The Grandad Trap

 

Novelty records seem to have been with us forever. The 60s and 70s were particularly prone to this form of chart entertainment, and produced a crop of singles from artists whose more usual stamping grounds were the worlds of comedy and light entertainment. In 1970, it was the turn of Clive Dunn, famous for the old buffer act he’d been doing since ITV’s Bootsie and Snudge in 1960, recently reinvented with a slew of catchphrases and mannerisms supplied by Jimmy Perry and David Croft, to delight audiences as Lance Corporal Jones in Dad’s Army. 

In 1970, at a showbiz party, Dunn chanced to meet musician Herbie Flowers, who would later provide the rock world with one of the best bass lines of all time, the intro to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’. It was something rather less wild that Dunn had in mind: could Flowers write a pop song for him to deliver as his old man character? Flowers accepted the challenge, and after consulting an ‘easy primer book on composing’ was well under way. There was one stumbling block, though: he couldn’t find a hook for the tune. A quick call to his friend Kenny Pickett (late of psychedelic scenesters The Creation) provided the answer. When Pickett rang Flowers’ doorbell, the two-note chime gave them the simple melodic device they were looking for.

Everyone knows the sound of a typical two-note door chime: in musical terms, it’s a falling major third. The same two-note phrase is also the call of the cuckoo. It can be heard in songs like ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ (‘Some day I’ll wish upon a star’) and, most famously, in Laurel and Hardy’s iconic signature tune. Trite and obvious, it's hardly the rocket science end of songwriting. Flowers and Pickett’s composition ‘Grandad’ is full of it: the falling third occurs in the chorus (‘Grandad/Grandad’) and occurs again half a bar later on the word ‘lovely’. The verse swings along in pure rocking chair fashion, and again, it’s made up of three ‘cuckoo calls’, B flat to G, expressed as a dotted quaver and semiquaver, as can be seen in the sheet music. After a dotted minim on B flat, the melody peaks on a sixth, C, falling a fourth to G. Below this, the chords perform a minor fall from E flat major to C minor, getting there by way of G minor with a D in the bass.

You may well wonder where all this is going. Well, that ‘cuckoo call’ melody in ‘Grandad’ is a bear trap that all songwriters should beware if they don’t want to end up sounding like Clive Dunn. Major thirds occur all the time in popular songs, but they don’t always repeat incessantly like the melody in Flowers and Pickett’s composition, and, crucially, they don’t often jump to the sixth note in the scale over a descending chord sequence. Once you’ve got all those elements in place, you’re in the bear trap. You've accidentally re-written 'Grandad'.

If it hadn’t been set in stone as a cheesy kiddie’s classic, there would be nothing inherently wrong with that particular melodic progression, apart from its being rather annoying. There’s something about that two-note chime that demands attention, which is probably why it’s so commonly used for doorbells. It’s also a bit dumb, as composer Marvin Hatley realised when he wrote the Laurel and Hardy theme. Songwriters go there at their peril. ‘Cuckoo’ was once a common term of derision to describe someone not quite in possession of a full deck.

It’s ironic that Herbie Flowers went on to work with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, because Macca is, unfortunately, the most recent victim of what I’m going to call ‘The Grandad Trap’ if he did but know it, and Ringo is his partner in crime. Macca's just released single ‘Home to Us’ has a melody that goes ‘cuckoo’ fully eight times, then jumps to a sixth, before dropping a fourth. The minute I heard it, I thought: ‘that’s Grandad!’

He’s not the first. Back in the 1990s, the band Spiritualised (who coincidentally got a namecheck in my last posting) fell into the trap with the title track of their album ‘Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space’, whose melody again does that ‘Grandad’ thing across its first four bars. A few people, mostly snarky journalists, noticed the similarity at the time, but it didn’t stop the album from reaching number 4 in the UK charts and being acclaimed as one of the best of the decade. It just accidentally quoted the melody from one of the cheesiest pop singles of all time.

