WINDSOR DAVIES AND DON ESTELLE – "Whispering Grass"

I’m going to try and recreate the context for this one from memory. Wikipedia and – god forbid – YouTube make this a pointless exercise, I know… but then that’s rather appropriate, wouldn’t you say?

It Ain’t Half Hot Mum was a British sitcom of the 1970s, set in…. Burma? During the second world war? The hook was that a tyrannical and pompous sergeant major, played by Windsor Davies, had been put in charge of a squad not of soldiers but of entertainers, who were out in the jungle to boost the troops’ morale. I can’t remember if the entertainers were meant to be any good or not (“Whispering Grass” surely suggests not!) but certainly they were terrible soldiers, much to the unending dismay of Davies.

This isn’t a bad set-up for a sitcom in the short-term, and It Ain’t Half Hot Mum was a roaring success in its day, but is rarely repeated now because it drew a disproportionate amount of jokery from two sources: i) misunderstandings between the squad and the comical natives, who I seem to remember were generally white actors ‘browned up’, ii) clashes between Windsor Davies’ character and Melvyn Hayes, who played a nervous and effeminate gay man. Both men are good comic actors and I found these second gags hilarious at the time, but I was 5 or 6.

Neither of these wells of humour is drawn on for “Whispering Grass”, though it’s quite bad enough without them. I’m assuming this is straight out of the series, probably an episode where they give a concert party, and someone falls ill, and so the Sergeant Major has to sing… WITH HILARIOUS CONSEQUENCES. That’s the only way I can explain the weird structure of “Whispering Grass”, which starts with a bit of Davies in-character, and then gives you most of the song with Don Estelle doing an adequate nostalgia turn, and just as you might be settling into enjoying the song back comes Davies doing it as an awkward spoken word. There’s no joke-value in the first half and no pop-value in the second, so whatever you’re coming to it for you’ll be disappointed.

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jeff w

22 March 2008 11:18

I’m pretty sure this song didn’t feature in the TV show at all. It’s a genuine spin-off product.

That probably deepens your perplexity even more. I suppose you don’t wanna know about their ALBUM…

a logged out p^nk s lord sukråt wötsit

22 March 2008 11:22

google informs that it’s an inkspots song, a hit in 1940

i kind of assume there was an element of displaced nostalgia in its being a hit again in 1975, in such a intention-confused and “in quotes” version — someone aged 20 in 1940 would after all only be 55 in 1975*, so this would be appealing the way the themetune to dad’s army would be, except without the small-p progressive politics: ie redolent of memories of empire not so much as “we ruled the waves rah rah” but as “something big and often fun we all did together when young which no one talks about much any more”**

*(35 years ago today is 1972, remember)
** i’ve just been reading my aunt’s memoirs, and one thing that’s fascinating — and disorientating– is how many people in the story, in not-so-distant reaches of the english-as-tuppence branches of my family, were born, lived, worked and died in (for example) india: this was a HUGE BIG DEAL, and then one day it all vanished, or anyway became unavailable to celebrate in any uncomplicated way

hence (possibly) some of the attraction of this song (and this sit-com) (which i never liked, bcz windsor davies was a big bully)

Dan R

22 March 2008 11:41

The song’s pretty good, I think. Sandy Denny does a cracking version (obviously). This version was, of course, simply a spin off from the TV show, utilising Don Estelle’s attractive light tenor and the ‘rapport’ he had with Windsor Davies, with whom he’d been touring the club circuit for some years with a mixture of music and comedy. The YouTube clip gives a sense of the rather aimless mugging that those performances may have featured.

Remember that Dad’s Army was at its peak and this was perhaps a period when people felt able comfortably to look back at the war and not be purely haunted by it. However, now we are at the same distance to this record as this record was to the era it was pastiching. Just as we can admire glam-rock stylings in Rachel Stevens singles, it may not have seemed so utterly distant to ape those fragile wartime sentiments (we’re not far away from Pennies in Heaven, and its revisiting of records of more or less similar vintage.

Which is to say that I think this is a rotten record, but I might have seen SOMETHING in it if I’d been the age I am now in 1975.

Marcello Carlin

22 March 2008 12:53

The 1975 world of British sitcom and the 30th anniversary of VE Day – what a problematic (if understandable brew).

The two 1975-generated British sitcoms which I guess most people would remember and venerate today were The Good Life – burned out 40-year-old decides to go green as substitute for post-sixties hangover nervous breakdown (except that the only way Richard Briers could be thought or imagined psychedelic would be in the context of his narration for the cartoon series Roobarb which ran at the same time); if that sounds overstated, you haven’t seen the first episode in a long time, wherein Paul Eddington’s Jerry is very, very far from the endearingly goofy henpecked husband figure he later became or was turned into – and Fawlty Towers which didn’t do that well at the time, either critically or ratings-wise (it was generally seen as one of a group of post-Python spinoffs with Palin and Jones’ Ripping Yarns and Idle’s Rutland Weekend Television); like The Prisoner it slowly gained a following through reruns and the second series didn’t appear until four years later.

It Ain’t Half Hot Mum still plays on cable TV, but has not been revisited on terrestrial TV, largely due to the controversy over the casting of Michael Bates as Rangi Ram (though the other Indian characters were all played by Indian actors); meanwhile, Alec Guinness in A Handful Of Dust gets the free pass despite Bates’ actual Indian background and upbringing and his own quarter-caste (I think) origins. I thought his performance was excellent and genuinely humourous.

And, admittedly from the perspective of an eleven or twelve year old comic book reader, I found IAHHM roughly a billion times funnier than Dad’s Army. The premise was that this concert party troupe had ended up in India and Davies’ Sgt Major Shutup loathed them and was extremely keen to send them up the jungle for some real combat (if I say the American equivalent would have been something like M*A*S*H* – and we haven’t seen the last of the latter on Popular – that may demonstrate the least crossable of canyons of cultural differences) but since the silly-arse commanding officers routinely nixed his requests, he was lumbered with them, including Melvyn Hayes’ post-Cliff diva Gloria Sahib, John Clegg’s Mister La-Di-Dah Gunner Graham (“You is wasting too much time reading that Useless by James Joyce!” which in certain circumstances I still think makes me laugh more than any other British sitcom line) and Don Estelle, Gunner “Lofty” Sugden – the show regularly paused for their crouching five-minute dialogues.

“Whispering Grass” was never featured in the show, just as “Grandad” never appeared in Dad’s Army, but someone at EMI saw some profits to be made; the song was originally a hit (or would have been a hit, had the singles chart been going at that time) for the Inkspots in 1940 and the Davies/Estelle reading does not noticeably deviate, except for the “I will not have gossip in this jungle” line which in the original is replaced by an Oliver Hardy-esque “mmmmmm, mmm.” And, as Dan remarks above, Sandy Denny recorded a splendid reading of the song about a year earlier.

But of course in 1975 it had been thirty years since the end of the war, and nostalgia was booming everywhere; we were in the middle of Max Bygraves’ seemingly unending Singalongamax phase, the Glenn Miller revival was just around the corner, Bing Crosby was appearing on TOTP (and in a Tennents Lager commercial in Scotland!) and the United Artists motion picture back catalogue was about to be given a dusting down; one of their most notable items became a serious contender for the 1975 Xmas number one slot.

As Mark has remarked above, you didn’t have to have been that old in ’75 to remember the war first hand (and of course there was also Thames’ The World At War series, which I remember in ’75 being rerun on Sunday afternoons) and there remained considerable nostalgia for what it represented, combined with the then imminent “threat” of absorption into the Common Market; many veterans felt the latter a total negation of what they imagined they had been fighting for.

So all of this, in addition to the general abundance of comedy records in the chart (the spring of ’75 also seeing top ten hits for Mike Reid and the Goodies, and the folk comedy section can perhaps be considered in connection with the year’s second comedy number one), ensured a huge demand for “Whispering Grass.” For myself, I think Estelle does an excellent job with his light tenor and Davies, maybe sensibly, keeps strictly in the background (and therefore works better than his TOTP bits of campy business).

I can’t say that I revisit the record regularly, but I don’t despise it either, nor its parent programme, nor the people, including both of my parents, who loved them.

a logged out p^nk s lord sukråt wötsit

22 March 2008 13:42

(slightly O/T pedantry: guinness does indeed play Mr Todd in A Handful of Dust — which i’ve never seen — but his ‘browning up’ shame is surely as Professor Godbole in A Passage to India? maybe both, as AHoD is set in deepest jungly brazil i think — even more O/T, mr todd makes me think of beatrix potter’s mr tod: if guinness FURRIES up for the role then OMG all round!)

(the 80s nostalgia wave for the raj, which APtI and AHoD both really belong to, as does Jewel in the Crown, tended to be for the middleclass empire life — and both prinked out some of the crimes of the colonial era, albeit rather complacently: what’s interesting and different about IAHHM, at least potentially, is that while it is as mute as allo allo on the dark side of the times, it was pretty much from a below-stairs perspective; kipling would have approved!) (well, maybe)

ps lord sukrat’s actual real laff-chart: allo allo >> dad’s army >> iahhm

a logged out p^nk s lord sukråt wötsit

22 March 2008 13:51

(sorry AHoD isn’t raj-nostalgia at all, i was distracted by a phonecall!)

rosie

22 March 2008 15:48

I think there’s more to it than simply a spin-off of ‘It Ain’t Half Hot Mum’, because Estelle and Davis were an established act on the northern club scene (by which I mean working mens clubs, not Northern Soul allnighters or whatever the forerunners of the Hacienda were) before the series, which to some extent was built around that act. Presumably it involved them doing this sort of thing – Estelle, who is a good singer of his type, singing straight while Davies chips in with the interjections. Much of the joke is that Estelle is small in stature and ripe for bullying, but his voice helps him to grow above the bully.

And, in defence of the show, I understand that it was only Michael Bates’s character which was played in a browned-up, exaggeratedly stereotypical way, all the other Indian characters were played by real Indian actors (not that they were ever given much to do). A real Indian told me once that the Indian community rather enjoyed Michael Bates’s performance in much the way that they enjoyed Peter Sellers’s Indian characters – the series “Goodness Gracious Me” was so named to reflect that. Melvyn Hayes was another matter altogether – portraying a screaming queen is one thing, but what was really offensive was the way Hayes never missed an opportunity to tell the world how straight he was.

A good song spoilt, I’d say.

tim davidge

22 March 2008 16:01

I always rather liked this one – indeed, I liked it enough to buy it when it came out. It compared well with the Ink Spots’ version from which, as Marcello says, it doesn’t deviate much. The ‘I will not ‘ave gossip in this jungle!’ line, though unexpected by those who knew the song from its original reading, was a contemporary comic reference akin to that Oliver Hardy-esque touch out of 1940. What really appeals about the song, I think, is its mixture of wit and whimsy, coupled with a certain melancholy, which both acts (i.e. the Ink Spots, and Davis/Estelle) brought out rather well.

Windsor Davis was himself quite self-effacing about his contribution to the record, attributing its success to the clear, accurate tenor of Don Estelle. I quote from memory: “Don has a really marvellous voice. I’m just like that…Telly Saveloys!”

rosie

22 March 2008 17:36

It’s worth mentioning, too, that IAHHM was set in Deolali, a long way from any fighting and the home of the Royal Artillery college. A posting there must have been pretty dreary: no wonder they called it “doolally”.

intothefireuk

22 March 2008 20:22

There was of course a tradition of this type of comedy act wherein a perfunctory ‘straight’ singer plays against a comedy buffoon eg. Laurel & Hardy, Morecambe & Wise, Little & Large (arghh !!!) etc. In 1975 TV would been full of them. I wasn’t a great fan of IAHHM, like Mind Your Language around the same time it played on broadly crass stereotypes which I had no real affection for who spent a lot of their time delivering sledgehammer punchlines. Dad’s Army was an alltogether different affair with broader characters you could warm to and far more subtle humour. This was despite both shows wallowing in a nostalgia I couldn’t possibly hope to relate to. Whispering Grass was & is a pretty rancid concoction with it’s only saving grace Estelles smooth tenor.

Keith W

22 March 2008 21:36

I think there’s a certain amount of Talking Dog about Don Estelle – how this short, fat, unassuming guy with a funny talking voice has this lovely clear tenor singing voice. But once I got past that, I think this is a pretty nice version of a pretty nice song, despite Windsor’s input.

Michael Bates pretty much got away with it, by being part Indian and by speaking Hindi, and because there just weren’t any prominent Indian actors around to play the role. And, to be fair, IAAHM did actually deal with the relationship between the servants and the army. Ranji Ram’s “We British . . .” routine was pretty funny, I think.

Pete

23 March 2008 11:05

My memories of IAAOM (surely ‘Alf ‘Ot?) through the five year old filter was that the Indian characters were treated very well, but the bullying and casual racism of Windsor Davies’s character places this in a historical bubble much like mid-seventies Alf Garnett and Love Thy Neighbour (ie the racists always get shown up, but the very situation that is supposed to bring up the comedy now looks parochial and naive). Rangi Ram was the most Bilko-esque of the characters after all. Thinking about it the casual homophobia possibly makes it harder to show now, it was somewhat liveral in its use of the word poof. I know I always used to get IAAOT mixed up with M*A*S*H via the Klinger / Gloria nexus I daresay.

Don Estelle became the classic star in reduced circumstances. I saw him hoofing in a pith helmet, and flogging tapes of him singing in Wandsworth Arndale Centre in the mid-eighties (as did Danny Baker and many correspondents of his show). Unlike Windsor who went on to star in sitcoms with Donald Sinden. Hmm, I’m not sure which one is the reduced circumstance there.

Marcello Carlin

23 March 2008 11:28

Quite (cue a decade’s worth of Spitting Image gags about when Donald’s getting his knighthood)…

In Oxford the unfortunate Mr Estelle was also a regular visitor with his tabletop of homemade tapes of a Saturday – usually in the Westgate shopping centre but sometimes in the Clarendon. However, the last notable thing he did before he died was to cameo in The League Of Gentlemen so I suppose that was a happy ending of sorts.

Windsor Davies also appeared in the film Carry On England, as that series entered its terminal decline – in his Diaries, Kenneth Williams commented at the time on Davies’ “encyclopaedic knowledge of the Bible.”

In his amazing biography of Peter Sellers, Roger Lewis nails the bend in the river – where Sellers the brilliant, down-to-earth actor turns into Sellers the hollow, out-to-lunch international star – at the point when an Indian gentleman came up to Sellers in the street just after The Millionairess had come out and told him in all seriousness that he was capable of leading India into a new dawn. And Sellers believed him.

Marcello Carlin

23 March 2008 11:32

oh and Mark: yes you’re quite right – I was thinking about A Passage To India but IIRC his Mr Todd in Handful did have a hint of dusk about him.

Billy Smart

23 March 2008 12:40

This has been a perhaps surprisingly generous commentary. Like most people, I’d prefer this if it didn’t have the spoken word bit, which transforms it from being a cover version into a TV tie-in.

Davies and Estelle weren’t technically one hit wonders, the follow-up version of Paper Doll stalling at number 41.

The interesting point of comparison with IAHHM is Peter Nichols ‘Privates on Parade’, also about a concert party in Burma, but rather more scabrous and political in intent. Here the songs are very effective parodies, rather than originals. It’s best not experienced through the film, though, which is marred by the unfortunate miscasting of John Cleese.

