Forty Eight Years of the Prefab Four

 

Easter was very early in 1978. On Easter Monday, 27 March, BBC2’s evening line-up included The Rutles, Eric Idle’s now famous Beatles parody and, perhaps unusually, still the only Beatles parody to appear in the mass media.

I noticed it in the Radio Times, mispronouncing the title to myself as ‘The Rootles’ until I got to see the film a few days later. The RT’s description promised us songs like ‘A Hard Day’s Rut’, ‘All You Need is Lunch’ and ‘W.C. Fields Forever’, but what we got was something funnier and more nuanced. Neil Innes’ songs were the making of The Rutles (AKA All You Need is Cash). Beyond them the film is an amusing, occasionally razor-sharp parody of the Beatles' career with all its ups and downs, but without the music I doubt we'd still be talking about The Rutles today. 

Idle’s scriptwriting process was aided and abetted by a Beatle himself, George Harrison, who granted him exclusive access to the band’s official biographical film The Long and Winding Road, unreleased and on ice pending its much later development into the Anthology television series. Various elements from the film, including concert footage (of the fans not the band) were incorporated and adapted into Idle’s project.

The Rutles anticipated later entries in the ‘mockumentary’ genre, most notably This is Spinal Tap and, like Spinal Tap, was given a huge lift by the sheer quality of the songs. Neil Innes’ material worked because the songs themselves weren’t inherently funny, but were brilliantly observed. They occasionally sounded funny – the first laugh-out-loud moment for me came on hearing ‘Get Up and Go’ which is so obviously a parody of ‘Get Back’; the second was seeing the band’s ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ appearance performing ‘Hold My Hand’, a comical mash-up of Beatle hits. The film, as presented by the BBC, ran for 65 minutes, so was slightly shorter than its full 76 minutes runtime. Amongst the items removed was Nasty and Chastity’s ‘One Hundred Feet of Film’ which, frankly, it was better off without.

The Rutles grew out of an idea Innes had presented to Idle during the making of Idle’s TV series Rutland Weekend Television. Innes had written a Beatley-sounding song (‘I Must be in Love’) and conceived the idea for a parody film. I’d given up on Idle’s series after just one episode, so I never got to see the original Rutles film (it’s been available on YouTube for years). Shot in black and white, and essentially a parody of A Hard Day’s Night, the ‘band’ members mucked about to a backing of Innes’ song. Further spots by Idle and Innes on Saturday Night Live led to the decision to make the full-length film, co-directed by Idle and SNL’s Gary Weis. 

The film premiered on NBC five days ahead of its BBC broadcast, earning the lowest ratings of any show on the primetime US networks that week. The BBC screening apparently did a lot better, and within a fortnight there was a Rutles LP available to buy in the shops. The album came with a glossy colour booklet sewn into the gatefold sleeve, its design clearly influenced by Roy Carr and Tony Tyler’s The Beatles: An Illustrated Record, which had been published three years earlier. My diary records that I got my copy, from the long vanished Bradshaw’s record shop in Lichfield, on Saturday 20 May. A week later, The Rutles received a repeat broadcast, this time on BBC1, sandwiched between the news and Saturday Night at the Mill. It would prove to be my last look at the Prefab Four for another ten years...

The LP booklet provided a chance to see those superbly accurate parody sleeves in full detail

All of this parodic business was of special interest to me, because, along with my brother, we’d been doing exactly the same thing ourselves, writing and drawing comedy histories of made-up bands whose career arcs mirrored the Beatles at every step: one of them even made a film called ‘Ouch!’ whilst another fell under the influence of coffee (as opposed to tea). This wouldn’t be worth mentioning if it weren’t for the fact that we’d written our versions at least a year before we saw The Rutles... Hearing Neil Innes’ songs gave me the idea that I could try writing some of the hits that I’d imagined for my own comedy pop groups. It was my first proper attempt at songwriting… and I had the Rutles to thank for it.

The Rutles LP, despite being incomplete (it contained fourteen of the twenty tracks heard in the film) was an excellent souvenir of the film, and in the absence of any further broadcasts, one could still replay the vinyl. Eric Idle made no contributions to the music, which was performed by Neil Innes, with on-screen Rutles John Halsey and Ricky Fataar joined by Ollie Halsall (providing the Dirk McQuickly vocals). Halsall was glimpsed briefly in a still photograph, playing the part of original band member Leppo. Musically, it sounded convincingly Beatlesque, although I could tell there was something not quite right about the early tracks, which have a 1970s studio sound about them and contain a lot more production than any comparable Beatle recordings. The songs of the psychedelic era were, on the whole, more authentically realised.

John Lennon had advised against the inclusion of ‘Get Up and Go’ on account of its strong musical similarity to ‘Get Back’, and the other omissions were simply for reasons of timing: but it didn’t stop ATV Music, holders of the Beatles copyrights, from suing Innes for copyright infringement. Innes settled out of court, but had to give up 50% of the royalties from sales of the album, and agree to the additon of Lennon and McCartney’s names to his composer credit.

The Rutles’ last appearance on the BBC came on Saturday 30 January 1988 (actually, early Sunday morning – it was scheduled at 12.05am) and I was finally able to capture the film on videotape. Many years later, the original US version was released on DVD, by which time the Rutles had been revived, without the participation of Eric Idle, for a new album written by Neil Innes and performed by most of the original musical line-up. The revival had been inspired by the Beatles’ Anthology series and LPs, which Neil Innes reimagined as Archaeology, providing the chance to craft some more Beatle-styled material, this time carefully avoiding any accusations of plagiarism. I went out and bought it, but have played it only once. By this time, I’d learned a little about music production and could coax some convincingly 1960s vibes out of a basic 4-track desk, and to me, the new Rutles songs sounded far too much like slick studio artefacts of the 1990s. Lacking the support of the film and its attendant visuals, they weren’t funny, either.

