CLIFF RICHARD AND THE YOUNG ONES ft HANK MARVIN – "Living Doll"

If the alternative comedy movement was supposed to be the equivalent of punk, then there seem to have been an awful lot of Boomtown Rats and precious few Pistols. Aside from the early stand-up work of Alexei Sayle and Ben Elton (listen to the latter’s splenetic, fearless 1987 live album Motormouth to demonstrate just how close he came to being a British Bill Hicks, mullet and sparkling suit notwithstanding) – both of whom have long since abandoned any outward traces of radicalism – the reaction seems to have been purely aesthetic; a sweeping away of porcine, frilly-shirted, middle-aged chaps telling stock gags about mothers in law, women, blacks and gays. Certainly in the seventies of Richard Pryor and Steve Martin it is scarcely credible that Britain still flew its flag with Bernard Manning and Little and Large.

The differential between alternative comedy and its Goons and Python antecedents, however, was that it ended up being about the spectacle only. The Young Ones was essentially broad slapstick, a tradition which in Britain goes back to Dan Leno and beyond, and whose obvious immediate precedent was The Goodies; young(ish), dissatisfied misfits trapped in a room together capable only of defiantly anti-meaning capers, though the traditional family sitcom template was present and correct, if heavily disguised; dad (boring straight man Mike), mum (hippy Neil) and problem kids (failing anarchist Rik and six-years-after-the-event punk Vyvyan). It was attractive to those easily satisfied by loud noises and primary-coloured bangs alone. Yet both the Goons and Python contained a deeper subtext; the seemingly random, spectacular FX in The Goon Show were a direct reference to the war through which all three main players had suffered as combatants and a howl against the slow stolidity of the abject British fifties. Similarly Python played a very shrewd, simultaneous game of derailing and deconstructing the meaning and purpose of sketches and continuity while subtly demanding the viewer: “don’t just sit there and take it.”

But comedy, by definition, has to have a target; consensus comedy is practically an oxymoron. And with Comic Relief we come to the same paradox which crippled pop after Band Aid; to use comedy for meaningful purpose and yet still remain comedic. With the numerous Secret Policeman’s Balls for Amnesty International, the Pythons, the Not The Nine O’Clock News team, Peter Cook and others had no trouble with this – but then Amnesty International is by its own definition a cause which demands confrontation. What is to be done about Comic Relief, a charity set up actively to aid child poverty, not only in Africa but also domestically? It has very noticeably retained an apolitical stance, perhaps fittingly so since by existing it relieves Governments of the burden of carrying out actions which should be basic actions to be carried out by any Government worth having.

Few of the Comic Relief fundraising records are of much aesthetic value, but the remake of “Living Doll” is particularly depressing. With, say, the Goons’ 1955 demolition of “Unchained Melody,” we manage to get both anarchy and poignancy in that it is simultaneously a hilarious debunking of a hallowed song but also an affecting portrait of what are essentially a couple of ageing buskers, marooned somewhere in a pre-Hoxtonite Shoreditch High Street, trying to keep in touch and keep the pennies coming in to warm their cryogenically freezing toes. But with “Living Doll” we simply get a rather listless reading of an already unpleasant song (“gonna lock her up in a trunk” etc.) by an audibly disinterested Cliff while the Young Ones cast shout noisily and unfunnily around him and go through dull vaudeville routines (“which instruments do you want us to break?”). In the show Cliff is set up as Rik’s unlikely idol, and this species of horseplay also helped set the scene for the Guilty Pleasures nightmare; as if anyone who didn’t truly love pop didn’t instinctively know that “Devil Woman” is a great record. From this distance the whole phenomenon seems like an abstract of sound and fury, signifying surrender.

I have to admit the appeal of The Young Ones pretty much passed me by and I found this merely tedious. Brownie points to Cliff for being a good sport but as Tom says it wasn’t built to last.

although I find it hard to actively hate intensely – except for being the template for a series of fading copies (see♯2) – it’s the musical equivalent of a Friday late night dodgy kebab – appealing at the time, yet regrettable in retrospect

I was just the right age for The Young Ones (20 and thinking I was a rebel) and ate it up at the time, it wasn’t just the noisy slapstick but they had great bands on the show too. It did seem all very “punk” at the time but it hasn’t aged well and now seems merely juvenile (though some of Rik’s lines like “Pop music! Let’s go!” still make me chuckle). After living abroad for several years I was shocked on one trip home to find Ben Elton with Ronnie Corbett as a regular guest on his show. Hang on Ben, weren’t your lot supposed to wipe out people like Ronnie?

The record? I hate to think that I ever found that funny, I was 4 years older by then and far more sophisticated don’t you know.

sadly – and in a spooky instance of synchronicity – tonight I was told I was dressed like Rik from TYOs.

perhaps, time to rethink my wardrobe

Mike: If we want this record to make number one, we’ve gotta rig the charts … There hasn’t been a genuine number one since the Beatles split up.
Neil: Oh, wow – have the Beatles split up?

In my first Popular comments I noted that I wasn’t a big pop music buyer or listener before the age of fifteen, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening to music. Apart from the usual parental, peer and sibling influences, I was exposed to masses of it on television – in particular, the collected works of Bill Oddie, repeated on a six-monthly cycle throughout my childhood. The Goodies, along with Doctor Who, were the backbone of many young Aussies’ TV viewing in the ’70s and early ’80s, thanks to the ABC showing them back-to-back from 6.00 to 7.00 each evening. I know most of Oddie’s songs better than the number ones of the time.