Keith W

23 March 2008 16:47

Don Estelle also appeared on an episode of Linda Smith’s A Brief History of Timewasting. He proved once again that he wasn’t much of an actor, but I think the conceit (that he was “Don” Estelle, underworld boss) was pretty funny.

Alan

23 March 2008 17:13

“it was somewhat liberal in its use of the word poof”

ISTR that it was mouthed in the credits in every episode. but i think that the gay-bashing comes over about as maliciously as the racism – i.e. barely. i’d be surprised if many gay men were offended by it – indeed those i know really like this level of dated humour about the gays. more so than the reclaiming of mr humphries/eys (sp?)

tim davidge

23 March 2008 18:47

re: Billy Smart’s comment (#15) I’ve dug out my copy of the Ink Spots’ version of this and played it. Main differences:

– no spoken intro
– guitar in the arrangement in addition to the piano
– “Mmm…mmm…mmm!” (cf. Oliver Hardy bit) added at the end of the baritone’s spoken bit in the middle (which was reproduced in the Davies/Estelle version) instead of “I will not ‘ave gossip in this jungle!”

er, that’s it. The whole thing was done pretty faithfully.

Before anyone points it out, yes I did mis-spell Windsor Davies’ name (comment #8); it is Davies and not Davis. Those “David” names!

Mark G

24 March 2008 03:57

Surely it was credited to “Windsor Davies and Don Estelle”, not “Est’elle”, who’s at number one right now as I type!

crag

24 March 2008 11:02

crag

24 March 2008 11:02

Despite a very foggy memory of the tv show it spun off from I’m rather fond of this one- a beautiful melody performed very well. Though the spoken word parts are somewhat jarring to our modern ears, at this distance are they really any more so than the same narratives on the original Inkspots recordings w/ their heavily exaggerated stereotypically ‘negro’ monologues (“Why, Honey-Child!)?
2 other Inkspots influenced tunes by charttoppers past and future – “You and Whose Army” by Radiohead and, less seriously, “You’ll Be Mine” by the Beatles, complete w/ another ridiculous spoken word part- “National Health eyeball” indeed!
Btw we seem to have jumped back 4 years. The entry states 1971. Oops…

Steve Mannion

24 March 2008 15:39

re ‘Est’elle’, now Windsor Davies ft. Kanye West is a collaboration that intrigues…

Caledonianne

24 March 2008 18:10

I could take or leave IAHHM, though I used to chuckle at Gloria (and, like Pete, found that ‘she’ sort of morphed into Klinger in my mind). I think I liked it better in the early days when George Layton was still in it. Certainly, echoing Marcello, as an adolescent I preferred it to Dad’s Army, the genius of which only dawned on me when I was in my 30s.

The point about Empire is well made. My mother’s very ordinary family was immersed in Empire (via Rolls Royce, rather than imperial civil or military service), with my mother and one brother born in the Federated Malay States, another brother in India, and a sister in Vancouver.

Between that and my father’s father having spent World War 1 in Basra (fighting the Turrrrrrks), it’s hard to escape the conclusion that my grandparents on both sides had rather more in the way of adventure than my generation (getting on a plane at Heathrow and getting off 16 hours later in KL as I did when I went to Seremban and Penang, hardly compares with Grandma’s voyage of discovery) – even if I did develop chickenpox in Sarawak and end up hospitalised in Singapore.

A couple of year after this topped the charts I was Pritt-sticking a photograph of the grandfather I never knew, resplendent in pith helmet, to the front page of my Certificate of Sixth Year Studies dissertation on ‘the colonial man in the works of W Somerset Maugham and George Orwell’, and because of Gunner Sugden’s solar topi, I’ve always had a soft spot for the song. Somewhat disingenuously in the circumstances, I’d like it more without the in-character interpolations.