How does the film stand up today? For me, not particularly well. It’s like a joke that works brilliantly the first time around but palls with re-telling. The best parts are the re-creations of concert and studio performance. Being a vintage instrument nerd, I can tell you that the guitars are mostly wrong (in a 'close but no cigar' manner), but back in 1977 there weren’t the kind of vintage reissue models available that one sees today in the hands of every self-respecting Beatles tribute band. The band’s clothes and hair were nicely re-created, but their teenybopper fans look like they’d been rounded up at a Bay City Rollers concert: not a beehive or bob among them.

Part of the problem with watching The Rutles today is a question of context. Back in 1978, few of us were familiar with the archival clips that Idle had seen in The Long and Winding Road and chosen to parody – newsreel film from the US tours, press conferences and suchlike. For many years, I genuinely believed that there had been an original film of the Beatles leaping from the front of a Carvair car-carrying aircraft, as the Rutles are seen to do at the beginning of the film – but it was a sequence unique to the Prefab Four. Seeing the Rutles mucking about in hotel rooms was amusing and nostalgic in 1978, but today, we’ve all seen the original Beatles footage many times over in Anthology, Eight Days a Week and countless other documentaries; and here’s the thing – the Beatles are funnier than the Rutles.

You can’t really get past that. Even Nasty’s apology for claiming the Rutles are bigger than God is less interesting to watch than Lennon dealing with the real thing, and he doesn’t actually say anything funny, lamely declaring ‘I think you’re all daft.’ Idle’s film is also on shaky ground when dealing with the darker aspects of the Beatles’ career – reimagining Yoko as a neo-Nazi was uncalled for, and I still find it hard to raise a smile when manager Leggy Mountbatten ‘tragically’ accepts a teaching post in Australia. The best moments are the recreations of Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine which are hard to tell apart from the originals.

Many good ideas are best left alone, and The Rutles is no exception. Eric Idle unwisely revisited his idea back in 2002, with the release of The Rutles 2 – Can’t Buy Me Lunch. The film was deferred by Warners until fans shouted loudly enough to force a belated release, after which the fans kept shouting; this time in dismay at the feeble mess the film turned out to be. There was no new footage in the sequel, just a few unused trims from interviews with Mick Jagger and Paul Simon, propped up with various new celebrity interviews, while the linking script was dull and unfunny. If you don’t believe me, check out the reviews on imdb.

Will we ever see the Rutles revisited? With the prospect of yet another Beatles biopic on the horizon (whose cast look less like the Fab Four than any of the Rutles did), will some enterprising producer conceive the idea of creating a ‘new’ Rutles with young actors presented as, perhaps, a stage show? I’m surprised Eric Idle hasn’t thought of doing so, given the success of Python musical Spamalot. He’s only 82. He could do a lot worse.

Over to you, Dirk McQuickly...

Nasty sports an almost but not quite right Rickenbacker, while Stig's 1973 Gretsch Country Gentleman doesn't really belong in this 'Rat Keller era' pose.

On Your Wavelength?

 

In my last posting, I lamented the state of today’s radio playlists, which have become increasingly focused on either contemporary music or a narrowing choice of over-familiar ‘greatest hits’. Where, I asked, were those more obscure items, the kind of songs you heard maybe once back in the mid 60s and never again? Where are those ‘rubbishy’ items that used to annoy us during their time in the top 20? Radio 2 has long since become Radio 1 in all but name: until a few years ago, Sundays were the only day of the week where one might find anything remotely resembling the station in its heyday, but with the deaths of presenters like Desmond Carrington and Richard Baker, and various scheduling overhauls, the ‘old school Sunday’ disappeared from national radio. But all is not lost... 

There is still a radio station where this kind of overlooked, easy listening music has a home. Serenade Radio is an internet station that models itself on the old Light Programme, with a schedule devoted to easy listening across the genres of pop, folk and jazz. Last weekend, I tuned in for the first time and was pleasantly surprised. In broadcasting terms, its nearest equivalent is the nostalgic TV channel Talking Pictures: but you won’t be annoyed by those endless commercials for Dormeo mattresses, because there aren’t any commercials on Serenade Radio: the station is run by professional presenters who give their time for free, and is entirely funded through donations from listeners. It’s been on air since 2015.

The station is the brainchild of Andy Marriott, a name I’ve known for years – he was an associate of my friend Tim Beddows, and would occasionally supply him with rare materials from the vintage years of television. Elsewhere in the schedule, we find Peter Tomlinson, a former continuity announcer from ATV in the Midlands, and a genuinely nice guy (he recorded a whole day of ‘in-vision continuity’ for my 60th birthday at the behest of Tim Beddows). There are even vintage editions of Sing Something Simple, a Sunday evening staple of Radio 2 that always followed the Top 20 rundown – and on weekday mornings, Music While You Work, originally launched during World War II as a morale-boosting programme of uplifting music.

I was tipped off about the station by Steve James, who presents a breakfast show on Saturday and Sunday mornings and posted a comment on my last blog, and last weekend I tuned in (if that’s the right expression when listening on an iPad) for the first time. The playlist was almost exactly what I was writing about last time – not that they play ‘rubbish’, but rather the kind of easy listening instrumentals that were once a staple of the Light Programme, from names like Tony Hatch, Percy Faith, Herb Alpert and many others. Alongside these items, there are pop records of that particular stripe once favoured by the Light Programme – so, no noisy rock bands (who are well served by the many ‘greatest hits’ style broadcasters). 

Much of what gets played is unfamiliar to me, but not unwelcome. I’ve caught a few personal favourites – the Johnny Mann Singers’ version of 'Up, Up and Away', and Reparata and the Delrons’ 'Captain of Your Ship', which I mentioned in a post back in 2021. Today, I even heard a track by Ken Dodd...

Perhaps most intriguingly though, I’ve caught a couple of records which I ‘know but don’t know’ if that makes any sense. Just this morning, I heard a track by the Tony Hatch Orchestra, ‘Maori’, a choral instrumental that struck a chord somewhere in the deepest recesses of memory. I was sure I knew this track, but had no memory of having heard it. This begs the question: if you hear a piece of music only once and never again, is it stored somewhere in the memory? Hearing songs like this is a bit like a benign form of hypnotic regression, recovering memories that had all but been erased: a kind of ‘Stone Tape’ of memory (for those familiar with the Nigel Kneale ghost story).

