Irrational Likes

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!'

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

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!'

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.'

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

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

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: