and perhaps a mint Club wafer (or, if wet, a Banjo). Lovely, that is, on occasion. But the mighty success of half-timbered hilarity gave ITV executives pause to muse: 'People like them, let's make some more of them. Actually, sod “some”. Make it “chuffing loads”.' No one appreciated the Pandora's box it had opened until it was too late, and Sunday teatimes became carpeted with Heartbeats, Kingdoms, Monarchs of the Glens and all manner of endlessly multiplying whimsical heritage froth, conspiring to make the modern televisual Sabbath an indigestible confection – all Battenberg and no crumpet.

9.30PM September 1st 1983 – Chas and Dave defect to the Beeb

If ever there was an archetypal ITV musical act, it was Chas and Dave. Their Christmas knees-up, housed in a fully mocked-up East End boozer at Teddington Studios, complete with working beer pumps but, crucially, no toilets – had Thames all over it, but they knocked a few sitcom themes off for the Euston Road mob too. The tunes they turned out are testament to the duo's musical versatility. Roy Kinnear building site comedy Cowboys was introduced by a stomping paean to the art of bodging ('If a job's worth doing, it's worth doing wrong/With a nail too short and a screw too long'), with an oddly Kraftwerkian electro backing. Then came Leslie Ash advertising sitcom The Happy Apple, in which C'n'D summarised the programme's plot to the tune of Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik ('Oh, Nancy/Was a secretary/In an advertising agency…') Slightly more trad was the opener for LWT Askwith Unigate bawdry Bottle Boys. ('Milk, eggs and butter, got 'em all on the float/Anything you're short of, darling, leave us a note…') However, the Gertchameisters now began working for the other side, at the front end of Alf Garnett: the Next Generation, aka In Sickness and In Health, which was much more of a home game for the boys. ('But they don't give a monkey's down the DHSS…') Then came the retooled Crackerjack theme ('Oh, Uncle Jack!') and Snooker Loopy, which was practically a trailer for the Beeb's Crucible coverage, and that was that. Aside from a slight return to the third channel for the theme to floundering chimpanzee cartoon Bangers and Mash ('Mash and Bangers's clangers come about quite frequently…'), ITV lost its most distinctive light entertainment musical asset this side of Colin Keys. 'Bloody poorer, that's a fact!'

8.45PM January 9th 1985 – Prunella Gee takes six Valium and collapses into Penelope Keith's fireplace

The middle class mid-life crisis sitcom was the bane of ITV in particular during the 1980s – Holding the Fort, Pig in the Middle, It Takes a Worried Man, Chintz… chock full of bittersweet one-liners about mortgage arrears, sad-eyed faces peering forlornly across the breakfast table over unfurled gas bills, and balding character actors in cardigans sighing heavily by the hall table. There was obviously a market for this sort of thing, though God knows where it lived. The apotheosis of the glum genre has to be Moving, a none-more-1985 series about well-to-do couple Penelope Keith and – Mr Radio Four light drama himself – Ronald Pickup, er, trying to move house. Well, it's the third most traumatic event in one's life, you know. And, judging by this series, about the 675th funniest. But this was different from all the others, as it was a bit – whisper it – 'dark', featuring no studio audience and a sub-plot about Keith's sister – the great Ms Gee – being a Valium addict, hence the above laugh-free faint into the commercial break during the first episode. No Christmas special followed.

8.30PM September 3rd 1986 – Tripper's Day becomes Slinger's Day

The original was bad enough: what turned out to be Leonard Rossiter's final TV outing as the bowler-hatted manager of a supermarket which made Store Wars in Whizzer and Chips comic look like the height of social realism. Even the set looked hopelessly fake – quite an achievement, as the interior of a supermarket is possibly the one real life location that looks exactly like a studio set in the first place. After Rossiter's untimely death halfway through the screening of a second series that existed on the strength of his name alone, Thames madly decided the original premise was worth resurrecting on its own terms. Madder still, they picked Bruce Forsyth as Rossiter's replacement. Forsyth's acting skills, while not to be entirely dismissed, are perhaps the least important part of his formidable showbiz arsenal, and indeed, here he's constantly trying to turn a straight-down-the-middle sitcom into something approaching the light entertainment spectaculars he'd been hankering after since the overstuffed Bruce's Big Night slipped in a puddle and fell on its arse in front of the entire nation. You Bet! would eventually let him work his passage back from Play Your Cards Right purgatory, but not before Bruce had suffered through two helpings of this, and an ill-fated attempt to break America with Bill Grundy-produced game show Hot Streak, a televised mix of Articulate and Chinese Whispers which didn't take but did briefly get whooping Stateside audiences joining in with the 'nice to see you' catchphrase, which must count for something.

10.30PM July 3rd 1988 – ITV knocks satirical sitcoms on the head

1988 saw a lot of long-standing British comedy traditions come to an end. The Grumbleweeds breathed their last, on telly at least, meaning an end to people going 'rattle rattle, jewellery jewellery' and Bertice Reading trying to sing Stormy Weather with a straight face while 'the lads' prannied about behind her with air horns and gorilla suits. Fresh Fields was remade and remodelled as French Fields, with Sonia jettisoned, an accordion stuck on the theme tune and a string of garlic stuck on the set. And Central finally stopped repeating The Gaffer. For shame! Arguably even more tragic was the end of several years of satirical sitcoms which used to alternate with Spitting Image in ITV's 10PM 'naughty' slot, of which the greatest was surely Hot Metal, the manic tabloid newspaper romp with Robert Hardy in dual roles and Alan Price on vibes. Slightly less majestic but still great was Room at the Bottom, the story of put-upon light entertainment producer James Bolam, suffering at the sadistic hands of controller Keith Barron. When the second series of that came to a close, nothing worth mentioning really took its place, and though Spitting Image carried on a few more years, Sunday night appointment TV never really recovered.

10PM October 27th 1996 – Sometime, Never

And this is the sort of stuff that replaced it: a sitcom built, if you please, around the Philadelphia Girls, aka Sara Crowe and Ann Bryson, whose ditzy office temps of the sing-song estuary voices and the unhealthy obsession with that rubbery cheese spread that always smelt faintly of tarmac evoke the mid-1990s more completely than any Britpop mix tape or clip of John Major talking about cricket and parsnips. Amazingly, they were given two cracks at TV stardom off the back of those – in 1995 Channel Four stuck them behind desks for sixthirtysomething, an early evening round up of celebrity news delivered in tones of mild sarcasm, which was something fresh and original at the time, and not, as it is now, the unappetising gruel making up 80% of all telly ever. Then came this, a rather less original sitcom where the pair swapped run-of-the-mill observations on the tribulations of being the wrong side of thirty over a bottle of cooking sherry. After that: nothing. Funny, that.

A Quick and Easy Winter Warmer

2008-12-02T02:01:00.000-08:00

There are all sorts of Kate Bush videos more worthy of a look than this one (Sat in Your Lap, for instance, has a lot of explaining to do), but since it's that time of year, only one song will do. When everyone else was doing either stompy party Christmas songs or retro ballads, trust Kate to go for the tenuous, all-over-the-place meander that was December Will be Magic Again. (And the ambiguity didn't stop with the music - does she mean 'magic' in the witchy sense, or the Selwyn Froggit sense?) There's no proper video for this, weirdly, but the famous clip from Abba's ill-conceived 1978 Snowtime Special ('recorded in the BBC Big Top, 4,000 feet up in the Swiss Alps') will do just fine.

First up, some set notes. I don't know the technical, interior-y designer-y name for those rattan chairs with the big old 'halo' back, but weren't they all over the telly in those days? Never saw one in anyone's actual house, of course. There's no room for the damn thing, for a start. And very wasteful of precious resources in the 'Save It!' decade, too. Unless it was the same chair every time, of course. Anyway, here Lesley Judd's stuck some red velvet on it and painted in in Humbrol gold, 'to look a bit more Christmassy'.

And it wouldn't be 1978 without the traditional half-height all-silver Christmas tree. The first year, by my reckoning, of the silver tree's four-year dominance, which by surely no coincidence overlapped precisely with the golden ages of James Burke, motionless blokes hammering two notes each on keyboards on Top of the Pops, and people saying the phrase "paperless office" without laughing. To live at that time was to live in The Future. Unless you were a member of Darts, of course. Then it all went wrong, and the silver trees were melted down to make CDs of Brothers in Arms. I blame Princess Di.

The premise is simple: Kate's in wide-eyed 'little girl' mode - OK, more than she usually is - waiting excitedly for Father Chrissamuss to come down the chimberlee. Cue lots of 'find a space' Music and Movement shape-making and, strangely, some leg-stretching 'chairobics' of the type Sue Becker would urge OAPs to have a go at in mid-afternoon autumn years fitness programme Boomph with Becker. 'Have a rest if you like Mrs Murchison, it's not a race, you're doing absolutely fine!'

'No Warninks for you until you learn to sit on that chair properly, young lady! And Auntie Joan's seen your Tommy Cooper impression before!'

'You like the lining, don't you!'

The wide shot shows Kate's parents have made a decisive move with all their decorations away from the paper chain and spherical multicoloured tissue paper fold-out bells that always seem to be heavily torn even the first time you put them up, to the futuristic (and more hardwearing) all-tinfoil spiky stars and tinsel look, which is as it should be. Note also a washing line arrangement of Christmas cards top right, and lurking in the background, a forlorn-looking standard lamp. Also, it looks like someone ought to be attending to those vol-au-vents in the oven.

It may be a Christmas fantasy, but there's no denying the odd sign of the times - at the height of the drawn-out Blokes Up Stepladders with Buckets of Fake Polystyrene Snow Union strike, Kate has to use her own initiative. That year's Crackerjack Christmas Special was a sparse affair indeed.

'Now dear, Auntie Joan's a guest in this house and if she wants the King's Singers on that's what we're having on. You can watch Morecambe and Wise any time.'

A poignant moment - it's goodbye to the last Gooseberry Cream in the realm.

All well and good, but it's hardly a proper production number of madness of the sort you'd expect. Another performance, on Kate's own Christmas Special the following year, was a bog-standard 'at the piano' affair. This, however, more than makes up for it, presumably composed in honour of that unvenerable institution, the Radio 1 DJs' Christmas Party.

Nobody Needs a Woolworth's Store These Days

2008-11-21T06:40:00.000-08:00

So it looks like Woolworth's is finally on its uppers. The media are inevitably trying to roll this story into the general recession coverage but, while that won't have helped, most people will just be surprised the chain has made it through the last twenty years at all. For at least two decades, Woolies has been a shop out of time.

Up until the mid-'80s, a town centre shopping trip that didn't include Woolies was practically unthinkable. An American chain run with ruthless commercial hard-headedness, it still managed to be, in this country at least, as aimlessly British as the Triumph TR7, George Brown MP and Bruce's Big Night Out.

A corner shop that fancied itself as a supermarket, Woolies was the department store you could actually buy something from. Its situation was ideal. Proper department stores were prohibitively expensive and wouldn't touch most of what Woolies had to offer, and the big three supermarkets (Sainsbury's, Safeways and MacFisheries, natch) were still strictly stewing steak and greaseproof paper outlets. As long as the status quo was regulated, they were sitting pretty in a sizeable niche. Then all of a sudden Tesco's got Scalextric in, butchers stopped wearing straw hats and you could buy a first class stamp in a pub. Something had to give.

It's unlikely the shop has much personal significance for anyone under 25 now. The Pick 'n' Mix has hung around, though health and safety rules have made the sweet-buying process akin to retrieving spent fuel rods from a nuclear reactor. but when the records went, there was no going back. If you wanted a 7" single before 1986 there was only one place you went. No-one stacked the Top 40 in a series of little wire-basket pigeonholes like Woolies.

Then there were the cassettes, either functionally blank or the shop's own brand of Chevron licences, heavy on the Gordon Lightfoot side of things. (Woolworths hosted a bewildering maze of loosely-affiliated own brands, including Lilliputian rock star outfitter Chad Valley, pint-size duffle coat fashion house Ladybird and deceptively posh-sounding jigsaw dispensary Winfield.) Oh, and the flick-through rack of chimp-on-the-potty posters, of course.