Serenade Radio is genuinely like revisiting the old Light Programme, which was a constant background in our home during the 1960s. It’s a welcome change from the state of modern radio, with its unashamedly ‘old school’ style of presentation. You even get the Greenwich Time Signal ‘pips’ on the hour, although, for pedants, they are the ‘post-1972’ variety, with the sixth pip longer than the others. Judging from the station’s website, there is a high level of listener engagement, with over 30 comments posted in the last seven days. This is unsurprising, as the BBC’s listener demographic has become increasingly biased towards the 30 and under age group, certainly as far as music radio is concerned, and there is little or nothing in their output with this kind of appeal to older listeners. It’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that the BBC might consider doing its own version of a station like this – there are, after all, no fewer than four iterations of Radio 1, and a ‘Radio 2 Extra’ would, I’m sure find an appreciative audience – but I think it’s unlikely.

You can find Serenade Radio here: https://www.serenade-radio.com

Don't Forget the Rubbish

There’s nothing I hate more on radio than what I call the ‘curated playlist’. By that, I mean any radio programme that claims to play the hits of a specific decade but sticks ridgidly to a kind of greatest hits reshuffle, resulting in a show that plays out like a compilation album. What, you may ask, is wrong with that? Nothing as such. It’s just that, for a proper nostalgia trip back in time, you really need to hear everything – not just the greatest hits but those lesser tracks that skirted the top twenty for maybe just a couple of weeks, or even missed it completely. And you need the rubbish, too – those tracks that, incredibly, made it into the top ten (or in some cases, reached number one) despite being unlistenable pap. My point being that, listening back in the day to a programme like the weekly Top Forty rundown, you got to hear everything as a rule. If there was some awful record in the charts, you had to sit through it.

There’s no radio show more guilty of ‘curated playlisting’ than Radio 2’s Pick of the Pops, recently relocated to Sunday teatime and presided over by Mark Goodier (never the edgiest of radio DJs). The programme, following a tradition that goes back to Jimmy Savile’s Double Top Ten Show of the 1970s, plays two charts from a given week in history (rarely venturing back further than the 1980s). The charts are, of course, incomplete, and the programme is bogged down by the usual tedious programme trails, and a lot of pointless factoids about the year in question that anyone interested could look up on Wikipedia. But the real issue with the show is how the charts are cherry picked. Odd and obscure items are glossed over. Anything by personae non gratae such as Rolf Harris, Gary Glitter or Jonathan King is omitted without comment, which, in this era of cancel culture, is only to be expected. But not all the omitted music is from artistes such as these. Each top twenty is whittled down to around twelve or thirteen songs, with priority given to climbers (though not always); and you can bet it’s the time-worn ‘greatest hits’ that always make it through this vetting process. Anything a bit weird or out of left field doesn’t make the cut. A recent Pick of the Pops chart from 1969 allowed in all the 'usual suspects' like 'Ob-la-di-Ob-la-da' but couldn't find room for Des O'Connor's '1,2,3 O'Leary'. Bad call!

The numerous, themed hits stations like Boom Radio and Greatest Hits Radio are, if anything, even more guilty of this kind of thing. GHR’s daytime playlist is like a zombie roll-call of ‘heard it a million times never need to hear it again’ hits, focused on the 80s and 90s with seldom a 60s track to be heard. I had to give up listening to it, and not only on account of the dreadful, repetitive commercials. Unfortunately, it is now the only place one can hear Ken Bruce, whose old Radio 2 show, despite an obligation to include a quota of talent-free contemporary artists, did manage to maintain some degree of musical integrity – where else on radio might you have heard a track like ‘Jackie Blue’ by the Ozark Mountain Daredevils?

There’s more to pop nostalgia than greatest hits. Around twenty years ago, when mp3s became readily obtainable online, I began to compile collections that I dubbed ‘old and cheesy’, focusing on the kind of obscure vintage material one seldom gets to hear on radio. In doing so, I located songs I remembered from childhood that rarely, if ever, trouble the compilers of contemporary radio playlists. Daytime radio in the 1960s would be utterly unrecognisable to anyone born after around 1970, consisting as it did of pop songs, comedy records, light orchestral numbers and crooners. In its own way, it was ‘curated’, in that the Light Programme tended to avoid the noisier pop songs of the era – you never heard anyone like the Kinks or the Who. As to the Sunday afternoon chart rundown, a near complete top twenty was played, with only a few of the lower numbers omitted when they were on their way out of the charts or seasonally inappropriate (like Christmas singles that hung around into mid January).

For this reason, songs that I didn’t particularly like – Ken Dodd’s ‘Eight by Ten’, for instance – are embedded in the memory along with everthing else that was getting radio play at the same time. I can pretty much guarantee that no radio station in the UK will have played ‘Eight by Ten’ in years, decades even. Yet the irony is that these seldom heard songs are often more evocative of a moment in time than their more frequently playlisted contemporaries. ‘Eight by Ten’ reached its peak chart position of number 22 in the chart of 27 February – 4 March 1964, a week that saw Cilla Black’s ‘Anyone Who Had a Heart’ at number one, the Searchers at number three with ‘Needles and Pins’ and the Dave Clark Five making a right racket at number four with ‘Bits and Pieces’. All of these are ‘frequent fliers’ on 60s nostalgia shows. But not ‘Eight by Ten’. Nor are we likely to hear Ronnie Hilton’s ‘A Windmill in Old Amsterdam’ or Josh Macrae’s ‘Messing About on the River’, both of which I remember vividly from radio plays in the early 60s (we even had the single of ‘Windmill in Old Amsterdam’). I think this is a shame. Old rubbish deserves to be heard, if only for its potent nostalgia value. Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere – the Ramblers’ ‘The Sparrow’, Brian and Michael’s ‘Matchstalk Men’, and any song about grandparents (step forward Clive Dunn and St Winifred’s School Choir). But on the whole, I’m usually happy to hear any of the more unlikely old records when they occasionally pop up on the airwaves, even more so when they do so in the context of a complete chart from the year in question. As I’ve written elsewhere, nostalgic items produce a kind of nuclear reaction when juxtaposed: a song, a TV series and a comic from the same week in, say, 1965, will give you a much more powerful hit of nostalgia when you can experience them simultaneously. It’s as close as we may ever get to travelling in time. But to be absolutely true to any given era, you have to take the rubbish along with the classics.