I suppose, being a grandad himself, it’s appropriate for Macca to quote from Clive Dunn’s kiddies’ classic, though I’m sure he did it unawares. The original was no slouch, reaching number one in the charts in January 1971, coincident with Dunn’s 51st birthday. But a lot of other horrible songs have made number one… In fairness, it took more than a trite melody to make 'Grandad' such a horror... the very idea of Corporal Jones making a pop record was bad enough, and then they gave us a kiddie chorus for good measure. Then again, even John Lennon had a kiddie chorus on 'Happy Xmas War is Over'. And lest we should forget, Macca did also give humanity 'The Frog Chorus'...

It may seem unfair to call out a legend like Paul McCartney for accidentally reproducing one of the cheesiest pop song melodies of all time, but no one can deny the similarity. Especially not now that I’ve pointed it out. My advice to him if he should happen to realise (or less likely, read this blog)?

“Don’t panic!”

A Very Peculiar Story

 

It’s rare for any television series to go unrepeated for thirty eight years, unless it was a victim of the BBC’s mass junking policy. Andrew Davies’ satirical campus comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice arrived in the mid 1980s, in an era when TV archiving had come of age and drama series were retained as a matter of course. The series turns forty later this month, and to mark the occasion, BBC4 will, I understand, be repeating all fourteen episodes, including the seven-episode series two – which has not been seen on terrestrial television since its original broadcast in 1988.

I came somewhat late to the series, and didn’t pick up on A Very Peculiar Practice until a repeat run of the first series on BBC1 in November 1988. (The series had its first broadcast two years earlier, placed in a 9.25pm Wednesday night slot on BBC2, where it ran from 21 May until 2 July.) I don’t know what made me tune in, or even have a VHS tape at the ready, but I did. My laconic diary entry proclaimed it to be good. By week three (Wives of Great Men) my estimation had risen to ‘v. good – v. funny’ (this is one of the series’ outstanding episodes featuring a brilliant guest appearance from Timothy West as a hyper-manic academic). Week four (Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit) was ‘V.G!’ Bob Buzzard, memorably portrayed by David Troughton, was by now my favourite character in the series – utterly unprincipled, snide, untrustworthy, and forever reliant on his ‘rinky-dink computer’.

Bob (‘do you think you can manage Robert?’) is one of the doctors in the university medical centre where nervous young medic Stephen Daker finds himself, alone, newly divorced, and friendless. As he drives into the campus, baffling signs warn him ominously of 'altered priorities ahead'. Daker (Peter Davison) comes with a less than impressive CV (‘Birmingham, Birmingham, Birmingham, Walsall’) but a dedication to his chosen career that sharply contrasts the self-interested motives of his colleagues. Decrepit Jock McCannon (Graham Crowden) is head of the pratice; never far from a bottle of Glenfyddych, and often to be found dictating the latest chapter of his masterwork ‘The Sick University’, he treats all ailments as manifestations of psycho-sexual anxiety. Daker’s other colleague, Rose-Marie (Barbara Flynn), proves to be a tricky and manipulative uber-feminist. With each of his fellow medics pursuing their own conflicting and self-serving agendas, it’s left to Dr. Daker to find a path of least resistance that will enable him to do his job with empathy and understanding. But Daker has problems of his own, entering into an unusual relationship with mature student Lyn Turtle (Amanda Hillwood) that becomes a form of therapy.

This was more than just another campus comedy with a medical slant: this was dark satire, the blackest of black comedy, with an uncompromising message about the state of further education in Thatcher’s Britain. It was knowing, sly and even self-referential: in episode seven, Dr. Daker encounters a writer in residence who’s trying to write a drama set on a university campus but finds that real life keeps second guessing his outrageous plot ideas.

Misleadingly, the Coronet books paperback of series one gave the impression that A Very Peculiar Practice had been a novel before it became a TV series...

The BBC1 repeat run ended on 19 December 1988, and when another series of repeats was scheduled in April 1990, I expected this would comprise the second series: but instead we got a third outing for series one. Surely series two would follow on? ‘Not a chance, buddy’ (as Bob would have said). What had happened to it? In the end, I had to borrow some VHS tapes from a friend who had recorded series two on its one and only BBC broadcast. They were a bit fuzzy, having been recorded using the ‘Long Play’ format, but it was better than nothing. Watching them, I discovered that series two was even more on the edge than series one: the satire was now vicious where it had formerly been wry, and the outlook for the university was bleak, as an American Vice Chancellor arrived and channelled funding into secret defence projects, guarded by a sinister security force.

Series two received its only repeat broadcast on UK Gold in the late 1990s, where it was shown in edited form (the episodes in their original form frequently ran over the usual fifty-minute slot). In 1992, a film sequel, A Very Polish Practice picked up the characters of Daker, his new wife Grete and Bob Buzzard, transplanting them to a chaotic post-Communist Poland. Like series two, this also went unrepeated. At Christmas 2003, series one got a further repeat run on the new BBC4 channel, but once again, series two failed to materialise? Why was this?

A few years earlier, I asked Andrew Davies himself, when I had the chance of a brief conversation following a lecture he delivered at a literary festival. He admitted he knew of no reason why the BBC should have failed to repeat the second series, and no conspiracy or legal wrangle that might have kept it off air. Series one had been refused permission to film on the University of East Anglia campus, who were somewhat sensitive in the aftermath of the controversial 1981 adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man, which was filmed at UEA. Davies’ fictional ‘Lowlands University’ was clearly UEA in all but name, but in the end, location filming was done at Birmingham and Keele Universities. To the best of my knowledge, Birmingham University wasn’t entirely happy with series one and refused permission for any further filming (series two lacks the brutalist concrete exteriors of the first and as a result looks quite different). If series one had ruffled academic feathers, series two was even more potentially controversial. Or maybe its non-appearance was simply down to the impracticality of scheduling a series where six of its episodes are 55 minutes long, and the seventh even longer.

The mystery of series two continued to rankle, not only with myself but my friend Tim Beddows, who was also a fan. In the end, it seemed that the only way we would get to see it was by releasing the whole thing on DVD, and this, ultimately, is what happened – although it took a long time to bring the plan to fruition. Network released series one in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2011 that a complete series DVD appeared, comprising both series and the spin-off film. I got to do the sleeve, and composed a desktop scene bringing together various elements from the series including Jock’s dictation machine, a glass of scotch, and a packet of the ‘Confidan’ drug that figured in the plot of Black Bob’s Hamburger Suit (it looks as if it were all photographed in situ, but the elements were, in fact, assembled in Photoshop). I don’t know if anyone got it, but the sleeve text was laid out in the manner of a piece of pharmaceutical packaging, an idea I ‘borrowed’ from the band Spiritualised’s album Ladies and Gentlemen we are Floating in Space.

To date, the DVD has been the only place where fans could legitimately watch both series (although, inevitably, there have been illegal online uploads), all of which makes the upcoming run on BBC4 something of a watershed. According to the iPlayer listings, episodes from series two ‘will be available soon’. So watch this space…

A Very Peculiar Practice begins on Wednesday 20 May at 22.15 on BBC4

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p032kkxy

More Sweets You Can Still Eat..

 

(and a few you can't)

So... how many of the above can you expect to find in any half decent sweet shop today? The spread comes from Robert Opie’s excellent (and highly recommended) ‘70s Scrapbook’, collected from his museum of packaging and other ephemera. There are a fair few in that line-up that have made it into the twenty-first century, most of them still recognisable, if occasionally somewhat diminished in size...

One thing the survivors have in common is that, from my perspective, they’ve mostly been around for a lot longer than I have. Curiously, though, a lot of the chocolate bars launched during my lifetime have been less enduring. Bar Six, introduced by Cadbury’s in the mid 1960s, was a six-segmented chocolate-covered wafer bar. At our grammar school, we had a wall-mounted dispenser which would disgorge Bars Six in exchange for a 5p piece. We couldn’t get enough of them. But Bar Six vanished some time in the 1980s. I once unwrapped a bar to find it was solid chocolate – someone had forgotten to add the wafers to the production line that day, and it wasn’t the only time it happened. Today, it would probably go viral...