Which brings us to the gags. Woolies' cheap and cheerful atmosphere meant it was the standard reference point for Jasper Carrott and his topical ilk whenever a metaphor for something down-at-heel or shoddily made was required. Jokers of today, hopelessly disorganised as they are, can't decide between Netto, Lidl and Poundstretcher as the modern signifier of naff, and even if they did settle on one, it wouldn't drop as neatly into a gag as the word 'Woolies' did. It was a comedy store in the truest sense.

And there was the long-running gag that it took forever to get served, which as far as I know had no basis in fact, but it fitted the whole gloriously shabby image, which Woolies seemed, at least, to grin and bear. Try something like that with Tesco's and you'd soon be on the receiving end of a nocturnal visit from some large men with mirrored sunglasses and blue stripy baseball bats. They can make Nick Hancock push a trolley on the telly all they like, but the comedy's gone out of commerce.

Even I could tell something was up in 1986, when I finished browsing the ground floor (ie. the good bit) of the Woolies located in the corner of Aylesbury's dystopian concrete Friar's Square shopping centre (the perfect location), and ascended on the escalators past the second floor (plates, pans and toasters - boring) to the top floor, which housed white goods, self-assembly greenhouses, ladders you could carry round with ease and, most importantly, demonstration models of brown-cushioned garden swing-seats you could easily spend a quarter of an hour lounging on and reading Smash Hits until a brown-coated floorwalker told you to naff off out of it. This time, however, all that was to be found up there was a single, forlorn-looking Zanussi washer-dryer being loaded onto a trolley while, across the void of the vast, dark and empty floor, a Vildea supermop topped over. 'Sorry, son. Top floor's closed, now.' That was that, then.

So it's far too late to weep for Woolies (and Woolco), but it's always worth remembering the once wonderful place, especially at this time of year. Christmas suited Woolworth's. For one, it was possibly the only shop which actually looked classier after it was bedecked with a surfeit of tinsel. Secondly, the mood-predicting cellophane fish in their crackers actually worked (occasionally). And of course there were those filibustering seasonal advertising extravaganzas, taking up an entire commercial break, which, to some of us, suggested untold power and influence. Had they done a deal with Willie Whitelaw? I wouldn't be at all surprised.

If that's not enough, there is this fantastic site, run by Woolies themselves. Can you imagine the Stalinist edifice of Tesco ever giving two hoots about its history?

One-two-three-four!

2008-10-18T01:35:00.000-07:00

School music lessons. Some love them, some hate them, some just appreciate the opportunity to stare out the window for half an hour. Surprisingly they're still going strong today - I thought they'd have been replaced with more tests, or something less alienating for the tone deaf community, or at least something a little less - well, hippy.

Because the music lesson as we know it was undoubtedly a product of the 1960s. It's all so folky and folksy and 'everyone join in'. You can't imagine Jimmy Edwards leading the class of Whack-O! in a few choruses of We're All Going to the Zoo Tomorrow. Round my way, where teachers with perfect pitch were thin on the ground, it was up to the radio or, best of all, telly to provide the sonic education, most usually in the form of the xylophone-plonking, high-pitch-counting-in Music Time on the BBC. here's a clip from a slightly-too-late edition (Helen Spiers eschewing the floaty blouse and wearing a knee-length skirt, which is all wrong of course).

Anyway, when it came to ensemble playing, there was no getting around the division between those who could play an instrument (ie had grade I recorder) and the vast majority who could just about clap, but that was it. To the rescue came the percussion cupboard, a treasure trove of tambourines, triangles and other weird noisemakers for the musically incapable to hit, scrape, or generally muck about with, including:

Shakere

How fortunate the proper African name is so close to 'shaker', which is what it basically is. Usually the most 'ethnic'-looking instrument in the cupboard, even though it was manufactured in Nottingham and half the beads on the outside have been idly picked off over the past term. By the third it's threadbare, and an emergency yoghurt-pot-and-dried-pea session is in order.
Mucking about rating: low.

Guiro

That's 'scraper' to you and me, wary teachers not wanting to tempt fate with the exotic pronunciation. ('Miss, my dad has a guiro every fortnight but me mum has a go at him for spending it all down the pub!') Good one to get as it's quite sizeable, and makes that amusing cockroachy noise so beloved of cheap TV serials to accompany the adventures of a furtive moustachioed lurker up to no good.
Mucking about rating: moderate.

Cuica

I.e. that drum with a stick in the middle that makes a sound like a cartoon hippo reading Punch magazine. Whoever gets this instantly becomes class hero for their mastery of sonic hilarity for about thirty seconds after it's taken off them for 'mucking about', put back on the high shelf and they're given the last tambourine with a split in the skin instead.

Mucking about rating: off the scale, while you can get away with it.

Vibra-slap

Missus. Makes that exotic rattlesnakey noise when hit. And does damn all else. Good choice for the lazy pupil, as you can just sit there through the whole recital idly calculating the odds on getting hold of that elusive Everton gold badge Panini sticker, then leap in right at the end with your vibra-slap and steal all the glory.
Mucking about rating: sporadic, but high.

Flex-a-tone

The best one of all, that wibbly-wobbly tinny cross between a bell and a Swanee whistle that's absolutely useless for anything but providing the soundtrack to someone unsteadily transporting a really big jelly.

Mucking about rating: countermanded.

It'll be Alright on the Night (on the right of the night on the left of the night opposite Mordred)

2008-09-26T03:13:00.000-07:00

So The Krypton Factor is coming back, as plugged here - bizarrely with Gordon 'The Chain' Burns holding building blocks spelling 'Trumpton Wanker'. Well, it's an angle.

Nothing amazing about another old quiz being plundered by poor old strapped-for-brains ITV of course, but all the talk of the 'iconic' assault course and 'state-of-the-art technology' suggest that, once again, they're missing the point of the original before it's even begun.

Even at the time, The Krypton Factor was a very ordinary sort of programme. While quizzes in the 1980s gradually stared beefing themselves up, with blonde women in helicopters and Richard O'Brien playing an ocarina, The Kryp (as we all called it) remained sober and, that shouting sergeant major at the end aside, very, very quiet. Gordon Burns's supernormal powers of whispering were stretched to the limit as he conspiratorially confided with the viewing public the key to solving the three-dimensional jigsaw (always something about getting the base segement the right way round) while the camera focussed unforgivingly on Jim, a systems analyst from Redditch who 'doesn't appear to be making any progress at all'.

Since then, silence has become as much a crime on TV as it always was on radio. But radio had a reason for it, as pointed out by John Peel whenever he played a record on the BBC World Service which featured a whopping pause in the middle, half-fearing the momentary silence of the global broadcasting bastion might trigger World War Three.

Blame Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and its constant, pulsating, sub-Jean Michel Jarre backing track, complete with matching Destination Docklands-style sweeping lightshow. Someone decided the sound of a silent studio wasn't 'tense' enough. Either that, or they had a morbid fear of the janitor's broom falling over and destroying the carefully constructed edifice of intellectual suspense.

ITV might decide to help their product stand out from the menacingly thrumming crowd by going back to whispering basics. Who knows? Mastermind managed it after all, but the Beeb tend to have more confidence in their resurrected brands, and don't share ITV's boobish, eager-to-please compulsion to kit the old model out with the TV equivalent of flashy rear spoilers and those blue lights that go along the bottom of the door frames. (They certainly tried odd things towards the end of The Kryp's original run, as I recall.)

But it's an important fact that The Kryp was, even by the standards of the time, quiet, thoughtful, modest telly. No bells, no whistles, no throbbing Fairlights or billowing carpets of dry ice. Even the assault course looked like a badly-tended adventure playground at times. And if they get the mechanics of the quiz right, there's no reason why it can't be like that again. They could even save a few bob to plough back into blinging up that Series Champion perspex trophy.

Oh, and what are the odds they'll persuade Steve Coogan into a one-off return to those 'spot the difference' dramatic film clips he used to appear in?

Funny the Things, eh?

2008-09-05T04:27:00.000-07:00

I used to like Sounds. Not as good as the NME admittedly, and a tad heavy on the DEATH TO FALSE METAL! Coverage, but streets ahead of the dour, priggish Melody Maker, for sure. Anyway, one of the wacky stunts the paper pulled towards the end of its life was to fill two whole pages with made-up charts. Not just the notoriously unreliable ‘indie charts’ (ie what some surly get in Notting Hill thinks his customers ought to be buying), but charts of everything from pie fillings to the most popular catchphrases on Bullseye. (This last achieved fame by being read out, a few weeks later, on the programme, to the mock-bemusement of Jim Bowen, and the as ever genuine bemusement of the crowd.)

One of these charts, published some time in early 1988, has stuck in my mind ever since. God knows why - it’s not especially funny or interesting in itself. A lot of it doesn’t even make sense. But, well, ‘funny the things, eh?’ And in an attempt to purge this pointless bit of whimsy from my mind for good, here it is, as the inkies used to say all the time, ‘in full’:

“WHERE ARE THEY NOW?” PETES

Pete Stride & John Plain
Peter Perrett
Pete Wylie
Peter Glaze
Peter Oosterhuis
Peter, Paul and Mary
Peter Lorimer (Leeds)
Peters and Lee
Pete Gunn
Pete Best

(The little flower things didn't appear in the original paper, of course, it's just Blogger being an arse and not letting me do a numbered list, for some reason. Anyway, let's have a rummage...)

PETE STRIDE AND JOHN PLAIN
A very Sounds choice, these two being members of pub-punk act The Lurkers and punk-pub band The Boys respectively. Dunno about The Boys, but The Lurkers sounded like 101 variations on The Clash’s White Riot to my punk-ignorant ears and, shall we say, respected the privacy of the UK Top 40. Still, loads of other people, including Peel, loved them, and they ‘made The Ramones sound like Queen’, which has to be worth something. Here’s some phlegmatically flailing skinny tie action from the lads on Revolver (sadly the clip cuts off before we get to hear Peter Cook’s soused verdict on the band.)

PETER PERRETT
Lead signer of The Only Ones, of course, who may have been nowhere to be seen in 1988, but now are all over Jools Holland, adverts and compilations – doing Another Girl Another Planet in all cases, admittedly, but Perrett’s still about, albeit tainted with association with The Libertines, of all folk. And he could still do with a bun or two by the looks of things.

PETE WYLIE
Bit cheeky of them to bung the Wah!meister into this list, as he’d been in the charts with Sinful just over a year previously. Sadly it’s more appropriate these days, as an accident in the early ‘90s put the kybosh on his solo career, though a comeback is apparently ‘imminent’, which could be rather good. Of course, the best band he was ever in was The Crucial Three, one of those late-’70s Liverpool bands who never actually wrote songs or performed, but just hung about in tea shops all day talking about how great it was being in a band. That’s the music career for me. Other members were Julian Cope, who is ace in a bizarre new way every day, and Ian McCulloch who I’ve never been able to stick. Put that jumper on properly lad, you’ll ruin the neck hole! And stop pouting!

PETER GLAZE
Not a very well-researched list this, is it? The former Crazy Gang understudy turned shortarse recipient of a giant tuning fork to the head on Crackerjack* had been dead a good five years by the time this chart was compiled. He carked it halfway through a series of the late-period, Stu Francis-’n’-gunge-era incarnation of the show too, raising the question of how, if at all, the programme commemorated that sad event. A memorial round of ‘get the whistle out of the tray of Sugar Puffs with your teeth’? Or just a mournful Jimmy Krankie with two downturned thumbs, declaring the tragic loss decidedly un-fandabidozi? Best of all, while Glaze was still operational, he could conceivably have covered the work of any of the abovementioned Pete’s in that section of Crackerjack where they do a daft mini-play and shoehorn a Hit parade number into the action. Not sure Glaze’s bluff tones would suit a Perrett song, but I bet he ould do a belting Seven Minutes to Midnight.

PETER OOSTERHUIS
Bit of a zany choice here, with the oddly-named lanky golfer who was all over the telly in the canary yellow plus fours era of the sport, but had buggered off to America by the time this list came out. That’s it.