One of the few DJs on Radio 2 who was ever likely to play eccentric items of the sort I’m talking about was Liza Tarbuck – and, sadly, she has recently retired from her Saturday evening radio show. Liza’s was undoubtedly the most eclectic and original playlist on the radio, reflecting her own diverse tastes in music, and the antithesis of the kind of ‘curated’ playlisting I’m talking about here. I’d go so far as to insist that her playlists were more interesting and certainly way more diverse than even John Peel, purely on account of the eccentric oddities she allowed out on air. 

Of Radio 2’s remaining crop of DJs, only Tony Blackburn is worthy of comment: his weekly ‘Sounds of the Sixties’ show often includes tracks that Tony admits to not liking himself. This week, his playlist included Esther and Abi Ofarim’s (pictured above) 1968 novelty single ‘Cinderella Rockefeller’, which I hated in 1968 and still hate today. Staggeringly, this bizarro oddity reached number one in the charts. She sounds like Vampirella and he sings like a bad yodeller. As a piece of music it’s catastrophically bad, but it rode on the coat tails of a brief chart flirtation with 1920s era flapper jazz (‘Winchester Cathedral’, ‘What a Day for a Daydream,’ ‘Honey Pie’) and because it hung around the charts for so long, it’s still embedded in the minds of anyone exposed to it at the time. Like Strontium 90.

As if that weren’t enough, the same show found room for Lulu’s 1969 Eurovision winner ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ (famously parodied by Monty Python as ‘Bing-Tiddle-Tiddle-Bong’) another song of questionable musical merit. But merit isn’t the point here – inclusion is. Hearing these tracks takes you back to their era much more readily than the over-played greatest hits that shared the charts alongside them. Constant repetition of a piece of music seems somehow to dull its nostalgic appeal, rendering it ‘timeless’ in a way that ‘Boom Bang-a-Bang’ is not. I'd much rather hear the likes of 'Sunshine Girl' or 'Something's Happening' by Herman's Hermits, or Oliver's 'Good Morning Starshine' (also in Tony Blackburn's playlist this week) than anything by the Kinks, the Stones or any of the other bands who crowd other artists out of the nostalgia spotlight.

Tony Blackburn’s ‘Sounds of the Sixties’, unlike many other radio nostalgia shows, is the genuine sound of an era, warts and all. Because real nostalgia has to allow for the rubbish alongside the good stuff.

 

It's Only a Dream... or is it?

 

How popular culture gets you while you’re sleeping…

As if I didn’t devote enough of my waking hours as a child to obsessing over Gerry Anderson’s TV series, reading books and comics about them, and collecting the myriad toys, I occasionally found them invading my dreams: albeit in a totally unfamiliar form.

I’ve heard comic and book collectors talk about dreams in which they discover previously unknown or unusual versions of series that they collect in real life, and I’ve had plenty of similar examples myself, to the point at which I consider them to be a trope of the unconscious mind. The dream typically involves finding, in a shop or at a jumble sale, a pile of previously unseen editions of a series such as Hergé’s Adventures of Tintin, or the annual collections of Carl Giles. Sometimes I get to leaf through the pages, which resemble the originals but have been changed in various ways: the dream Giles annuals often contain colour pages where the originals were always black and white, and bear dates going back to the 1920s whereas the series didn’t begin until 1945. In the Gerry Anderson universe, the most frequently occurring example is that of Fireball XL5. It’s always one of the annuals that I discover in the dream, usually a rare pre-publication ‘demo’ edition with an unusual cover and contents that don’t match any of the real world examples. I can trace this particular dream back as far as the late 60s or early 70s, and it was often so vivid that, on waking, I was spurred on to try and create my own versions of what I’d imagined.

Sometimes, though, it wasn’t just a book that I saw in the dream, but a televised episode. And rather than being an episode of one of Gerry Anderson’s actual TV series, it was always, without exception, something that didn’t exist. The earliest version of this dream came to me around 1970 and was almost certainly influenced by the ongoing repeats of Thunderbirds that were being broacast around this time. We were still watching in black and white, but the dream was in vivid colour – it was all centered around an oil refinery or similar industrial complex, which I saw rendered in fine detail, silver towers and pipe networks standing out against a bright blue sky. The hero of the piece was a security guy who had to protect the plant from attack by enemy craft which resembled the Shuttlecraft in Star Trek. The characters were all puppets, and they wore the kind of uniforms one saw in all the Supermarionation series, with peaked caps and tunics with exaggerated shoulders. It all came over as quite exciting in the dream and I looked forward to watching it again. Except, of course, that I couldn’t. The show didn’t exist. My mind had conflated aspects of Thunderbirds (the industrial plant was an almost direct lift from episodes like The Mighty Atom) and Captain Scarlet (the uniforms, the quest to defeat an enemy agency). It was all so clear that I started at once to draw the characters and settings (sadly, those drawings no longer exist).

I never dreamed about the same series again, but I had another variation on the ‘Anderson mash-up’ a little later, maybe even the same year. This time, rather than a completely new idea, I was shown a sequel to Captain Scarlet. It was set on the moon, and the characters travelled around on high-speed moon motorcycles, which featured prominently in the opening credits. These were typically Andersonesque, with a strident theme song and the title zooming up onto the screen: ‘Black Means Death’. I can still picture it now. I imagine the title referred to Captain Black, the nemesis of the Spectrum organisation, but I didn’t see enough of it to find out. This again, was most likely a conflation of ideas: the moon-based episodes of the real Captain Scarlet series, and the lunar aspects of Gerry Anderson’s UFO, which had started broadcasting around the same time as the ‘dream episode’ came to me – the characters accessed their ‘moon motorbikes’ in a similar manner to the pilots of the SHADO Interceptors. I knew by this time that Gerry Anderson had given up on puppets, and the dream came like a false dawn, suggesting that he might return to producing the kind of films that had made his reputation. He would, of course, but not for another fifteen years.