Even shorter-lived was the Aztec bar introduced by Cadburys in 1967 as a kind of rival to the Mars bar. On the outside, it looked just the same as a Mars, but beneath the thick chocolate were three separate layers: soft caramel on top, brown, Mars-style nougat below and white nougat on the bottom layer.* I found it very chewy – much more so than a Mars bar – and probably ate less than half a dozen of them (not all at the same time). Some time in the 1970s, I realised Aztec had quietly been dropped. Cadbury’s briefly revived it in 1999 (above left), but deserve a wooden spoon for their efforts, as what they came up with was simply a Mars bar, without the three-layer appearance of the original Aztec. Did nobody bother to do any research? All they had to do was look at the 1960s commercial where the bar's layers can be seen quite clearly:

A 1967 commercial introducing Aztec: I've heard it claimed that the bar contained raisins: it absolutely did not.

Others ‘missing in action’ brands include Cadbury’s Ice Breaker (chocolate bar with mint pieces) and Milk Tray bar (selection of Milk Tray chocolates fused together into a chocolate bar). Topic is a recent loss to sweet addicts, having been discontinued in 2021, with the last shelf stock selling out around 2023. Shame, as its white nougat centre made it quite unlike any other chocolate bar, but it seems that declining sales led to its demise. Introduced in 1962, it was famously promoted for many years with the slogan ‘a hazelnut in every bite'. Bill Oddie provides the voice of Toby alongside (I think) Jon Pertwee in this mid 70s TV spot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsLceXcFd6I

So much for the history books, but we’re concerned here with the sweets you can still eat… so let’s have a few more...

I was going to add Old Jamaica to the casualty list until I discovered it had been relaunched six years ago as a sub-brand of Bournville dark chocolate and is still available at time of writing, although reviews online suggest it’s ‘not the same as it used to be’ (is anything?) This rum and raisin flavoured bar first hit the shelves back in the 1970s and was promoted with a ‘Treasure Island’ styled ad campaign in which a whiskery old pirate advised his young shipmate ‘don’t ee knock it all back at once.’ 

Curlywurly, introduced by Cadbury’s in the early 70s, and promoted on television by comedian Terry Scott, is also still very much alive, and appears unchanged from its original appearance. This, again, has traditionally been aimed at children, but that didn’t stop me from checking out an example just recently. It is still very chewy, although the toffee centre is slightly smoother than it used to be, and the chocolate still falls to bits when you eat it. Perhaps they should have tied their advertising in with Persil...

Toffee Crisp arrived in the early 60s, with a launch campaign on television that emphasised the huge crunch produced when you bit into one, which was exaggerated in the advert to seismic proportions. The bar was derived from a chocolate and rice krispies cake made by the wife of John Henderson, great-nephew of Mackintosh’s founder John Mackintosh. Today’s version is more or less indistinguishable from the original, and the orange/yellow packaging has evolved from an earlier orange and white version. As you can see in the Robert Opie spread, a plain chocolate version was also available for a while during the 1970s.

Also still present and correct on the shelves of any self-respecting sweet shop is the ages old favourite Bounty, introduced by Mars in 1951, and more recently developed into an ice cream equivalent (in my opinion one of the more successful ‘choc bar to ice cream’ transitions). Originally sold as individual bars, a two-pack Milky Way-style package eventually became the default, with a cardboard slide insert that has disappeared over the years. Like Charlie Brown, I used to hate any chocolate that contained coconut, and was a late adopter of Bounty: I doubt I ate it at all prior to the 1980s. Today, it is unchanged as far as I can tell, and the chocolate retains its distinctive thickness. Bounty's advertising played off the exotic associations of coconut, and featured a group of ‘Bounty hunters’ on a tropical island whence they had come ‘in search of paradise.’ Our dad always used to add: ‘and all they found was chocolate bars’.

The plain chocolate Bounty in its red variant wrapper was always far harder to find, and as of 2023 is reported to be extinct. A garage just up the road from where I live was certainly still selling them in relatively recent years, so news of its demise may yet prove to be premature.