PETER, PAUL AND MARY
Were still going in ‘88! And are still going these days to the best of my knowledge. Just because you stopped listening to Junior Choice when they started going overboard with the Ralph MacTell songs doesn’t mean that world just vanished, Mr List Compiling Man!

PETER LORIMER (LEEDS)
Footballer famous for his ability to kick the ball very hard. Unlike his team-mates, who preferred to do the same to the opposing side. No joke like an old joke, eh?

PETERS AND LEE
This list does admittedly run out of steam towards the end. Though this pair are a legitimate Where Are They Now? Target, being as they were bloody everywhere in the 1970s on the back of pretty much one song, with their own TV Christmas specials and everything. They’d long packed it in by 1988, though I do remember seeing them on Summertime Special once, which must have just about been in the ‘80s.

PETE GUNN
Not sure who this even is. Do they mean Peter Gunn, the 1950s detective series? Or the Duane Eddy theme tune from same? If it’s the latter, that was being covered by The Art of Noise about the time this was published, so zero points on the research front there. But knowing this paper, it’s more likely referring to the bassist from Peter and the Test Tube Babies or something.

PETE BEST
Oh, of all the cheap shots… It’s hard not to feel sympathy for the Biggest Loser in Rock (copyright lots of little losers). Twenty years of sterling work for the civil service and a rock solid marriage to the girl off the biscuit counter at Woolie’s mean nothing, do they? Oddly enough, this list was published in the very year Best knocked his day job on the head and went back to music, forming The Pete Best Band. I like to think this list was directly responsible.

* - Crackerjack!

It's all done in the Geoff POSSIBLE Capes!

2008-08-25T03:05:00.000-07:00

This week’s British Olympic showreel wouldn’t have been complete without a misshapen lump of controversy every bit as artificial and underwhelming as one of those chunks of coagulated flavouring found at the bottom of a packet of Monster Munch. Apparently that rotten picture from bloody years ago of Myra Hindley made out of Jim’ll Fix It badges or something was bewilderingly featured, in a ‘deeply upsetting’ way.

It is upsetting of course, but only in the usual way – seeing genuine talent and hard work (your actual medal-winning folk) being piggy-backed by the usual lazy crowd of media slugabeds is as British as any unfolding London bus full of Crowley-worshipping billionaires. Never mind sport and politics being kept apart, sport and art shouldn’t be half-heartedly mashed together, certainly not in this boring, taking-the-shine-off-genuine-aceness, committee-driven way.

The irony is, of course, that not so long ago (well, OK, quite long ago), art was an Olympic event. You can see why this wouldn’t happen now – not televisual enough, and who would commentate? Brian Sewell? – but perhaps if a measurable element was added, it could work. Who can sculpt a reclining nude in less than four minutes? ‘And there’s the plucky Italian undergoing his own mini-Renaissance, coming back against the Spaniard with some rapid work on the upper torso there, just look at those chippings fly!’ Or the novel-writing marathon? ‘Fifty pages to go, and Amis has an awful lot of characterisation through revealed action left to do! He spent too long building up that allegory in the early chapters, and now he’s paying the price!’

Hmm. Perhaps it’s best left untampered with. We’ve got enough proper amateur athletes who’ve made it on their own ability and dedication as it is, let’s not let egregious, self-promoting faux-proles like Banksy in and spoilt everything. With him on our team, we’d be bound to cark it. Unlike Los Angeles in 1932, where Britain’s John Hughes won a gold medal in town planning. Er, result!

Someone's 50 Today...

2008-07-30T03:36:00.001-07:00

... unbelievably enough. I won't tell if you won't.

Happy birthday, love.

.

Let's Go Shopping

2008-07-24T00:18:00.001-07:00

It's just about summer at last, and there's something about the orange haze of a July morning that puts me in mind of holiday trips to the local newsagent-cum-general store round about the turn of the '80s. Leave your bike outside in a casual heap and enter its subdued, welcoming, blue-and-white vinyl floor tiled, no-cheques-cashed-thank-you interior.

Most important, on a day like this, is the little deep freeze with the two-way sliding top and the achingly outdated stickers on the front. This is, of course, owned by the company which makes both the contents and the little tin sign spinning out front in the breeze - Wall's if you must, but more properly Lyon's Maid, signified by that bucolic dancing troika of a small boy and two small girls, captured in the middle of a raucous round of Ring-A-Roses with alarming disregard for the safety of their Mini Milks.

The contents of the freezer depend, of course, on whether 'the man's been'. If he has, fill your boots with Fabs, Funny Feet, Starship 2000s and the urban drug legend magnet that was the 2-Ball Screwball. If he hasn't, it's a sad scrabble round the bottom of the unit forthe best of the dull stuff - Jubblies, popsicles (not even Cola flavour left), Callipos and, most spirit-crusing of all, big brown unopened boxes of boring wafery sandwich things and the ubiquitous family brick.

It's important to note that Cornettos and other posh fare were never spotted in these units. At best, you might have seen the occasional rogue King Cone, looking lost and nervous outside its natural habitat of a shoulder-mounted tray in a darkened Odeon. If you're really unlucky, the good stuff in the tiny deep freeze will be sharing freezer space with savoury abominations, usually Patsy Kensit peas and Findus frozen boil in the bag dinners, featuring the most suspiciously smooth slices of roast beef you ever did see.

But never mind that, if there's nothing to be found in the freezer, the pop's all there, lined up on a shelf to the right. Naturally, there's no refrigerator here - not for another three years, at least - so your tins of Lilt and first-generation Tab (the beautiful drink for beautiful people) have to sweat it out among the Panda Pops, Trendy Pops and Rola Colas. No preferential treatment here. Other uncomfortably warm drinks come in space age all-plastic packaging, like the listlessly fruity Tip Tops (there are probably fewer toxic elements in the tub than the contents).

On the floor beneath, the family-sized bottles with the dimpled necks and 3p deposit caps, lined up in serried ranks temptingly reminiscent of a 'lemonade fishing' fete stall. Again, brand egalitarianism rules. Amongst the big name liquids with bubbles which have passed their fizzical are the regional pop brands. It was Dayla round my way, but if you lived elsewhere it could've been Alpine, Larkspur or, for those lucky Yorkshire folk, pop bottled by father of future Tory leader Charles Hague. All delivered either by the milkman or via a good, solid beige Bedford van with the driver's semi-hard son sat in the back, flicking Big D nuts at dogs through the open tailgate.

And we have the sweets, of course. They've been pushed temporarily into third place for the season as, with the possible exception of those new-fangled Trebor mints with the hole blocked up, they're not in any way chilled (well OK, neither are the drinks, but that's more a psychological thing, I suppose). But one tradition still holds sway in the heat - the purchasing of too many old fashioned sotrage jar sweets in a big bag. Maybe it's their 'behind counter' taboo, or the fact they're slap next to the fags, sometimes even mingled with Castellas, St Bruno and other 'OK' smoking ware, but something always ensures the buying and wolfing of far too many Styrofoam bananas, coconut mushrooms or representatives of the mysteriously resilient mojo/fruit salad duopoly - these are sweets you'll be seeing again 2 hours hence on the wasteground behind the prefabs, like old friends.

Above all this sits the 'adult shelf' stocking swanky dinner party fare such as Black Magic, Dairy Box (the winsome lady on the top of a big two-pound box cloaked in a tell-tale Miss Havisham layer of dust), the dadcentric Spartan hard centres and Terry's Pyramints. Never mind 'gentlemen's relaxation periodicals', once upon a time anything placed 5' 5" or more above ground level instantly attained an aura of grown-up mystery. Height equalled sophistication. This despite the continuing popularity of Eli Woods and Tommy Cooper.

And of course, every proper shop of this kind has a mysterious vestibule which lies behind a mystical curtain of blue and orange plastic fly-proof strips, full of wooden shelves lined with wax paper in a red gingham check or wavy blue line pattern, affixed by drawing pins on the underside, yellowing and brittle in what sun there is straining through the tiny square rear window, which some obliging soul has partially cleared of dust with the finger-daubed legend 'DALGLISH 78'.

This is a sort of half-shop, half-storeroom area, which is kind of exciting as you're never sure if you're actually allowed in here, but generally contains a lot of dull, non-child-friendly sundries. Odd-looking paper-bagged bread, in particular the oddly disturbing 'milk roll'. Cylindrical and corrugated, everything about this weird, OAP-endorsed loaf seems wrong, resembling not so much bread as we know it but a calcified version of the wobbly tube of 'solid nourishment' perpetually bisected on Pedigree Chum ads.

Other oddities hang about, ever-present, never bought. A faded card bears brown shoelaces, folded up in little paper tubes. There are always exactly four missing. Great big Ever Ready batteries, plastic coated and the size of a Tea-Hee mug, present their weird spring contacts to the air. What are they ever used in? A cardboard presentation tray of sachets of Rise 'N' Shine, or some other alchemically powdered 'orange drink', defy you to guess their age.

And at the bottom of the ninth circle sits the mystery box, a rough cardboard pallet containing as sorted small tinned items that could have been there years ( and probably have, judging by the circular rusty grooves they appear to have worn in the base of the box). Toast Toppers, pea and ham baby food, Brasso, Colman's Mustard Powder, DioCalm - you pays your 10p and you quite literally takes your chance. But of course nobody does. Although Mrs Michinson's boy likes to rummage around in there of an afternoon. Always said he was a bit funny.

Coming up in five months' time: The Co-op at Christmas.

Picture it - Sicily, 1914!

2008-07-23T00:13:00.000-07:00

Sophia: In Sicily, we never went to the doctor. We went to the Widow Caravelli. Whatever you had, she had a cure. She was most famous for her green salve to cure ear infections. One day, she gave some to Salvadore, the village idiot. He misunderstood the directions and put in on his linguine instead of in his ear.

Dorothy: Well, I guess if you're an idiot with a hearing problem, you do things like that.

Sophia: Actually, it turned out ok. The stuff tasted great, so Salvadore decided to market it. At first, things didn't go so well. Linguine with ear salve wasn't very appetizing. But once he changed the name to pesto sauce, it sold like hot cakes!

Dorothy: Ma, you're making this up!

Sophia: So what? I'm old, I'm supposed to be colourful!

Estelle Getty 1923 - 2008

Telly Selly Time #4: A Nice Repast

2008-07-17T05:59:00.000-07:00

It's the easiest thing in the world to poke fun at the telly of a quarter of a century ago for its antediluvian attitudes and plethora of offensive stereotypes, unlike today's enlightened world where snobbery and prejudice are nowhere to be seen, hem hem. Having said that, this choice 1983 promotion on behalf of the British Lamb Marketing Board was, and remains, something else.

The format of choice is, natch, is the cockney oompah rap, which did well for Kwik Fit, Do-It-All, George Cole's Leeds building society campaign and countless others. Where it came from, God knows. Chas and Dave may have something to do with it, but this sort of stuff is to the likes of Rabbit what Jamiroquai is to Parliament. Where's the cockney soul, you cowson?

One thing that really does seem odd from a modern viewpoint is the whole point of the ad - the idea that the fashion for vegetarianism would take over the nation, bankrupting farmers and sending tinfoil shares into a downward spiral. It's a threat to our very way of life! About this time, you also got ads for tea - not any particular brand, just the concept of having a cup of tea in general. Which shadowy organisation decides these things?

I'll always have a soft spot for the old 'copper with flashing blue light on helmet' bit.

Nosey neighbour with telescope doubles as outraged Mary Whitehouse figure on mention of 'meatballs'! Two stereotypes for the price of one, nice work.

Turns out moussaka was a Mexican dish all along. Who knew?

The hippie, of course. After punk knocked all that bearded wooliness on the head he was the number one cultural joke for the best part of a decade, though by '83 the main reason for ridicule seems to be his lack of awareness of hair gel and/or Yamaha keyboards.
FACT: Every joke hippie in an '80s ad not played by Nigel Planer was, for some reason, modelled closely on Van Der Graaf Generator's David Jackson. [ For example - see here. ]

'Could've had it barbecued!': Is this the most confused gay stereotype ever committed to the screen? Bodybuilding, bondage, lisp, pink thong, blonde woman on rowing machine... yes, that just about covers, um, something.