I also encountered Don Estelle in one of his shopping centre pitch-ups, though whether it was in Oxford, Glasgow or somewhere else I was passing through I can’t now remember. I knew there was a sister album to the single, but only realised quite how well it had done from Estelle’s Telegraph obituary,

“They also recorded an album, Sing Lofty, which has sold more than 300,000 copies and is one of EMI’s top 20 selling regular albums”

rosie

25 March 2008 08:58

Apropos leading sitcoms of 1975: wasn’t this the age of Porridge? Surely one of the greatest of all sitcoms. For me it knocks Fawlty Towers into the proverbial cocked hat. Ronnie Barker’s exquisite sense of timing let the jokes breathe, and that’s what made it special.

The best of Dad’s Army was firmly behind us in 1975. I suppose DA was a bit special in my family, because my own dad – in a reserved occupation as a shipyard draughtsman – was a Home Guarder, and able to testify to how chillingly accurate the basic set up was. He liked to tell of tales of how on an overnight exercise he was posted on the far end of Walney and spent the night watching Liverpool burn on the horizon, and then found that they forgot about him and didn’t collect him in the morning. I guess you have to know the geography of Walney to see the funny side.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 09:09

Maximum respect to Porridge indeed – and RIP Brian Wilde, who played Barraclough and passed on last week aged eighty. A total masterclass in comedy acting and timing from all involved.

Was Open All Hours going in ’75 or did that start a little later? The genius of Barker of course is that you could watch Norman Stanley Fletcher and Arkwright without once thinking it was the same actor. What a man.

Billy Smart

25 March 2008 09:25

The Open All Hours pilot was transmitted in 1973, but the first series wasn’t aired until 1976. For more glorious Ronnie Barker versatility, I’d recommend seeing last night’s BBC4 40th anniversary programme and repeat of The Frost Report while its still up on the BBC iPlayer.

Mark G

25 March 2008 10:44

The grand final of Mastermind had one of the contestants’ specialist subjects as “It aint ‘alf ‘ot mum”

I got exactly zero.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 11:31

So do the BBC, frankly.

Assiduous Googling reveals that the following sitcoms also began in 1975:

The Cuckoo Waltz – Diane Keen and Lewis Collins.
Two’s Company – Elaine Stritch and Donald Sinden.
Down The ‘Gate – Reg Varney plays a Billingsgate fish porter and no I don’t remember it either.

Mark G

25 March 2008 11:50

I do.. (well, one scene anyway)

Reg was trying to prove to bloke A that people are suspicious of being given something for nothing, as he’d read about a story about a man who tried to give out tenners on the street but no-one would take them.

So, he went up to bloke B and said “Hey, here’s a tenner” to which bloke B said “Oh, thanks very much” and put it into his pocket.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 12:16

Which reminds me – Reg Varney was the first man to take money out of an ATM in Britain. Barclays, Enfield branch, 1967, and he withdrew a fiver.

mark sinker

25 March 2008 12:19

that was nearly ten millon pounds in old money!

rosie

25 March 2008 12:24

You could live in reasonable comfort for a fiver a week in 1967…

I meant to say something about the Perry/Croft sitcom I really can’t stand, made me wince then and makes me cringe today. Are You Being Served. The worst thing about it being that, like Benny Hill, it was popular in Leftpondia and a disturbing number of Americans, especially inland, think we Brits are really like that.

I’m also trying to think of anything with Reg Varney in it that ever made me laugh, and I haven’t succeeded yet.

Lena

25 March 2008 12:31

Can you get fivers from ATMs now?

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 12:32

In actual fact Are You Being Served? was written by David Croft and Jeremy “Captain Beaky” Lloyd; I think the next Perry/Croft sitcom was probably Hi De Hi (i.e. post-war Butlins being the next logical autobiographical step from wartime concert party). John Inman had a small Top 40 hit with a vocal version of the theme tune (“Are You Being Served, Sir?”) in late ’75.