The most unusual example of this phenomenon happened over twenty years later, and is logged in my diary for 1996. Once again, I was watching an episode of an unknown puppet series, and this time it had been discovered by a collector. The untitled series involved a moustached character (bearing a vague resemblence to Super Mario), who acted as a kind of cleaning man and flew around in an aircraft that slightly resembled Sky One from UFO, but with a yellow nose cone. He had a sidekick along with him. The guy’s name was, bizarrely, ‘Mr. Pennywhacket’ which sounds rather more like a character from Trumpton than anything by Gerry Anderson, but the whole thing was intriguing and had an unusual aesthetic, not far removed from the look of Thunderbirds. Again, it was in colour.

None of this would be worthy of comment were it not for the fact that, within eighteen months of having this dream, I found myself watching the rediscovered pilot episode of Roberta Leigh’s Paul Starr, which had been unearthed by Tim Beddows, and had never been seen outside of a handful of television executives. Paul Starr didn’t have a moustache, but he did have a sidekick, and he travelled in an aircraft that strongly resembled the machine in my dream, but for the minor detail of its red nosecone (illustrated above). The interior of the ship was exactly as I’d seen it in the dream.

Almost exactly as I dreamed it... the interior of Paul Starr's plane/sub/spaceship/whatever...

I’d had no knowledge whatsoever of Paul Starr back in 1996, and had assumed that Roberta Leigh’s forays into ersatz Supermarionation had ended with Space Patrol: but the unbroadcast pilot film had been amongst the film cans stored in her lock-up garage when Tim finally persuaded her to let him release Space Patrol. We couldn’t quite believe it when we projected the film for the first time. It had a dream-like quality of its own, with its knock-off Daleks and ideas appropriated from the worlds of Gerry Anderson.

Thinking about it (perhaps in a little too much depth), did the dream perhaps include more of the contents of Paul Starr than were at first apparent? The character in the dream may have looked like Super Mario, but ‘super mario’ is more than half of ‘supermarionation’ is it not? The name Paul Starr was, of course, a synthesis of two Beatles: but couldn’t my character’s name be decoded as referring, obliquely, to the Beatles? Penny, as in Penny Lane (a Paul McCartney composition), and ‘whacket’ suggesting scousers? Either way, the fact remains that I’d dreamed of an unknown ‘supermarionation’ styled series, filmed in colour, nearly two years before being present at the rediscovery of just such an artefact.

What, if anything, do these kind of dreams tell us? Most obviously, they’re illustrative of the nature of dreams themselves, as the unconscious mind cherry picks imagery and ideas familar to the dreamer, and reassembles them in often surprising ways – but to what end? Is there a kind of wish fulfilment involved? In the case of Paul Starr, there’s also a paranormal aspect, one which I’ve experienced in other ways, that of a dream appearing to foreshadow actual events. 

It still happens: only last night, I dreamed I’d heard an announcer on Radio 4 Extra telling listeners about a lost old radio comedy from 1969 that would be returning to the airwaves next week. It revolved around Kenneth Horne and Kenneth Williams running a hotel together, Williams playing his part as a ‘mad Welshman’. Kenneth Horne, of course, died in 1969, so that’s one that’s definitely not going to surface any time… more’s the pity, as I was quite looking forward to hearing it. Unrelated it may be, but on waking, I learned that the BBC had just announced the discovery of two lost episodes… of Dr. Who.

Discovering Kenneth Williams

'Good evening...'

One of my intentions when I began this blog back in 2016 was to attempt to describe how I first encountered various icons of popular culture. Pop cultural icons don’t come much bigger than Kenneth Williams, and to mark his centenary, I thought I’d delve back to see exactly how and when this inimitable entertainer first insinuated himself into my consciousness.

For a generation above me, Kenneth Williams first came to prominence as a member of the cast of Hancock’s Half Hour, in which he appeared regularly between November 1954 and October 1959. Ironically, he’d been spotted by the show’s producer Dennis Main Wilson in a serious role (the Dauphin) in a West End production of George Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan. As the resident character voice on the Hancock shows, Williams’ career was tugged in a different direction from what he’d originally envisaged. Soon he began to star in West End revues, establishing himself firmly as a comic performer. If anyone had been left in any doubt, his contributions to Beyond Our Ken (1958-64) and Round the Horne (1965-68) confirmed his comedy credentials and showcased the increasingly outrageous aspects of his persona.

I knew none of this at the time. The Hancock series had ended before I was born, and I have no recollection of hearing either Beyond Our Ken or Round the Horne until much later. What I do remember is a man with a funny voice who would crop up occasionally on the radio, repeating phrases like ‘give me your money’ in a sneering accent. This was, in fact, a sketch entitled ‘Hand Up Your Sticks’, written by Peter Cook for Williams’ 1961 revue ‘One Over the Eight’, which had been released on a Decca LP in 1961 and as the featured track on a 1963 EP. It was this EP, around the time of its release, that I kept hearing on the radio: I can’t have been more than two or three at the time, and I didn’t much care for the sound of Williams’ voice. He played the sketch in the so-called ‘Snide’* persona that he’d developed on Hancock’s Half Hour, portraying an inept bank robber who couldn’t master the simple phrase ‘stick up your hands and give me your money’ and kept coming out with garbled manglings of the words in everything but the right order. The LP version had been recorded in a studio without an audience, so there was no laughter to alert me to the fact that what I was hearing was supposed to be funny...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iAfaXO_Szs

I had no idea who Kenneth Williams was beyond this silly, nameless voice, and I began to dread hearing the sketch, which would pop up in the Light Programme’s morning schedule with regularity. Curiously, though, I began to form a mental picture of him which was not far removed from reality.

I didn’t get to actually see Kenneth Williams until around 1967. ABC Television, who provided programmes for the ITV Midlands region at weekends, owned the rights to the early Carry On films, and would frequently screen them on Saturday evenings. My brother and I were allowed to sit up and watch them, and it was here that I first saw Williams doing his thing for the cameras. I particularly remembered a scene in Carry On Nurse (1959) where a bar of nougat made him nauseous: but I was still too young to put names to faces, and even though he became familiar for his performances across the other films in the series, I still didn’t think ‘that’s Kenneth Williams’ whenever he appeared on screen. So when, exactly, was I first able to put face and name together?