Say what you like about this ad, but at least it gets over in 30 seconds what Little Britain managed to stretch over three series.

Qui est ce Pierrot?

2008-06-06T00:14:00.000-07:00

A Very Funny Red-Haired Woman Named Tate

2008-05-26T01:47:00.000-07:00

On the weird and wacky cable service I have at home because The Man won’t let me put a dish up, there’s a rum little on-demand mini-channel thing called Screen Gems. The name will be familiar to those of you who ever mainlined stuff like The Monkees or I Dream of Jeannie on summer holiday mornings. This channel offers up a handful of those, selected seemingly at random. Why it’s doing this is anyone’s guess, but the multichannel age thumbs its nose at such lily-livered commonsensical talk, and so, there it is.

Anyway, after a brief dalliance with the one Monkees episode I must have seen every three months throughout my childhood and so could recite the dialogue as it happened (the one where they go into a toy-testing department, Tork fans) I assumed that was Screen Gems spent for me. Then a while ago Benson turned up, and through nothing more than a vivid recollection of the smell of roast beef that I’ll always associate with the theme tune, I had a look. It wasn’t half bad. Not many laughs, but still possibly the most watchable of the whole ‘sarcastic black butler versus frigid German cook’ genre. Then, the other week, along came the programme from which Benson span off, Soap.

Soap is one of those sitcoms that’s considered a landmark in America, but is hardly mentioned here. Channel 4 used to show some of the later series at odd times late at night as I recall, but the disparity in fame on either side of the Atlantic makes Seinfeld look like Dallas. It is, as the oleaginous voice of one Rod Roddy puts it at the top of every show, the story of two sisters. Mary Campbell’s the lower middle-class one, married to a loon who killed her previous husband, with one son on the run from the mob after failing to kill said loon, and another mulling over a sex change operation so he can marry his quarterback boyfriend. Jessica Tate is the other, who married a wealthy businessman who cheats on her with his secretary, and on his secretary with anyone else who’s going, is herself boffing the same tennis coach as her daughter, who’s also got the hots for a Catholic priest. And then there’s the other daughter who’s bedding congressmen, the requisite ‘wise beyond his years’ smartass kid, a Hawaiian ventriloquist with inseparable wisecracking doll, and of course Benson.

Confused? Well, you have to watch the thing closely, that’s for sure, so it’s suited to the whole on-demand format, where missing an episode is not an option. The sort of daytime soap it’s supposed to be parodying never happened over here, but that doesn’t matter. The script, created and, unusually for American comedy, mostly written by Susan Harris (later of Golden Girls fame) may suffer from the old ‘everyone talks the same way’ syndrome that’s hard to avoid with wisecracking comedy, but the performances carry it off superbly. Everyone knows about Billy Crystal’s star-making turn as Gay Jodie, but in a close contest acting honours go to Robert Guillaume’s Benson, Katherine Helmond’s brilliantly sustained airhead whitebread matriarch turn as Jessica Tate, and Richard Mulligan, whose Bert Campbell was clearly closely studied by the young Michael ‘Kramer’ Richards:

In retrospect, after we’ve been spoilt by the likes of Frasier, it inevitably seems a tad slow, and it certainly does seem a bit pleased with its mould-breaking outrageousness at times, but so does Not the Nine O’Clock News and Brass Eye. And then, this being an American sitcom, there’s The Mawkishness. Oddly, the first half dozen episodes roll by in a manic haze of plot-reversals and scene-setting with no time for a touching moment, so the first big ‘the laughter dies, leaving a tear forming in the corner of the studio audience’s collective eye’ scene comes as something of a shock. I’m told by those who know that this escalates to unbearable levels a couple of series in, and indeed the whole thing went on into the 1980s way after it should have been put out to grass, but that’s the US networks for you.

Still, even if it turns to total dross after this first series, that’s 19 episodes of class more than most can manage. Oh, and !!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! Here’s the final ever scene. They don’t end sitcoms like that any more.

Gagfax 2008

2008-05-09T01:33:00.000-07:00

Tube Fauna

2008-04-25T00:18:00.000-07:00

Spring is finally here, and with its arrival the hedgerows and fields leap into life with an abundance of wildlife. But benighted dwellers of central London, who foolishly chose to swap an idyllic life of cuckoo-accompanied romping in haylofts for a bleak routine of flopping about on concrete floors, may feel they're missing out on this natural beauty. But there's plenty of fascinating wildlife to be found on the average underground carriage, if you know where to look...

1) The Swinging Chad

Size: Human

Found: Central, Northern, Circle lines

Breeding times: 8-11AM, 5-7PM weekdays

Behaviour: The Swinging Chad is a much-misunderstood creature. Locating itself firmly in the doorway of a half-crowded carriage, it then remains rooted to the spot, no matter how many people subsequently try to embark or disembark past them. As a result, Swinging Chads are generally mistaken by the ignorant for rude, arrogant tossers who feel it beneath themselves to get out of other peoples' way. But nothing could be further from the truth, as these limpet-like animals are as much a part of the underground system as a broken 'service update' board or posters of MacKenzie Crook's knackered face.

Life Cycle: Swinging Chads have a short lifespan. Hatching from eggs laid down the backs of carriage seats, they first emerge about 4AM and have reached full maturity by the time the train comes into service. After mating with another of the species (who is then devoured) they enter incubation stage, fusing an arm-like tendril to the ceiling rail of the carriage, and on foot-like appendage to the floor. The location commonly chosen - right in front of the doors - is hazardous, but necessary to provide adequate cooling. By 11 o'clock the eggs are ready to be laid in the approved manner, and after this the Chad crumbles away to nothing. The eggs will either hatch next morning, or occasionally in time for the afternoon rush hour. Chads are edible, chickeny, and high in Omega 3 oils.

Idiot Weekly, Price £100,000

2008-04-11T00:04:00.000-07:00

It's not in my nature to blog about the other night's reality telly, but The Apprentice - which surely should be categorised as something else, it's miles ahead of any of the other stuff in this Angus Steakhouse of a TV genre - is an exception.

This week the task was doing food for a pub. The boys' team (and it feels so right to call them 'boys' and 'girls', they're like an overgrown Why Don't You? gang at all times) got that pub in Islington that appears on the Beeb almost every night, presumably because half the nation's TV producers live above it. Italian food was chosen as the theme, because one of them had eaten some once and thought it was quite good.

Disaster - of course! - came about, no doubt heavily edited to make it look worse but - note to the tabloids - it's the telly, that's what they do. A quick survival tactic was dreamt up - customers ordered a whole pizza? Give them half and cover the gaps with lollo rosso! The perfect crime you might think, but they were quickly rumbled. There followed an exchange worthy of Spike Milligan himself.

'Is this a whole pizza?'

'Er...'

'This looks like half a pizza.'

'Well.. our kitchen's run out of whole pizzas.'

Consider the logic of that last sentence for a moment. Then go and have a lie down. I know The Apprentice is nothing more than a cheap laugh at the dregs of the business world to make us feel a little better about being roundly clouted by the rest of them, but it's still the only comedy worth Bollywood dancing out of bed for right now.

She'd come in at a quarter to six with her carrier bulging - and it wasn’t with Arctic Roll

2008-04-03T09:29:00.000-07:00

For some reason - energy conservation, probably - I rarely laugh out loud at the telly. With just about anything else, I do a fair impersonation of Stuart Hall commentating on gladiatorial Bavarians dressed as pantomime ducks, but it takes a great deal to have me honking over the box. A notable exception to this rule is Kitty, the anarchic old ratbag from Victoria Wood: As Seen On TV.

As with all Victoria Wood's best '80s characters, there's no attempt made to keep Kitty sympathetic. The Continuity Announcer (the excellent Susie Blake in a mauve ruched nylon blouse complete with Princess Di-style hideous outsize bow) is a despicable snob. Julie Walters's more demented characters were surreally vulgar. Kitty is both simultaneously.

Like all good pop songs, these monologues rarely creep over three minutes in length, but pack more wonders into that infinitesimal space than is physically possible. With a delicately balanced mix of ebullience and spite, this weird, domineering WI refugee, who appears to have let herself into the studio, rattles on about the mundane minutiae of her week to a suddenly captive audience.

Her week is invariably strange, but in a workaday sort of way. Wood's usual lower middle class reference points are thrown up in the air and scattered in bizarre patterns. There are a few recurring characters - the lesbian producer, 'the boys from flat five' and Kitty's assorted fellow rummy club members - but most of the action takes place inside Kitty's disturbed chintzy brain. She's Alan Bennett's psychedelic auntie, and could clearly keep up this prattle of unconsciousness all day, despite her repeated insistence she's 'not stopping long'.

Here are a few refresher quotes:

The first day I met her she said, ‘I’m a radical feminist lesbian’; I thought what would the Queen Mum do? So I just smiled and said, ‘We shall have fog by tea-time!’
Fortunately, I’ve just had my TV mended. I say mended – a shifty young man in plimsolls waggled my aerial and wolfed my Gipsy Creams, but that’s the comprehensive system for you.
I don’t drink as a rule, not wishing to have a liver the size of a hot-water bottle. If I need a ‘buzz’, as I call it, I have a piccalilli sandwich with Worcester sauce. That takes your mind off your bunions, believe me.

There are dozens just as good. In fact, there's nothing in these sketches that isn't. It's amazing how much Wood crammed into every bit of As Seen On TV (though I still find some of the songs hard going). One episode contains enough good jokes to sustain a ten-year career by modern standards, though a modern career would have trouble yielding even one line to match it.

And Routledge is brilliant, of course. It's a grotesque performance - her mouth chews the air around the words and contorts itself into all sorts of manic shapes in between them - but that doesn't mean it's not full of little subtle touches, like an intricately carved bust of Stan Boardman. I won't succumb to prattishness by comparing her mastery of Wood's rolling verbal rhythms to the knack of speaking Shakespearean blank verse, but you get the idea - this is poetry, and wonderful it is, too.

Seriously, does anyone not like this?

Irrational Likes

2008-03-14T02:33:00.000-07:00

Here are some things that, looked at with an objective eye, add nothing to the sum total of human well-being, but which I love nonetheless:

The audible ‘clonk’ of the continuity announcer’s fader as he introduces ‘another… Round With Alliss’.

Female backing singers on Top of the Pops in the first half of the ‘80s who, despite being dolled up in the finest evening frocks and elbow-length gloves Richard Shops can provide, still look unmistakeably like bored sixth-formers killing time at the wedding of an unloved maiden aunt.

The avuncular bloke who does the announcements at the otherwise horrendous Bank tube station. I know many people object to the way he tells us what to do if we see ‘any suspicious be-HA-viour!’ as if he was addressing the front row audience for Dick Whittington at the New Theatre, Oxford, but I love it, especially when he rounds it all off with an indefatigably cheery ‘Or a police officer!’

In a similar vein, the news vendor at London Bridge station who shouts ‘Evening Standaaaard!’ to exactly the same tune as the Velvet Underground’s Sunday Morning. Sadly he’s yet to work the phrase ‘West End Final!’ into a version of Lady Godiva’s Operation, but give him time.

American ladies of a certain age who steadfastly refuse to use even the mildest swearwords in a heated argument. ‘That’s a load of bull-ploppy, mister!’

Un-rock-‘n’-roll guitars. First you’ve got the half-guitar, half-synthesiser. Anything with a keyboard and a little handle that does nothing goes under the fabulous moniker of ‘Keytar’. Better yet is the SynthAxe, a ridiculously expensive (and ridiculously heavy) bent-necked MIDI-enabled thing that could only ever be used on a Peter Gabriel filler track circa 1987. (Or by Rock School's guitar heroine Deirdre Cartwright, of course.)

Other un-rock-‘n’-roll guitars include the fretless bass (and better yet, the bass that had frets you could retract with a special key, as demonstrated on Tomorrow's World, where its Swedish inventor played it inside Bob Symes's potting shed - rock!), the one with the ‘sawn-off’ headstock look, and the one Brian May’s dad built out of a Victorian fireplace. (I’m not including guitars with two or more necks – they are rock ‘n’ roll, albeit in a goofy sort of way, and just don’t do it for me.)

'I've just received this meemo!'

2008-03-13T04:54:00.000-07:00

It's the pointless craze that's sweeping the globe! Take the book you're currently reading, flip through it to page 123, ignore the first three lines and bung down the subsequent five. Someone somewhere is cackling with evil glee at the silly men and women running around fulfilling this pointless task that he (oh, it'll be a he all right) initiated. And thanks to DJ and noted Brothers MacGregor fan Matthew Rudd, it's my turn to continue the cosmic ballet.

Funnily enough, most of the books I've been reading lately don't even have a page 123 (there are perfectly innocent reasons for this, but that's for another time). Fortunately the one I'm currently on has, so let's see here:

'It used to be a common practice for some agents to keep their clients' fees until the actor came raging into the office pleading starvation. Whereupon the books would be examined, and with a "Hello, what's this?", the agent would find a record of payment. Salaries are passed on immediately nowadays, but repeat fees are still liable to do a stint in a W1 deposit account before reaching the actor.

'But money doesn't actually mean very much to me to be honest. As long as I can buy my booze and fags and pay my mortgage and have a week or two on Lesbos and a Winterbreak and the odd dinn at L'Escargot then I'm happy.'

Well, there you have it. One person will guess what book that is instantly, the rest will just back away smiling nervously. And now I'm supposed to pass the metaphorical baton onto two other poor saps, but everyone seems to have done this already apart from dapper gadabout Steve Berry and the protean genius behind Digi-Creamguide. So, er, them then.

[Edited as I cocked it up first time round. Not, of course, that it matters, but in for a penny and that.]

Reasons Why Derek Griffiths is Brilliant #2704

2008-03-07T11:31:00.000-08:00

Nothing to add to that, really, except that this predates Whose Line It Is Anyway by a good couple of years, I think.

Telly Selly Time #3: 'Hand over that Tizer, you boys!'

2008-03-07T04:50:00.000-08:00

I’m not usually a subscriber to the idea of advertising as an artform in its own right. Far from being a hive of creativity, 99% of it leeches off what’s floating about the zeitgeist, chops it up into a one-minute chunk for the uses of Messrs Procter and Gamble, then sits back and takes all the money. Ad execs like the dreadful Trevor Beattie nick someone else’s perfectly good idea, employ highly talented technical folk to recreate it, then bask in all the glory despite having contributed nothing but a badly soiled fag packet. It’s not out of some strong Socialist principle or anything like that, I’m just sarky about Saatchi.

But a rule as monolithic as that spawns some great exceptions, and the 1985 Tizer ad here is one of them. (Doesn’t start until 00.50 but don’t miss a fine bit of Roland Rat/Tommy Boyd rivalry on the way.) The premise doesn’t hold much promise: a bunch of bored South London yobs get high on Tartrazine fizz and decide to terrorise a pair of security guards (a pre-Carling Black Label Oblivion Boys) with an intimidating mixture of formation pogoing and Pig Latin.

But. It’s great though, isn’t it? That catchy Madness-meets-Sham 69 song, some top crosstalk from Frost and Arden, that moustache, and an all-round playground quotability factor of 10. There’s a school of thought (population: me) that says adverts at their best are the purest form of nostalgia. Think about it – you spent about eight months of your childhood watching the same sixty seconds of action several times a day. It burns itself into your brain. Then they stop showing it, and you forget all about it, until it turns up decades later on an old VHS or YouTube and the sleeping dragon wakes. You enter a dreamlike state wherein – you swear – you start mentally reciting the ad a fraction of a second before it unspools on screen. It’s like playing a tape directly out of your memory, and when it happens the results are uncanny.

By the way, if anyone can identify any of the actors playing the ‘yobboes’, or indeed decipher the line that comes directly after ‘so we say words they won’t understand,’ you’ll have scratched a 23-year-old itch.

'But now let's meet some people who are juggling... with life.'

2008-03-01T03:02:00.000-08:00

There doesn't really need to be any text accompanying this clip of WC Fields's rightfully legendary juggling skills from The Old Fashioned Way (1934), this isn't so much a post as a sort of replacement for Monkhouse Movie Madness or Make 'Em Laugh or any of those other wet Sunday afternoon compilations of old comedy films which you just don't get anymore, thus depriving future generations of a staple of their cultural diet.

(Well, I assume you don't get them anymore - I'd love to be proved wrong by the discovery of T4's Charley Chase season, or by catching the last five minutes of Loose Women in which Kate Garroway and Colleen Nolan break into a step-perfect recreation of Laurel and Hardy's soft shoe shuffle from Way Out West, but I'm not holding out much hope.)

Why, though, do juggling and comedy seem to go together where, say, plate-spinning and comedy or going over Niagara Falls in a barrel and comedy don't? I suppose comics often feign daftness to conceal a razor-sharp mind, and jugglers pretend to be clumsy only to turn the audience's expectations around by plucking balls out of the air, or something equally woolly and cod-theoretical like that.

Anyway, here's a more contemporary bit of precision tossing shorn of its original context but none the worse for that - Mark 'Let me put my thinking cap ONNNN...' Heap's ten seconds of wonder from one of those Big Train pay rise sketches. Contain your jealousy by thinking of those thousands of unfunny Covent Garden/Glastonbury regulars who make An Audience with Justin Lee Collins seem like a nice night's entertainment, but admit it, you wish you could do this sort of thing, don't you?

Imagine Her, Imagine Them

2008-02-07T07:23:00.001-08:00

Fox were great. This is a fact. Some facts aren't trumpeted enough. My incessant trumpeting of Fox's greatness resulted in a lovely email from an American TV Cream reader, thanking me for introducing him to the band, which whom he was now obsessed. I was, needless to say, chuffed to bits by this. So, in the hope of drumming up a few more converts, here are more reasons why Fox were, as the man said, great.

(Sorry there's nothing much to accompany them, but the band's YouTube presence is predictably meagre. there are a couple of songs but They won't let me embed them here, for some sinister reason.)

1) S-S-S-Single Bed. The motherlode of course, and packed to the gunwales with gorgeous oddness. That clumsy club-footed wah-wah intro, for instance, sets alarm bells ringing among the less imaginative punter from the off. Then in comes the 'Lilli von Schtupp at 78RPM' vocal and that clumsy 'ner-nernk!' riff, the rhythm guitar equivalent of an on-the-pull Mod trying to lean nonchalantly on the edge of a National Milk Bar counter and sliding off. It's All Wrong and All Right at the same time. And then there are your Talkbox shenanigans in the middle eight of course. Best bit (and which, admittedly, you won't be hearing on that YouTube clip) is the way the menacing bass synth hum swoops in suddenly at the end of the chorus like a Close Encounters spaceship. Brrr! Oh, and Kenny Young's goofy cod-Texan backing vocals. Brrr!

2) Only You Can. On the album version at least, this starts very oddly indeed, with a bit of pan-pipe fuelled wooziness that seems to have fallen off a Martini advert. Then, before you can get your bearings, in comes the completely different actual tune, in the middle of a line. Out-avant-garde that, Radiohead! Then you have to contend with Noosha's nutty suction noises and bonkers lyrics about making her heart 'twirl and gyrate just like a Giro delight'. (Presumably some kind of instant dessert for the unemployed.) And for the middle eight, sir, may I recommend ten seconds of extreme stereo flanging on all channels at once?

3) Imagine Me, Imagine You. The 'difficult' third single, and not quite in the same league as the above two, to be honest. The opening is pretty bland for them (ie bonkers in terms of everyone else). Some backwards tambourine, a few 'doodle-ang's and some Hungarian phrasebook lyrics. ('Or would you rather up my room/For wine and dining?') Still, there's always that humming bass synth, here sounding less like a menacing flying saucer and more like a welcoming fridge full of... well, Giro delight, probably.

4) He's Got Magic. Not going to win any awards for fine tunesmanship, this song, but it has that infectious boinginess that glam did so well. (Though ironically Kenny's The Bump, the song which celebrated early '70s pop's bounce, was one of the exceptions.) If I was angling for a Guardian job I'd suggest it's the aural equivalent of a space hopper. But no. Best instead to mention the inclusion of more upward key changes than Zager could shake an Evans at, and the weird panning-right-to-left reprise of the chorus at the end. Why not?

5) Red Letter Day. Essentially, Altered Images four years before the fact, though in every other respect (the squeaky-husky vocal gymnastics, lyrics about pink horizons and fancy magicians) this is early Kate Bush in embryo. How many classic pop acts did *you* pre-empt today? (Oh, and Lene Lovich, I suppose.) And best of all, the whole things anchored in that sort of squelchy synth oompah bassline familiar to fans of Orange Juice's Rip It Up. (And indeed the theme to Noah and Nelly.)

HONOURABLE MENTIONS: Clued-up swingers will by now be screaming 'Wot, no I Like Electro People?' Of course, this theme to the Kenny Everett Television Show (mid-'80s BBC version, end credits only) was probably the first contact I had with Ver Fox, and it remains ace, even if you try not to get sidetracked into some mad conspiracy theory about how this came out a good six months before The Human League's Love Action, eh? Eh? All that aside, it's great to hear the always tech-savvy band move into full-on synth pop territory, although of course it wasn't officially credited as Fox for some trumped up legal reason or other. Really, it should be number three here. And Strange Ships should be at number five. Ah, forget it. Not sure what to make of this, which is supposedly the website of the lady herself, though it appears to have stalled about 18 months ago. Still, it does feature some new material, namely Judy Blue, a kind of 3 1/2 minute Bohemian Rhapsody/Tommy concept single with overtones of Andrew Gold's Lonely Boy and Kate Bush's There Goes a Tenner (and Nine to Five, in a strange way), while Fox herself adds Hazel O'Connor-style operatics and - gulp - baritone backing to her usual vocal toolbox. So she's clearly as nuts as ever, which is good.

Making toast interesting

2008-01-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

Something I assumed everyone knew - the origins of Life On Mars's 'I'm 'avin' 'oops!' courtesy Victoria Wood, Hugh Lloyd and Duncan Preston. Turns out everyone doesn't know. But even if you do, I don't apologise for bunging this on:

Givin' it Plenty!

2008-01-21T03:10:00.000-08:00

This post is primarily to plug the new Creamguide (Films) YouTube channel, a sort of visual accompaniment to the perenially late weekly e-mag of tiresomely esoteric film obsessions, to which all contributions are most welcome. One area of cinema we'll be covering is the cultural phenomenon scholars refer to as Great Credits, Bog-rotten Film. As a case in point, here's the opening to shabby Bond spoofer Lindsay Shonteff's 1977 classic No.1 of the Secret Service.

Needless to say, actually sitting down and watching this film is a severe test of any sane individual's patence, but this is great. Top disco-lite theme song with a lyric which is more Perfect Strangers than James Bond? Check! Everyone firing guns at random a la Police Squad? Check! Unreconstructed chauvinistic abuse of Sue Lloyd? Check! A very big, very red GPO telephone? Check! Dudley Sutton? Check! Whether the comedy's unintentional or not, this is opening sequence is every bit as great as a 'You Have Been Watching' montage at the end of Hi-De-Hi! A sort of 'you will be watching', in this case. Except of course, if you have any sense you won't be.

Hold Me Close Now, Tony Danza

2008-01-08T04:38:00.000-08:00

Lord, what a time of year. It's only light for forty minutes a day, happiness is but a distant memory, and there are a thousand things to do but neither the will nor the way with which to get them done. The world seems to be 'on hold' for a few weeks at about this time, so a sort of wistful anticipation is the most positive mood it's possible for most to muster. What genre of music best soundtracks this weird purgatorial period? Thanks to TJ Worthington, I've discovered the answer - those sad/uplifting songs that used to introduce just about every US sitcom made between 1980 and 1986.