In the late eighties/early nineties I remember the BBC rerunning the pilot of ABYS? in black and white. It was entirely free of camp and in many places was pretty grim drama, almost like one of those BS Johnson Agitprop films.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 12:33

There was another Croft/Lloyd sitcom slightly later in the seventies which featured Mollie Sugden in a spaceship. I admit that I may have hallucinated it but if anyone else recalls it etc.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 12:35

There are a couple of ATMs in odd bits of London which still give out fivers but mostly it’s tens and twenties now (and the tens are getting increasingly scarce).

rosie

25 March 2008 12:39

Come Back Mrs Noah. Which I don’t remember being broadcast and know of it only because it figured in the legendary Open University module U203 – Popular Culture, in the segment on sitcoms. It looked pretty dire.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 12:43

Thanks Rosie!

I always get it mixed up with the cartoon series Noah and Nelly in Skylark which was Bob Godfrey’s similarly unsuccessful follow-up to Roobarb.

rosie

25 March 2008 12:46

I liked Noah and Nelly, and Roobarb and Custard, and Crystal Tipps and Alistair. And that was as a grown-up! (allegedly)I remember them with fondness -in what way were they unsuccessful?

mark sinker

25 March 2008 12:46

haha we were talkin abt “come back mrs noah” on sunday! they shd have gone w.the original pilot title which even i, lord of the mothed marches, DARE NOT WRITE ON THE INTERNET

mark sinker

25 March 2008 12:48

(actually if russell t.davies wasn’t wasting his energies and talents on the “not at all ironic” last of the summer wine remake, i think a “mrs noah” revamp wd be right up his street)

LondonLee

25 March 2008 13:11

They still show “Are You Being Served?” on PBS in the States, along with “Keeping Up Appearances”

Lovely record anyway, not just for Estelle’s singing but there’s something about Windsor Davies’ “lovely boy” voice too, it’s the sound of the British Empire. I don’t think military men talk like that anymore.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 13:11

Re. “not at all ironic” Last Of The Summer Wine remake, I think Mark and I ought to be on a percentage if they’re casting New Order as we suggested several zillion ILx years ago.

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 13:14

Even from beyond the grave, Tony Wilson still insists that the Hacienda must be rebuilt:

http://www.summer-wine.com/summer-wine/images/smiler.jpg

Rob M

25 March 2008 15:44

Around the time this was number one, I saw the live theatre show of IAHHM in Leeds Grand Theatre (or it might have been the Playhouse), with the original cast, and they had a spot when Don and Windsor did their big hit single. Memories are vague – I was only six or so – but it definitely brought the house down.

Mark G

25 March 2008 15:50

I went and saw this when I was about 20, and I can only vaguely remember going!

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 15:56

I remember in the late eighties they were offering comps round our hospital for ‘Allo ‘Allo live at the London Palladium.

Moral: comp theatre tickets are given out for a reason (see also Hunting Of The Snark at around the same time which is the WORST MUSICAL EVER).

Mark G

25 March 2008 16:26

Captain Sensible doing “Snookering you tonight” wasn’t clue enough?

Marcello Carlin

25 March 2008 16:47

In the show Kenny Everett did that song.

Also the tackiest opening to any musical ever where each of the cast sits in their own box and their name is superimposed on the box TV credits-style.

Dan R

25 March 2008 19:01

From memory, Come Back Mrs Noah was made as a series after a short season of televised sitcom pilots was broadcast and it was judged the best. I don’t know how the decision was made but the idea that the winner would be Mollie Sugden playing a middle-aged woman who accidentally gets locked into a spaceship leading her to a series of hilarious outer space adventures gives one pause to reflect gravely on what the standard of the other pilots must have been.

wpDiscuz

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WINDSOR DAVIES AND DON ESTELLE – "Whispering Grass"

TAMMY WYNETTE – "Stand By Your Man"

10cc – "I'm Not In Love"

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