It was through television that I came to recognise celebrities, and Williams wasn’t a regular television performer at this time: his small screen appearances in the mid 60s were mostly guest spots on programmes including International Cabaret, Call My Bluff and The Rolf Harris Show. It was, I believe, Jackanory that finally did the trick. Beginning in December 1968 with The Land of Green Ginger, Williams would become a frequent contributor to the series, and his readings were always highly watchable on account of his animated expressions and range of humorous voices. His next appearance on the programme was in September of the following year, reading Tolstoy’s The Founding of Evil Hold School, and by the time he returned in October 1972 with Agaton Sax and the Max Brothers, he’d become a face I could put a name to. By this time, I was probably most familiar with Williams through his contributions to the radio panel game Just a Minute, on which he’d been appearing regularly since September 1968, and which I often heard when I came home from school at lunchtimes.

I still hadn’t discovered Round the Horne or, indeed, Hancock’s Half Hour, but I did stumble across the short-lived replacement series for RTH that ran for two seasons following Kenneth Horne’s death in 1969. Stop Messing About took as its title Kenneth Williams’ famous catchphrase coined for him by Galton and Simpson as part of the ‘Snide’ character in the Hancock series, but the risqué humour was far too advanced for me at the age of eight or nine. Nevertheless, it must have struck a chord somewhere, as I was able to remember the signature tune decades after its last broadcast, well before it re-emerged on Radio 4 Extra. I became further acquainted with Williams’ performing style via two further radio series, The Secret Life of Kenneth Williams, in 1971 and 1973, curiously produced by the BBC radio drama department despite being wholly comic affairs.

Of Round the Horne itself, I remained in ignorance until introduced to it through a friend at school who had a couple of LP collections. Of the series’ characters, the one I really latched onto was the folk singer with the peculiar vocabulary, Rambling Syd Rumpo. He’s mentioned in my diary on February 12 1975, when a Radio 4 compilation, Celebration, presented ‘a reminder of entertaining Radio and Television characters who have become household names’ (I was also, around this time, discovering the comic genius of Peter Sellers, who was featured in the same programme). Rambling Syd was illustrated in the Radio Times and a few weeks later, I bought an EMI cassette of the album ‘The Best of Rambling Syd Rumpo’, originally released in 1970 and hard to obtain on vinyl (which explains my choice of format).

In the summer of 1976, I finally caught up with Hancock’s Half Hour: the radio series had been repeated on and off over the years, but it was only when it arrived on Radio 4 for a series of Monday evening broadcasts that I tuned in at last. Kenneth Williams appeared in all but one of these repeated episodes, and his ‘Snide’ persona soon became a favourite part of the programme (it’s easy to see how Hancock came to resent Williams getting ‘easy laughs’ with the character’s exaggerated voice and catchphrases). By the time of another repeat run in the autumn of 1977, I was making special mention in my diary of ‘Kenneth Williams (+ silly voice)’.

In 1982, I began, belatedly, to catch up with Round the Horne, when episodes from the second series were repeated on Sunday lunchtimes. Kenneth Williams’ occasional (scripted) tantrums were a favourite part of the programme, but curiously I was less enamoured of the beloved double act that was Julian and Sandy, and didn’t come to fully appreciate them until much later. By this time, Williams had lent his many voices and cartoon image to the five-minute animated series Willo the Wisp which, solely on account of his contributions, became essential viewing not only for its intended audience of children, but many older viewers like myself.

By now, I probably thought I knew Kenneth Williams as a performer as well as it was possible to know any television, film or radio celebrity. It wasn’t until the posthumous publication of his diaries that I (and, indeed the vast majority of people) fully appreciated the truth about his complex and tortured private persona. What was it about these ‘funny voice men’ that caused such traumas in their personal lives? Peter Sellers was another tortured genius, differing from Williams in that he imposed his internal psychodramas onto his family and colleagues. Like Williams, he found his calling through wartime service in the entertainments branch of the armed forces, and also had ambitions to be taken seriously as an actor, as opposed to a provider of comic characters.

Sellers’s manic personality ended up destroying him – the cardiac problems that finally killed him arose after deliberately inhaling amyl nitrite (‘poppers’) in an attempt to bolster his sex life with new bride Britt Ekland. Williams, morbidly depressed and suffering from an endless list of niggling ailments, ended it all on 15 April 1988 with an overdose of barbituartes. His last diary entry said, hopelessly, ‘oh, what’s the bloody point.’

We could have answered that one at the time, and 38 years later, as his centenary is celebrated on the BBC, the answer is even more obvious: Kenneth Williams was a beloved entertainer whose persona and performances delighted and entertained millions during his lifetime and continue to do so to this day. That, surely, was ‘the bloody point...’

* * *

[* ‘Ken (Snide) is how Galton and Simpson habitually indicated Williams’ annoying character in the Hancock programmes, but the part he played wasn’t really ‘snide’ in the true sense of the word – the correct defintion is of one who is ‘derogatory or mocking in an indirect way’ which doesn’t fully or even accurately describe the wheedling idiocy of Williams’ Hancock persona.]

Owning Number One

There used to be something good about owning the number one single of the week. It was almost as if some of the artist’s success had attached itself to you. Better still if you’d bought the record while it was still on its way up the charts, so that when it hit the top spot it validated your musical taste and your ability to spot a hit. All this, of course, rather depended on the quality of the record in question. Surely not many music fans got a good feeling from owning Ken Dodd’s ‘Tears’, number one for five weeks in 1965, or Englebert Humperdinck’s ‘Release Me’ which annexed the top spot for six weeks during March and April of 1967. But in general, the records that made number one during the 1960s and, to some extent the 70s were all deserving of their hit status. Owning a number one single by The Beatles, the Rolling Stones, The Kinks or any number of class acts of the era was like wearing a badge of honour. Conversely, since the 1990s, when the charts came increasingly to be dominated by manufactured acts and worthless novelty songs, ownership of the week’s number one single was not always something to be advertised, and the same thing still applies today – even more so, as the pop charts have been reduced to an irrelevance populated by acts of uniform blandness.