The models are many. The likes of Chicago and Boston laid down those winsome power chords for the networks to purloin. Elton John's Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, though a bit 'out there' in places, serves as a nice emotional template. A closer model would be Christopher Cross's Arthur's Theme, which has the possibly erroneous effect of locating all these tunes, for me at least, in some mythical early '80s New York. Lyrically they inherit their upliftingly bittersweet, 'life can be hard but hey, if we have each other we'll pull through' sentiment from Carole King via seventies themes like Diff'rent Strokes, Happy Days and the various 'female star's first name in title' sitcoms we never really saw over here, but they were more lyrically cutesy and musically varied, and you could dance to them, whereas the below are all of a sedentary, plaintive piece. Here's a swift top ten of the most effective.

The Greatest American Hero

As detailed by TJ, this is a bit of a forgotten wonder, built along strict mid-west FM radio guidelines. What's the technical term for the thing those piano chords do at the beginning? 'Pom, pom, pom-pa-pom pom...' Simultaneously criminally bland and oddly evocative of a nighttime sojourn in uptown Manhattan you never actually experienced. 'Believe it or not, I'm walking on air!' It's all uplifting in the lyrical department though, with not much in the way of the 'momentary self-doubt expunged in an instantaneous surge of self-belief as strings and major chord kick in' feeling. Still, an honorary point for the way the opening scene resembles every video The Darkness ever made.

Taxi

If this had lyrics (aside from the 'Night Mr Walters!' 'Uuuuuhhhh!' exchange) this would romp away with the title. As it is, this Bob James flute and (I'm guessing here) vibraphone workout is mellow, just jazzy enough to be musically enjoyable without the troublesome suggestion of Benny-fuelled licentiousness, and the perfect accompaniment to a very boxy car going over a very long bridge. Other instrumentals in this genre include Gloria (only lyric, the repeated title and a load of 'na-nn-na-da-da-daaa's) St Elsewhere and, oddly, Hill Street Blues.

Silver Spoons

Quite a bit of rockist guitar freakery on this one, which marks it down considerably, but what the hell, there's Erin Gray! And the lyrics pay huge mawkish dividends with their paeans to 'Making a go/Making it grow,' 'taking the time each day,' 'those things you just can't buy,' etc. All went over my tiny head at the time, of course. I just wanted a go on that indoor train.

Punky Brewster

The unmistakably unnerving influence of Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds may cause initial panic in the casual fan, but seasoned aficionados know this is just the 'hook', the little bit of musical business that makes the theme look just a little bit different from the pack. Our familiar territory of minor-major changes and 'dit-dit-dit-da-na-na-naaa's soon returns. 'Maybe the world is blind/Or just a little unkind.' Aw. God alone knows what this programme was actually like to watch all the way through, mind.

Charles in Charge

We're at the end of the musical era here, as the rude intrusion of that LINN drum machine and proto-Mavericks mariachi trumpet work make plain. Also the lyrics are a bit odd - 'I want Charles in charge of me!' No, you want Charles 'lending a hand', 'helping out' or just 'being there for you', you don't want Charles bossing you around like a Freddie Starr Hitler any more than Diana did. This masochistic tendency in American sitcom is what would eventually lead ot Out of This World.

Who's the Boss?

Here accompanied by the visuals to Family Ties, for some reason, but try and ignore that. A jaunty, Honky Tonk Women-style cowbell and chirpy synth sting threaten to funk this out of the generic ball park, but things soon fall back into mellow place with those lyrics, taking a philosophical view with loads of guff about paths not taken. 'There were times I lost a dream or two/Found a trail, and at the end was you.'

Kate and Allie

A snappy, sassy, modern sitcom, but with a heart. In the right place. This was all over Channel Four when I was of school age, which meant that I often saw it when the combined programming might of CBBC and CITV fell slack and a watchable alternative to both We Are the Champions and SPLASH was in order. The theme tune pulls no punches. 'Sometimes tears and sorrow are all the friends you've got/Just when you think you're all by yourself, you're not.' Ain't it the truth? A bonus point for use of the word 'sharing' in a non-Sesame Street context. There doesn't seem to be a decent version on YouTube, amazingly, but the one in your head should more than suffice.

The Golden Girls

Of course Andrew Gold! Now, he's a very 'clever' songwriter, what with all those time sig flourishes on Lonely Boy and palling about with Graham Gouldman, and such brainy shenanigans are frowned upon in the world of the earnest sit-ballad. But this is upfront and honest stuff, as you well know. This, though, is a cover by Cindy Fee. ('Cindy has been awarded Clios for leads on numerous five-plus year campaigns (Hoover, Wheaties, Pontiac) placing her in the rarefied air at the top of the industry.') Some say the fact it's not a bespoke theme tune disqualifies it from competition but who's bastardly enough to pull the plug? And there's that wonderfully muddy US telly sound mix too, which I can't get enough of (see also Diff'rent Strokes and, paradoxically, the BBC golf theme).

Cheers

I nearly didn't consider this one, for some reason. Maybe it's all those antiquated photos in the title sequence masking the essential '80s-ness of Gary Portnoy's hymn to drunken cameraderie. But this is firmly modelled after the style so, to quote the old geezer's newspaper, we win! Anyway, I won't waste time analysing such a familar beast, as it's been trumped, just, by...

Perfect Strangers

You knew it was coming. That harmonica might sound a bit rootsy in theory, but it fits in seamlessly. OK, this is altogether rockier, more up-tempo, and more Friends-ish than your Christopher Cross clones, but the effect is still the same, times ten. Standing tall on the wings of his dream, the singer (presumably on behalf of Balki) promises us he's bound for better days whatever hazards life and the world may throw at him, even that gravest of modern concerns, 'haze'. It's all very Reaganite, very self-empowering, with no mention of sharing, love or counting on the little Netto Bill Murray bloke he's lodging with, but compassion be damned, this gets you right there in a running-up-the-Philly-steps kind of way. In fact, put this on your iPod and go and run up some stairs. And if you can have a bit of slapstick fun with the revolving dooors at the top, so much the better. You'll feel ready to take on all comers afterwards, guaranteed. Here comes 2008! We're gonna make it after all!

Christmas DVD Preview 2008 Part Two

2007-12-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

That Bit on Hi-De-Hi! Where Peggy and Spike are Dressed as a Pantomime Horse Riding on the Back of a Real Horse (For Some Reason) and Boozy Old Mr Partridge is There Drinking Booze and Eating a Banana and he Looks at the Booze and Looks at the Banana and he Throws the Banana Away

RRP: $45.60

From Britain’s best-loved comedy comes Britain’s best-loved scene from Britain’s best-loved comedy! Everyone – WITHOUT FAIL – remembers where they were when they first saw this textbook piece of al fresco slapstick. Now it’s available in a special extended collector’s edition for you to own. (Well, for you to buy, let’s be honest, but if we talk about you ‘owning’ the thing that sounds more cosy and less rampantly profit-orientated. To tell the truth, we don’t care if you stick the thing up your arse, as long as you paid for it).

Includes:

The famous scene in question, shorn of the rest of the programme it appeared in and shown entirely out of context (and probably cut to ribbons to boot, I’ll be bound).

Commentaries from everyone - and we mean everyone – involved. Jeffrey Holland and Su Pollard contribute fulsome praise for each other’s acting talents and other trad reminiscences along ‘the BBC tea kept us going’ lines.

The late Leslie Dwyer’s private diaries are ransacked and read out by a computer with his voice in a similar manner to that Tom Baker messaging service.

The late Simon Cadell does the same with a comic ‘review’ of the scene written by ‘Joe Maplin!’

Paul Shane applies his ‘rules of comedy’ to the scene. In song!

Barry Howard grins painfully, and Felix Bowness spends five minutes silently jumping up and down and ranting about something or other (audio only).

Someone in the production office suddenly gets the faint, sickening inkling in the back of his mind that this gag might be a rip-off of something WC Fields did in about 1932, but no-one bothers to go out and check.

Bonus Features:

Su Pollard’s ‘Oo Makes a Luvverly Cupp-aaah!’ donkey advert for Ty-Phoo!

Plus five more hours of solid Pollard!

Coming Soon:

That Bit Where Barry Whispers to Yvonne what Joe Maplin Means by the Term ‘Merchant Bankers’, and Yvonne Winces.

‘Pies, Pies, Who Wants a Custard Pie?’

The Complete Gladys-Sylvia Stand-offs (Commentary by Barry Davies)

Knit Yourself Funny!: Jeffrey Holland’s Step-by-Step Guide to Creating Woollen Versions of Every One of Spike’s Comedy Costumes

‘I Just Sort of Stood Next to the Webb Twins and Waved’: A Personal Journey by Chris Andrews.

Christmas DVD Preview 2008 Part One

2007-12-05T05:10:00.000-08:00

Let's Make An Aimless Noise Right Here!: Twenty five years of arts-funded dustbin banging.

RRP: $13.99

Stomp, the internationally famous troupe of tiresomely eager-looking DIY percussionists, have been making a vaguely rhythmic noise on amusingly prosaic bits of waste metal for a quarter of a century, under various aliases so as to avoid detection. To celebrate this year's announcement that Stomp's act will not only be opening the 2012 Olympics Game, but will in fact be replacing them, and everything else, on British television for the entire fortnight, this DVD brings together for the first time every televisual appearance of the noisome crew's various incarnations.

Includes:

Pookiesnackenburger's dustbin-tapping Heineken ad!

Every awards ceremony appearance Stomp have made to the end of 2006, which at last count was 263, though it feels like about 739. Bonus disc includes footage of ceremony audience looking nonplussed, bored, restless, in pain etc.

Yvette Fielding gamely joining in with a couple of kids banging plastic pipes with wooden spoons as Urban Strawberry Lunch take over the Blue Peter studio! For five minutes!

Every Yes-No People appearance on Andrea Arnold's slightly odd lunchtime eco-warrior magazine A Beetle Called Derek!

Ben Elton making that gag about someone nicking all the Yes-No People's instruments on Saturday Live!

The titles to late, lamented proto-Word Magazine Channel Four music show Wired, featuring the percussive stylings of the Yes-No People. And to enable you to enjoy the music better, we've handily blanked out all those distracting computer graphics with a big picture of a bloke in overalls grinning like a loon!

They were probably on that thing with Craig Charles and all, but I can't bear to look.

Extras:

The Genesis of Stomp: leading players talk about the collective's formative years, including the moment one of them saw the start of the video for Down Under by Men at Work and thought: 'I'll have that!'

A downloadable PDF of Stomp's secret plan to infiltrate and destroy the Tap Dogs, The Blue Man Group, Cirque De Soileil and any other quirky-yet-Royal-Command-friendly novelty act on the planet by 2009!

Over To You! The Stomp ethos is all about joining in (after you've purchased the official product), so here's a step-by-step guide on how to go about setting up your own tappity-tap refuse collective. Includes tips on dustbin lid-sexing, and how to choreograph those routines where one of you walks about pretending to look bored, then starts flicking at a tin can or something, and the rest of the team leap up one by one to add to the spontaneous fun. Plus how to clear Covent Garden market of all shoppers in under ten minutes!

'There's a ten shilling note! Remember them?'

2007-12-01T01:24:00.000-08:00

Well, by popular demand, here's Kate workshopping a mime accompaniment to her selective-appeal-era 'Ealing comedy in four minutes' There Goes a Tenner on Stansfieldian gantrified roustabout Razzamatazz.

No need to go through a step-by-step deconstruction of this, as it's pretty much all of a piece, but do watch out for:

00:00 : Razzamatazz's helpful overhead display for non-Cockney viewers: 'KATE BUSH THERE GOES A TENNER £10')

00:00 - 00:20 : Kate's tribute to Michael Palin's tentative, Ministry-rejected silly walk.

00:35 - 00:40 : Leather trousers, T-shirt, prancing about - why, it's Sally James in Four Bucketeers mode! (According to one comment here, La James presented this very episode. The news that evening contained a grim bulletin on a nationwide spate of teenage spontaneous combustion.)

00:55 : 'Audience joined in with the 'waiting' mime rather nicely, I thought.' 'I think they were just confused, Alistair.'

01:20 : Pull-focus on MG horn, Mr Director!

01:52 : Missed opportunity - A. Pirrie or similar fails to hove into shot dressed as Edward G Robinson.