Picnic, still with us, is a bar of Australian origin, created in 1950 by the MacRobertson confectionery company, which was acquired by Cadbury’s in 1967. I can’t find any confirmation of this, but I’m certain that Picnic originally did not contain peanuts, and that the ‘Peanut Picnic’ was a new variety introduced a few years later. Does anyone know for sure? In my recollection, ‘original’ Picnic was rather like a Lion bar.

Other favourites still available at your local sweetshop include Starbar (which disappeared for a time, after being rebranded as a variant of Boost but has made a return in recent years), Wispa (famously advertised on television by various comedy double acts), Aero (with us in one form or another since 1935), Boost (launched in 1985) and of course the ever popular Cadbury’s bars: Dairy Milk, (1905-present), Fruit and Nut (1926 - ), Wholenut (1930 - ), and Bournville (1908 - ) The latter has been ‘retooled’ in the past year, and is now moulded in larger segments which are much harder to eat. In the late 60s and early 70s, Bournville was promoted on television with an ‘X certificate’ campaign, emphasising that it was a chocolate for adults: I couldn’t fault their reasoning, and was never that big a fan of dark chocolate, except when it came on biscuits…

Cadbury’s Creme Egg is happily unaffected by shrinkflation – you can’t change the shape of an egg after all (although Cadbury’s have recently changed the shape of their large Easter Eggs, giving them a flat base, so they’re not egg-shaped all round. You know where to write and complain…) Creme Eggs were introduced in Britain in 1963, and I can still remember eating one for the first time, half expecting the ‘yolk and white’ fondant to taste like a real egg. Originally sold under the Fry’s brand name, they were brought under the Cadbury’s banner in 1971. During the 1970s, Cadbury’s also sold ‘Border Creme Eggs’ in tartan wrappers, with toffee fondant centres. There’s nothing like them around today, although the ‘Caramel Creme Egg’ comes close, and there have been any number of variant editions over the years. This year, by accident, I bought a pack of white chocolate creme eggs, which look disconcertingly like real eggs and taste very, very sickly. Not recommended...

Back in 1967, Cadbury’s started selling its famous Mini Eggs, which I believe were originally intended as cake decorations. In later years they were promoted by ‘Mr. Cadbury’s parrot.’ Recent reports suggest that, unlike Creme Eggs, these candy-coated chocolates are showing disturbing signs of shrinkage… the eggs remain the same size as ever, but there are fewer in a packet, down from 80g to 74g, whilst the price is now upwards of £2.15. Rising costs of cocoa and dairy products have been blamed – and as ever, the cost is absorbed by the consumer instead of eating into the manufacturer’s profit margins… plus ça change: people have always complained about Easter eggs being bad value for money, traditionally pointing to the excessive packaging and the meagre amount of sweets you find inside them.

Today, the chocolate I buy more often than any other is Cadbury’s Caramel. At time of writing the large bar tends to retail for around £2.75, but I recently spotted them on sale in a local Tesco for just £2. Bargain! Launched in 1976 with an advertising campaign featuring a seductive bunny rabbit that’s remembered to this day, it was later brought under the ‘Dairy Milk’ branding. And the human owner of that slinkily seductive bunny voice? Miriam Margolyes.

What, if anything have we learned from all this? Well, if you like continuity in your chocolate, then be wary of fickle Cadbury's, as their brands seem more prone to discontinuation than those of other manufacturers – just consider the list of casualties above, and you'll see they're mostly Cadbury's. Mars products seem to stick around for longer, as do those of Nestlé. Perhaps it's more the case that Cadbury's like to experiment more than other makers, and experiments don't always work: in their defence, they have occasionally reintroduced items in response to popular demand. I'd really like to see them bring back Aztec, and to do it right this time... they might even make it better than the original. But on the whole, we don't do too badly for sweets here in Britain – at least we get proper chocolate unlike what passes for it in the United States, and notwithstanding shrinkflation, I think it's safe to assume that most of our long standing chocolate brands will be with us for a while yet.

Think of it as edible nostalgia...