I thought it would be interesting to go back through the charts of the past six decades and pick out the number one singles that myself and my brother owned at the time. Anything bought after the fact didn’t count, which ruled out everything by The Beatles – we didn’t own a single Beatle record until 1974. To qualify, we needed to have owned the single – or its album equivalent – at the time that it made number one in the charts, or so close to the time as to make no difference. Wikipedia has handy lists of every UK number one record going right back to the beginning of the pop charts, organised by decades, so it was an easy task to scroll down and pick out the number ones that we’d owned. All told, there were just 26 of them, spanning the years 1964 to 2002. One or two of them were slightly surprising, but on the whole, with only a few exceptions, there was nothing there to cause undue embarrassment. Or, indeed, baggy trousers...

These 26 records were, of course, the mere tip of an iceberg. Between us, my brother and myself had plenty of records in our collections, both singles and albums, originally bought for us by our mum and dad, sometimes purchased with tokens or our own money. Often, we would wait until singles had dropped out of the chart in order to buy them at a reduced price. And beyond the records we actually owned were the many others that we liked well enough but were happy to hear as and when they turned up on the radio or television. Some of my favourite and best remembered songs of the 60s and 70s belong in that category.

The first single I ever had bought for me also happened to be number one at the time. Herman’s Hermits’ (pictured above) ‘I’m Into Something Good’ reached the top of the charts on 24 September 1964, and remained there for just two weeks. During this time, I remember being taken into our local record store – actually an electrical goods retailer that sold records as a sideline – and having the single bought for me. I don’t know if I’d asked for it, but I certainly liked it. Our mum made the purchase, so she evidently considered Herman’s Hermits to be acceptable listening for me at the age of just three and a half. They were nice boys, well-scrubbed, unthreatening, and the song was a jaunty lightweight singalong. And it was number one in the charts, a fact I may have dimly perceived at the time. I was literally, myself, ‘into something good’. It wasn’t the first pop record that had worked its way into my consciousness – I’d been noticing songs on the radio from a very young age indeed, and can recollect hearing some of the earliest Beatle records – ‘She Loves You’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ – around the time of their appearance in the charts.

I wasn’t bought very many pop singles during the 1960s, and of those 26 number ones, just seven are from that decade. The next number one that found its way into my hands was Manfred Mann’s ‘The Mighty Quinn’ which made the top spot on 14 February 1968, during the half term holiday. It came from the chemist’s. John Frosts in Sutton Coldfield also had a modest record department, and at the time was one of the few places in the town town from which you could buy singles and LPs. I can still remember seeing that week’s edition of Top of the Pops, and feeling slightly pleased that I had this week’s top-selling single in my collection. That’s collection as in two singles.

I picked another number one again later in the year: Hugo Montenegro’s cover of Ennio Morricone’s main title theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly topped the charts on 13 November 1968. We were in the record department of WH Smith in Lichfield around that time (I remember being intrigued at the lenticular sleeve of the Rolling Stones’ Satanic Majesties LP), and I had the single in my hand, ready to take to the counter. Then, at the last minute, I changed my mind, deciding instead to have The Gun’s ‘Race With the Devil’ bought for me, a frantic heavy rock workout with the weirdest guitar tones I’d ever heard. Strange choice…

1969 saw a unique situation when, between us, my brother and myself had four consecutive number one records bought for us. This had never happened before and would never happen again. The singles in question were Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Albatross’ (29 January), the Move’s ‘Blackberry Way’ (5 February), Amen Corner’s ‘(If Paradise is) Half as Nice’ (12 February) and Peter Sarstedt’s ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ (26 February). The reason for this cluster of chart toppers is easily explained – my brother’s birthday is in early February, my own a month later, and we had these singles bought for us as presents (I can’t recall whether we were influenced by their chart-topping status). In the chart of 12-18 February, three of them occupied the top of the charts – Amen Corner at number one had just bumped Fleetwood Mac down to number two whilst the Move were waiting at number three to make their own assault on the top spot.

Of these four number ones, I owned only one – Amen Corner. My brother, just turned six years old, was emerging as the ‘serious’ music fan in the household. I liked them all well enough but was aghast at the sight of the Move when they appeared on Top of the Pops: I’d never seen so much hair! When Roy Wood sang ‘what am I supposed to do now?’ I answered, without missing a beat, ‘get a haircut!’

The next single I had bought for me that year was another number one – Zager and Evans’ apocalyptic folk-rock ditty ‘In the Year 2525’. I remember watching them strumming their acoustic guitars, perched on stools in the film clip shown on Top of the Pops and thinking I’d quite like to do that myself (strum a guitar, not sit on a stool…) My next number one is one of the few it’s somewhat shameful to admit to owning. Even before we knew the truth about him, Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ was not the kind of single that you’d boast about to your friends. But I liked it well enough, even if I didn’t quite grasp its anti-war message, and had it bought for me at Christmas 1969. It became the first number one single of the new decade, holding the top spot for the whole of January until replaced on the very last day of the month by Edison Lighthouse’s ‘Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)’ – which I also had bought for me. Another two consecutive number ones – but they were to be the last.

Around this same time, I was bought the novelty single ‘Gimme Dat Ding’, the perpetrators of which, The Pipkins, appeared on TOTP the same week as Edison Lighthouse. I remember noticing the resemblance between their vocalists. There was an excellent reason for this – they were one and the same person, session singer Tony Burrows.

Our hit-spotting run of early 1969 was never to be repeated. During 1970, there were plenty of good nunber one records (and, of course, the bloody awful ‘In the Summertime’), but only one of them made it into our house – the England World Cup Squad’s overly-optimistic anthem ‘Back Home’, which made number one on 16 May. Getting to the top of the charts and walking off with the World Cup was just too much to hope for…

From late 1970 through to the spring of 1971, I took no interest in the pop charts, for reasons that now escape me. There weren’t a lot of great songs around in any case, and the only one of that era that I really noticed – for all the wrong reasons – was Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’, which hit the top on 9 January 1971. Fortunately for our future credibility as music fans, neither myself nor my brother had this bought for us. It was a narrow escape, I suppose, as it was the kind of record that I’m sure was foisted on a lot of kids as a paen to their own grandparents. I hated it.