02:30 : 'Have you ever wondered what would happen if they made a Rita Tushingham Muppet? I think it might look something... like this!'

02:50 : A ukulele mime - lovely.

03:05 : Admit it, you've secretly been spending this entire song thinking, 'I wonder if they're going to..?' Well, they do! They do!

And for comparison, here's the official video version, which isn't that amazing, apart from the Great Big Pendulum:

See, surely the video for this song should have Kate herself playing the three (or is it four?) gang mambers she does accents for in the song, with loads of wobbly split screen. Or have I misunderstood things?

The Kate Bush Tactics Truck #1

2007-11-30T02:15:00.000-08:00

In these fractious and turbulent times (and I sincerely hope someone's enjoying that cream horn I was saving for later, chiz chiz), we look for guidance to the great artists of history. A world of shifting consequences can, we hope, be imbued with some sense of order if we study the classics. And nowhere, surely, is there a greater repository of spiritual and geopolitical wisdom than the video oeuvre of Kate Bush.

THE BIG SKY

Let's start off with something accessible and basic. Nothing particularly legendary about this track, manifestly ace though it is, and positively fantastic for a fourth-off-the-album potboiler. But the Bush attention to detail didn't slack at these moments, as the gloriously overwrought video shows.

1) 'It's a film...'
We start off with loads of dry ice, and various historical figures including a WWII pilot standing about and waving, which is clearly a reference to A Matter of Life and Death. Er, or Close Encounters. Or The History of the World Part One. Anyway, it's a film reference of summat or other. Oh, and here comes Kate. Notice how, at this stage of her career, she somehow manages to be mumsy and girly at the same time. (Furtively adjusts Adidas bag on lap.)

2) Springwatch 2086
What every well-dressed post-apocalyptic twitcher should be sporting as they perch nimbly on a basalt plinth to watch the sky boil away. (Time Machine-style giant scorpions not pictured.) Here Kate's just about to hand over to Bill, who's got some terrific news about the family of house martins in that Swaffham rectory.

3) 'S-T-I-M-I-L-A-T-I-N-G! Stimulatin'!'
A kestrel for a knave, or rather for no other reason than it looks great. This sleek bird of prey is never more at home than in front of the Life on Earth title sequence. (Kate also turns up at about this point dressed as Napoleon while someone empties a watering can over her head, which is self-explanatory, really.)

4) Qua-diddly-qua-qua!
Time to step things up a gear, with the tried and tested gambit of flamenco dancing furiously towards the camera with a bunch of oddly-dressed mates. Ten years later, R&B videos would consist of nothing else, but here it's just another choreographical dumpling in Kate's cultural stew.

5) Taking Tiger Mountain by Dancercise
How many videos during this period ended up in a big warehouse full of rubble with loads of blokes with flags running about? Red Box, Killing Joke, Duran Duran, er... Bad News's Burning, Looting, Raping, Shooting... you can think of a hundred more. The end result: when the Berlin Wall finally fell, those delirious, epoch-defining 'hands across No Man's Land' parties looked strangely familiar.

6) 'Hey, Superman, where are you now..?'
Genesis's Land of Confusion, there's another! Which also featured a bloke dressed as Superman, though not running about as prattishly as this one.

7) Going to a Go-Go
Never let it be said Kate lost her sense of goofy fun at this point. The Ninth Wave may have been a tad heavy on the conceptual song cycle roughage for some listeners, but she wasn't above ending her videos with a joyfully daffy auntie-left-alone-with-the-Bailey's-on-Boxing-Night wig out. 'See you next time, on Blockbusters!'

Kangabang '82

2007-11-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

It's 1982! Fun, love and experimentation are in the air! The Space Shuttle is finally working! The ZX Spectrum is teaching us to laugh! And an entire generation of young men are - cough - beginning to come of age. If you could sum up this year in a single image, what would it be? Might it be the one, say, at 2:25 here?

Yes folks, for a certain segment of the British populace nothing says 1982 quite like Kate Bush wanking off a laser beam. And just off camera, don't forget there's Rolf Harris and Percy Edwards, beavering away in their booths. 'Hey, that's OK, Junior. I am confused also.' Tony Benn writes: 'Thish ish exshactly the short of thing I was pushing towardsh when I accshepted the poshition of Poshtmashter General.'

And here's something in better taste - Very Good Taste, in fact.

No Really, Who IS this Clown?

2007-11-11T02:44:00.000-08:00

I’d have mentioned this even if I wasn’t namechecked in it, honest, but Talk About the Passion is a podcast about fandom wherein rubber-limbed former Play School presenter Ben Baker interviews a worshipper of a different area of pop ephemera every single day. If you would like to join in at home you’ll need a candle, some bread, and the 1973 Trumpton annual with you.

Today’s guest is TJ Worthington, the subject is Watch with Mother, and the rest writes itself. One of the points raised was the indefinable scariness of the clown who appeared at the end of Camberwick Green, operating the credit roller. It’s usually agreed by scholars that this terror is down to a mixture of our natural fear of clowns, the slow, deliberate movements of this particular one, and that crashing discord at the end.

But there are a few other horrifying things about this scene. Here’s a summary of the latest research.

1) WHERE IS HE?
Well, we’re not given any clues, are we? That snazzy purple and brown striped wallpaper aside, our poor friend seems to be in limbo, vis-à-vis the geography of the ‘Green. This leads inevitably to point 3).

2) WHEN IS HE?
Well, we do have other clues, but they just make things more worrying. There’s a lute in front of him. Now this must mean a) he’s tapping into the Fairport Convention market; b) He’s Sting; c) He’s fallen through time from the 16th century like some kind of Catweazle-esque children’s-programme-within-a-children’s-programme; or d) Camberwick Green itself takes place in the 16th century, and not modern times like you thought! Ha! Fooled you all along! (Copyright M Night Shyamalan.)

3) WHO’S MAKING HIM DO THIS?
If we take the most rational explanation – ie that he’s the Catweazle of Trumpton – then we must unhappily conclude that the poor sod, fresh out of his own era and maybe a little groggy, has been kidnapped and forced to do toil in the credit dungeon for the term of his natural life. PC McGarry (number 452) is on a Madeline-style quest to find the fellow (Codename ‘lost dog’). When he first arrived in Camberwick (quite an event in itself for a village visited most days by nobody whatsoever) he enchanted all around with his eccentrically medieval ways and delightful ballads detailing his aliases in various European countries. That stripy wallpaper leads to Jonathan Bell being the most likely culprit, luring this temporal immigrant to his go-ahead farm with the promise of easy labour and plentiful beer and wenches, then sending the hapless bloke down below for lifetime of slavery. A Masonic handshake at the farm gates keeps PC McGarry away – but for how long? Paddy and Mary Murphy investigate! Etc.

Telly Selly Time #2: Instant Doggerel

2007-11-05T02:08:00.000-08:00

They say time is a two-way street. The further one gets from a specific period, the vaguer memories become, but simultaneously it can be brought into sharper focus. The 1980s are a case in point. By now, there's a whole phalanx of clichés - shoulder pads, big mobile phones, ra-ra skirts, that British Gas share price unveiling ceremony on the side of a skyscraper that didn't quite work - which enable the lazy and the half-bothered to miss the point as effortlessly as they can with any other previous decade. But similarly, little bits of ephemera float to the surface, mundane little noodles which just happen to sum up a time in thirty seconds more accurately and succinctly than a thousand Peter Yorks. And here it is.

You'll have to bear with your ISP as you chug through that daytime telly address caption, I'm afraid. And don't be fooled by that absurdly ostentatious Rover advert - it may look like the commercial in question, but it's the one that comes next which holds the real riches. Let's go!

"I'm a fashion model!
I'm right on top!"

Ooh, there's so much going on here! Well actually there isn't, but it looks like there is, and maybe that's the point. The basics first - it's the mid-'80s, and it's fashion. First thing we hear, naturally, is the frenzied sound of the auto-wind mechanism on an Olympus Trip. Yes, it's been a good five years since Girls on Film, but the old grams are the best. To accompany this, the visuals have gone for that Paintboxy cut-'n'-paste look, a la The Clothes Show when Selina Scott and that woman who makes belts out of Coke cans were still on it. A kind of not-quite-experimental 'let's make the telly look like a pace of Blitz!' effect, which of course never works, and thus adds to the charm.

The only appropriate musical accompaniment to a slightly aimless Paintbox wilderness is, of course, a slightly aimless Fairlight wilderness. Hence the sloppily-applied guitar chord samples. (Nearly two years before Tone Loc, ad fans! And nearly two years more rubbish, but never mind.) And over the top? A rapping model, of course. Despite the best efforts of Whose Line is it Anyway? by 1986 it was still possible to go on the telly and rap in a sort of plodding, Mr Plow way in whatever accent you liked, thus embarrassing anyone under seventeen. (Nowadays of course, you have to try your damndest to sound a bit 'street' and do lots of bits of business with your knuckles, thus embarrassing everybody.) The accent our model friend has chosen, of course, is Squeaky Sloane, a sort of transitionally girlish register somewhere between Anneka Rice and Toyah Willcox. This should make things all the more annoying, but actually it's rather sweet, rendering the opening lines more in the manner of a small child plundering the dressing-up box than a haughty bitch pushing her ill-gotten career in your face.

"Always busy!
No time to stop!"

Of course you are, dear! Never mind the fact you seem to have hit on a job that doesn't actually require you to move a muscle. (In fact, our friend's head, if you look closely, has been severely restrained in order to make that bit of 'changing outfit' telly magic work, seemingly in one of those Victorian neck-braces Henry Fox-Talbot used to screw dowagers into prior to one of his famous hour-long-exposure daguerreotypes.) But what we have here is a daintily rapped example of that great 1980s advertising innovation, The Bird's Eye Fallacy.

Bird's Eye, as the slogan had it, was 'the bird of freedom', liberating people from their busy routines by flogging square lumps of cod in unopenable bags. Of course, everyone knew that to heat up one of these tasty polythene-cocooned creatures, or indeed to pop a breeding pair of its close cousin, the Findus Crispy Pancake, under the eye-level, took as long if not longer than it would to, say, make a nice sandwich or something. The only time you would, logically, choose the former over the latter is if you just plain couldn't be arsed making a nice sandwich, and would be happy with the relative surfeit of starch, red hot parsley sauce and guilt that came from making a pact with the Bird of Freedom as long as it let you off all that daunting business with the bread knife. So it was understood, almost from day one, that 'your busy lifestyle' was flattering code for 'your lazy fat arse', and advertisers and consumers got on with their busy lives accordingly.

"I drink Instant Bovril when my body's on go!"

Now, you might think the incongruity of the product in this fashionable context would constitute a 'steps back in amazement!' reveal. Not a bit of it. There it is, plain and businesslike, in her hand (after she's changed into a weird-looking 'and this is me' leotard ensemble). A lesser advertiser would make more of that incongruity: There'd be a big posh flat in Frankfurt or somewhere international like that, with all the models lounging elegantly about drinking Perrier and Moet and stuff like that. Then, in walks the Head Model (whoever she was at the time - Marie Helvin or Koo Stark or Maria Whittaker - I'm no expert) drinking openly from a mug of - shock on the untermodels' faces! - Bovril! In fact, this was done a few years later, with Jerry Hall being all smugly contrary with her beverage (Your Mum: 'Cuh! Bet she's never touched a drop in her life!'), but that's in the distant future. Here it's just brought out - literally - of nowhere like a cow-based cousin of the Nescafe beans. There's also a doctoral thesis to be written on the linguistics of the phrase 'my body's on go', but that's for greater minds than mine to wrestle with.

"One cup - twenty calories!
That's real low!
(Yeah!)"