1971 was topped and tailed by novelty records from TV comedians, and in December my very modest record collection clocked up another number one in the form of ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’. No shame in that, surely? We even lived at ‘number 22’ ourselves, though not, of course in ‘Lily Lane’. In my mind’s eye I can still see the accompanying film with Benny Hill squaring up to Henry McGee’s ‘Two Ton Ted’, that was shown for weeks on Top of the Pops. I can even recite all the lyrics in the voice of Benny Hill. Is that a ‘no’?

The next chart-topping single to make it into our household was another ‘novelty’ hit, one of those bizarre fluke number ones that used to pop up now and then. The Band of the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards released a bagpipe rendition of the 1772 hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ which not only reached number one in the charts (on 15 April 1972) but became the year’s best selling single and was an international hit. I hate the sound of the bagpipes and can plead not guilty here, though my brother won’t relish being reminded that it was, to the best of my knowledge, bought on his behest (although I suspect our mum may have exerted some influence).

There were plenty of iconic number one records during the 1970s, but almost none of them found their way into our hands, and I went for almost the entire decade without owning any more number one singles. In 1973 I owned the number one piece of sheet music when 10CC’s ‘Rubber Bullets’ made number one on 23 June 1973. How I laughed when, in that week’s Beano, Minnie the Minx substituted the sheet music for ‘this week’s number one record’ for the sedate chamber music being played by a quartet of old biddies who immediately went into overdrive. Ironically, 10CC’s next album was called Sheet Music.

The same thing happened when Pilot’s single ‘January’ reached number one in – uh – February of 1975. I bought the sheet music rather than the single. In fact, I think I had it in my mind to get the song on an LP whenever it became available but it somehow never happened, or at least not until many, many years later. By this time, I’d gone off singles altogether, and now preferred to play albums, so it was in LP form that I owned 10CC’s ‘I’m Not in Love’ when it topped the charts on 28 June 1975. I’d had the album The Original Soundtrack since Easter.

Over four years would elapse before I owned any more contemporary number one hits, and I’m not sure I can allow them in because they came into my possession, as tracks on albums, weeks or even months after their original chart appearances. So, it’s more of an honourable mention for The Police with ‘Message in a Bottle’ and ‘Walking on the Moon’. Likewise Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ which I hated on release but finally allowed into my collection when I bought the album The Kick Inside two years later.

I went out and bought the Police’s ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’ when it was released in the autumn of 1980, which probably makes it the first number one single I owned prior to its topping the charts – although by this time in the band’s career, it’s chart-topping status was more or less a foregone conclusion. The following year, I already owned ‘Every Little Thing She Does is Magic’ on the Ghost in the Machine album when the single reached number one on 14 November.

In all, I owned ten number one hits of the 1980s at the time they topped the charts. Some, like Madness’s ‘House of Fun’ I’d prefer to forget, and I’ve long since disposed of the Housemartins’ acapella Christmas hit ‘Caravan of Love’. I’m not wild about admitting to having bought Spandau Ballet’s ‘True’ in its trendy David Band sleeve, but I’m afraid it’s, er, true… and as for Cliff and the Young One’s irreverent cover of Lionel Bart’s ‘Living Doll’, if I find it still lurking anywhere amongst my records, I’ll be sure to dispatch it to the nearest charity shop – although the dustbin would require less effort.

Topping the list of ‘oh my God, did I really go out and buy that’ is the ‘novelty’ (if that’s the right word) dance hit of September 1992 ‘Ebeneezer Goode’. Oh the shame(n)! I have no idea what possessed me to wish to own this piece of nonsense other than the idea that it had so permeated the fabric of reality at the time through endless radio play that it might in the future aquire a patina of 90s nostalgia. Pull the other one! Got any salmon? Sorted…

Equally embarrassing to own up to is Oasis’s 2002 single ‘The Hindu Times’ which a friend recommended to me. It didn’t cost a lot, maybe around a quid, and I played it but once. There just wasn’t a bloody tune there…

So we come to the last, the very last number one record that I went out and bought. It was June 2002 and the record in question was ‘A Little Less Conversation’, an obscure 1968 Elvis cut that had been given an injection of contemporary chart steroids by Dutch multi-instrumentalist and composer (according to Wikipedia) Tom Holkenborg, AKA ‘Junkie XL’ or just plain JXL. Whoever and whatever he was, his production was a huge improvement on the song in its original form.

And there you have it – from Herman’s Hermits to Elvis – my own personal story of chart-topping hits. It seems almost like a trip backwards, from a 60s act to a 50s act whose late 60s recording was remixed in the 21st century. Are you still with me?

By the time I clocked out, the charts were becoming a place to avoid, with worthless one-off dance or, God help us, trance acts trading places at the top on an almost weekly basis with boy bands, junk groups like Aqua and the era’s ‘big hitters’ like Robbie Williams, Kylie and Oasis. Adding to the horror were novelties aimed at children, like singles from Teletubbies and Bob the Builder, both of them shameless commercial cash-ins from people who should have known better.

Today, I couldn’t name you a single chart act. Just scrolling through the list of number ones since the year 2000 is a depressing business where I find myself constantly asking ‘who’, ‘what’ and ‘why’. The plain fact is that being number one used to mean something and today it means less than nothing. To reach number one in the 1960s, an act had to sell in the tens of thousands, if not millions. Today, I’ve no idea nor interest in how many streams it takes to get into the charts, but it’s no way near the colossal sales enjoyed by the artists of pop’s golden age. Pop today is all too often merely one facet of a multi-media mix designed to promote the latest shiny young piece of talent. Which strikes me as an utterly specious reason for making music...

The Toys Department is Open...

Head over here for a new spin-off from this blog, dedicated to the toys I grew up with... 

many of which, as you can see, are still with me... 

https://sundayinoldmoneytoysdept.blogspot.com/2026/02/welcome-to-toys-department.html