And another thesis please, Doctor, on what led her to substitute the winsomely transatlantic 'real' for the more appropriate 'really'. But then we are moving in a mad and confusing world, where you could be strapped to a brace in Milan one day, and screwed to a support in New York the next. Perhaps to reflect this mind-boggling chaos, our man at the Fairlight chooses this moment to unleash his piece-de-resistance, accompanying the pack shot with a couple of bars of The Beach Boys' Help Me Rhonda played on car horns by a performing seal. Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman and Nigel Ogden combined couldn't have put it better, whatever 'it' is. Less successful is that echoey 'yeah!', presumably meant as a yelp of agreement from The Woman in the Street as to the product's Bovrilly goodness, though it's more likely to put you in mind of the poor girl who had to go on Top of the Pops, stand behind a sweater-clad Bill Withers, and mime to those 'Hey! Hey!' samples that plagued that '80s Lovely Day remix. Even Kit and the Widow would have trumped that.

"It's quick to mix, it's the taste for me!
Instant Bovril: naturally!"

So we've had Point One of this advert - Bovril = slim = models! But the luckless copywriters have been given two points to get over in their allotted thirty seconds by the Beef Corporation of London (or whoever), namely the inherent naturalness of the stuff. That's a mechanically-extracted essence of beef carcasses, a product of the industrial revolution, as repackaged into instant powdered form during the heady, nuclear-powered days of the space race. Good luck with that account, old chap! Oh, and the china cup may provide the requisite modelly glamour, but it's breaking one of the cardinal rules of advertising, which clearly states that all homely drinks - Bovril, Horlicks, Cup-a-Soup, Lemsip - must by law be consumed on camera from a big colourful mug with the product's name emblazoned on the front. You muck about with this sort of thing at your peril.

"Whatever the city, you'll hear my voice!
Instant Bovril, the natural choice!"

Not so much tying things up as floundering with them for thirty seconds in the manner of Clive Dunn trying to put up a deckchair, then giving up and throwing them in a heap in the corner of the room, our model signs off before being wheeled away to the catwalks of Paris, with only her Olympus Trip and Swan jug kettle for company. It's been special. Indeed, this ad holds its hypnotic power to this day, if the likes of this fellow are anything to go by. Ah, those illustrious blue eyes...

Whoops-ooh! Aren't you looking slim, mum?

2007-11-01T04:25:00.001-07:00

In my day, 'milf' was a word used as an abbreviation for 'Milford Haven' when giving hurried written directions to Pembrokeshire boy scouts. Nowadays it has a slightly different meaning.

I won't go into its creepy acronymic derivation here. (Why not Google the word yourself? Don't forget to present your findings to the boss!) Suffice to say it's yet another lexicographical gift bestowed upon us by the world of pornography, they of 'fluff', 'wood' and 'maudling' fame. Its existence, rather depressingly, implies that the supply of pictures of women old enough to have been in the audience for Razzamatazz is now a niche market in the flesh trade, to be filed away alongside one-legged mulatto hookers, Mexican dwarf pimps and other Tom Waits song subjects.

All very grim of course, but yet... what a great word! Clearly no thought at all has gone into its coining, as what could sound less feminine? It sounds like the nickname of a 1930s Sheffield millworker who eats dripping sandwiches and plays overlapping full-back for the factory team on Sundays. ''As thee cleaned them bung-throttles out yet, young Milfred?' ''Appen as not, Gaffer Willoughby. Ahm still up t'me trussies wi' untafflin' yon clag-shunter.' And what about Milf Lunn? Milfred Pickles? Milf Harris? Acker Milf! Milfred Milf!

The more you say it, the more abstract it becomes. (And the more you get funny looks on the bus, but that's a small price to pay.) So, if English is indeed doomed to become the international language of the nasty little dickhead by 2021, at least let's have more words like 'milf', which are funny as well as crass. Make mine milf!

Drudgemanship

2007-10-31T04:50:00.000-07:00

This morning, while bumbling through notes for an article I've got to complete in a couple of weeks time, I found myself thinking 'Ho hum. Suppose I'll have to go and watch School for Scoundrels again, then.' Then I froze, having realised I'd just passed one of the tests commonly used in institutions to identify insanity.

I don't really hate the prospect of watching Terry-Thomas and co again. That's not physically possible. But that moment of madness made me wonder about the problems of making a vocation out of a hobby. The upsides are many and obvious: you get paid for having fun, you can justify spending that essential little bit more on stuff you'd otherwise have a hard time rationalising, and friends and family start to lay off the shouts of 'you're wasting your time!' A bit.

But there can be a downside, which is that you're in danger of exhausting the subject, exhausting your own patience and generally boring yourself rigid with the whole thing. As Patrick Moore used to say about the sun collapsing, 'Don't worry, that's not likely to happen for a good few billion years yet.' But occasionally you do start to wonder...

Telly Selly Time #1: Castle's On the Air

2007-10-27T05:53:00.000-07:00

If you're anything like me, any mention by rolled-up suits of the 'art' of advertising is enough to drive you nuts. Not necessarily due to sound political ideals (in fact, more of a general low-level nonspecific irritation than anything else), a firm belief was ingrained on our generation that nothing made to flog cold cocoa and wing nuts can even pretend to aspire to the levels of pure-spun art, like Picasso's Guernica or the Captain Zep theme. But sometimes an ad comes along that makes you wonder. Take a look at this commercial break from 1980, in particular the second ad in:

Nothing too remarkable about the elements here - a Geoff Love-ish backing over some reliably grainy 'living catalogue' vignettes with a spot of 'here are our hard-working girls' Real People Showcasing for good populist measure. Obviously the involvement of Roy Castle, never knowingly giving less than 110% percent of his considerable self, is a hint that things might get a little bit special, as is Woolies' track record with big Christmas extravaganza ads. (This isn't Christmas-specific of course, but it still overreaches your standard commercial by some way.) But this is somewhat mightier than even this promising pedigree would suggest. Let's start from the top.

"Sis finds Cover Plus the right paint and saves money on the white paint,
Larry carries ladders round with ease."

How the hell do you approach an opening line like that? We don't know how long Roy had to prepare his little bit of dialogue situation, but the nameless writer's doing him no favours here. Straight off the bat with what amounts to a tongue twister that's bad enough to speak, let alone sing along to a tune it doesn't even fit properly. But Castle, who may well only have seen this song hours or even minutes before the recording session, breezes through it with aplomb, refusing to make a meal of that hideous 'right paint/white paint' conjuncture and skating as nimbly as is possible over that mis-stressed 'and'. In fact, getting through the line intact, without fumbling a syllable or sounding like you're about to burst with scary madness, is no mean feat. All water of a Castle's back, you suppose, but the way he sinks down into the next line ('...with eeeeeeaaaase!') with such relish signifies that maybe Roy is as glad to see the back of it as we are.

Oh, and 'sis'? What's going on here? Either this woman is Roy's sister (which she isn't), or called 'Sissy' (which seems unlikely) or she's sibling to Larry, aka Jacko's mate off of Brush Strokes. But - spoiler alert! - at the end of the ad we see them cutely painting each other's noses in what can only be taken to be A PLAYFUL PRELUDE TO GETTING IT ON. Where this leaves Cover Plus is unclear. Anyway, time enough to pick that shit apart on Thursday's Kaleidoscope, as we're straight into the next vignette:

"He gets all the help he needs from his long extension lead,
And Fiona's Flymo mower's sure to please."

Things are looking up in the lyrical department. Not only is this couplet something Roy can actually sing along to the tune he's been given, but the first line even has a bit of rhythmic bounce to it. Granted, this is all but done in by that wrong-footing 'Flymo mowers' howler, but you can't have everything. Roy sensibly eases back and takes it easy here, as he knows what's coming next, and it ain't pretty.

"This growing board
Even Jill can carry,
Just ad water - wow! - and Harry
Finds going straight for Woolies value really pays."

What in God's name is going on here? No sooner have we been introduced to the delectable Fiona and her mower in a change of scenery, then the camera's whipped away from her (bet she fumed to her agent when she saw the final cut) and plonked in a greenhouse, with Castle's breathless 'THIS GROWING BOARD!!!' scaring the shit out of everyone. It takes something special to make Roy Castle sound terrifying, but shouting 'THIS GROWING BOARD!!!' far too loud and far too fast because the idiot songwriter can't fit all the products into three verses just about manages it. It'd work for anyone. Imagine walking down a dark alley when Richard Briers leaps out from the shadows, bellowing 'THIS GROWING BOARD!!!' at the top of his honeyed voice. You'd run, wouldn't you?

It gets worse yet. You can see what they've tried to do with the next bit, splitting it up 'cleverly' over the stanza from 'carry' to 'Harry', but such winsome precociousness just hasn't the clout to register, what with 'THIS GROWING BOARD!!!' still ringing in our ears, and the whole thing just sounds like what it is, a muddled mess. Still, good on Roy for managing, in the middle of an unstoppable upward crescendo, to give that 'wow!' a seperate emphasis without derailing the rhythm, or giving himself a hernia.

"Everybody needs a Woolworth's store these days."

And relax! This is Larry's Easy Ladder times ten, as Roy, clearly feeling the burn in that wretched greenhouse, slips into the vocal equivalent of a velour lounge suit with undisguised gratitude. Also, note Jacko's mate winding up his extension lead to the left of the greenhouse. Are all these people supposed to be living together? What a strange extended family this is proving to be.

"This super switch-off kettle is what switches on Samantha."

At last, a quality lyric! Neither too clever nor too gallumphing, the easy alliteration enables Roy to bounce along after he's got his breath back from that regrettable episode of moments earlier. He's genuinely enthused - note how his native accent pushes its way past the transatlantic crooner stylings for the word 'kettle'. It's as if Roy's as excited about the kettle as Samantha clearly is. And why not?

"Brian's Binatone is great for his cassettes."

Another lyrical blinder seals this ad's greatness. Note the change in Roy's voice from desperation to admiration. He's sweated and strained over this song's many irritating quirks, and now his reward is some of the finest rhythmic poetry these Isles have yet produced. A newfound respect grows between composer and singer. This is MUSIC, people!

The rest of the commercial is relatively routine, tidying up the incestuous relations of the Woolies' DIY family (hopefully Social Services were alerted to Jill's predicament before it was too late), panning across some Chevron cassettes, a bloke with a dubbed on bass voice, which was considered inherently hilarious throughout the '70s and well into the '80s (Obie Benson of the Four Tops was well pissed off). Oh, and some strangely manic laughter over a cup of tea from a couple who are either so helplessly in love with each other every workaday act is filled with deranged mutual glee, or are dangerously unhinged and are about to borrow Larry's power tools to slaughter each other, and maybe Fiona as well if she's foolish enough to stick her pleasing Flymo nose round the door. Woolies would go on to grander things, peaking in the popular consciousness with Joe Brown's gargantuan concept meisterwerk, It's The Latest Greatest Ever More Spectacular Woolworth's Christmas Show, or Sales from Topographic Oceans as it's known in the trade. But those prog behemoths never matched the simple, freewheeling showbiz glamour of Roy Castle and the Homemakers, effortlessly evocative of the time a trip to Woolies was a real event, every store an Alladin's cave with pick-'n'-mix by the door, records at the back and, if you were lucky, Mark Hyland's sister who worked as Saturday girl on the third floor would let you and your mates sit on the swing seats when the manager was out. A lost era. Do they still sell growing boards, even?

Third Time's a Charm

2007-10-27T01:56:00.000-07:00

Why am I doing this? Having started two blogs which quickly ran squealing under the voluminous petticoats of Dame Apathy, it might be argued that starting 'that difficult third blog' is asking for grief. A stronger man would think 'Now, hold on there just a minute, Derek [or similar Stronger Man's Name]. Have you actually got Something To Say, or are you just mindlessly pitching in to the latest daft fad that everyone else seems to be at, though tellingly about six months after half of them have decided it's all old hat now anyway? Put down the mouse and get your old fishing cap on. Take the greyhound for a walk along the canal. Fire up the old St Bruno. You don't need all this mimsy-whimsy neologistic nonsense. By the way, mine's a Mackeson's. Mellow and smooth. Rich and invigorating. A drink that brings liveliness back to tired bodies. Strength and life in every glass, when the long day's work is over at last. And still only 11p a pint. MACKESON'S STOUT sets you up wonderfully. '

Anyway, there it is, done. If you're reading this by accident in July 2009, and wondering why this is the only entry on a sadly sparse sliver of HTML, there's your answer. And with all that cowardly funk out of the way... let's go!