The Goodies were also an effective gateway to their influences and peers: to the Goons, repeated endlessly on Radio National every Saturday lunchtime, and eventually, around the time I started buying pop records, to Monty Python, through the medium of the LP. (They were long gone from the box, and this was a good five years before the series were released on VHS.) And then there was Dad’s old Songs for Swingin’ Sellers LP, still the gold standard of comedy albums in my book, which even has some relevance here (as in here at Popular, and this here single), with one sketch taking off the British rockers of the late ’50s and another that no fan of Lonnie Donegan should miss.

Then in my mid-teens, just as I was discovering the joys of Another Monty Python Record, along came these guys, screened somewhat belatedly on the ABC but an instant hit with me and my friends. The Young Ones felt like they were ours: our Goodies, our Python and our Goons all rolled into one. I was mad for them, flawed production values and all, and consumed anything to do with the show that I could. In a mid-80s VCR-less household, this meant: watching the show when it was screened on actual television; buying the Bachelor Boys book as soon as it came out; buying “Hole in My Shoe” on 7″; listening obsessively to a tape of Neil’s Heavy Concept Album (another of my landmark comedy albums – among other things, its lounge cover of the Sex Pistols anticipated the brief career of the Mike Flowers Pops); buying a prized copy of Neil’s Book of the Dead at Foyle’s on my visit to London; and, a few months after getting home, buying this on glorious 12″ vinyl.

Neil: So here we are in the middle of the twelve-inch. Just the same as a seven-inch, really, except you get five inches of nothing in the middle.
Mike: Oh, mind you, it does cost an extra quid.
Rick: Yeah, that’s a point. So listen, listeners, we got a quid off you for nothing.
Vyvyan: It’s still boring. I was looking forward to some raunchy guitar licks.
Rick: All right, matey, lick this raunchy guitar.
Vyvyan: All right, I will. [Zzzzztttt] Oh bum, I’ve electrocuted my tongue.
Rick: Brilliant! Stick him in a coffin before he realises he’s not dead.

It would be nearly twenty years before I saw the twelve episodes of The Young Ones again on DVD, and although they had of course dated, they still made me laugh. Intervening exposure to Bottom helped keep my inner-teenage-Mayall-and-Edmonson-fan alive, but it wouldn’t have if I still hadn’t found Mayall’s shameless mugging amusing. In Rick, Mayall created one of the great sitcom characters, one whose juvenile behaviour was precisely the point (“I hate old people!”) and whose try-hard anarchism was just the right degree of unsettling for any nascent lefty viewer.

Rick, of course, was most memorable for his particular musical obsession, one that you could only assume must be leaving the target squirming – so it was a source of great delight to see the target go along with the gag. Cliff immediately became a Good Sport in the eyes of the teenage Aussie Young Ones fans who helped send this to number one for six weeks. “Devil Woman” and “Wired for Sound” were all well and good, but taking the piss out of yourself was true class. And there can’t be many piss-taking moments on record as delicious as the transition from Rick’s hysterical build-up for “the total and utter king of rock ‘n’ roll, CLIFF RICHARD!” to “Got myself a cryin’, talkin’, sleepin’, walkin’, livin’ doll”. The record was worth it just for that.

The song itself was pants, of course, and not worth returning to more than once every twenty years, but I’m still finding plenty to laugh at now that I do – possibly because I’m listening to the twelve-inch version, which has lots of extra Young Ones banter to leaven the dulcet tones of Cliff, like the bits I’m quoting here. The comedy side of it doesn’t match up to the shows themselves, but I’d still rate it an affectionate 6; the music would be a 3 or 4. Logic would dictate averaging that to a five, but I didn’t buy this for the music – did anyone? – so I’m going to stick with 6.

The record has another place in my affections: that twelve-inch single was the very last I bought that helped send a song to number one. I’ve acquired other number ones since, but they were either bought after the event or as part of albums rather than as chart singles – another reason this doll is locked in my trunk of special Popular memories. As for Cliff’s trunk, I don’t want to know what kinds of dolls he keeps there.

Rick: Oh, ha ha ha, Vyvyan, how very clever, I’m sure. Oh yes, let’s end this wonderful project on a silly little meaningless innuendo.
Vyvyan: All right.

The original 1959 version of this charted at #30 in the U.S. Needless to say, this version never charted. And until now I’ve never heard this, but then I don’t remember the show airing in America. Maybe someone can tell us if the show was on in the U.S. in the 80’s.

My new year’s resolution to plough through every ’00s no.1 before Xmas has led me to conclude that Comic Relief is much more of a soul enema than X Factor/Pop Idol.

This is where the fun began? As a one-off it would have worked pretty well, scripted and “actually funny” in places. But by the time you had Bananarama claiming French & Saunders had nixed all their best lines and ruined their cover of Help! you were jealous of American charts that are sloooow enough to keep seasonal/novelty hits at bay.

Rory, lovely post on the Goodies. Last night I was reminded by someone in the same boat that my first brush with Wild Thing was on the Goodies, as sung by Graeme Garden, and I assumed it was a self-penned novelty song. The Troggs (though still a novelty of sorts) took a while to win me over, via K-Tel’s Goofy Greats.

Errr… Lenny Henry? Has he ever been “actually funny”? Or just an irksome Lord Smuggington, who thought Rockit was edgy in ’86?

Re: 2 Aha! One of the rare posts where I’m confident that I know as much about the topic as Punctum does. For me the definitive view of the ‘Alternative Comedy’ movement came from Jerry Sadowitz: “In 1979 Keith Allen, Tony Allen and Alexei Sayle opened the door to a whole new way of thinking about comedy. And in 1981, Ben Elton closed it.” Documentation of the very early years of possibility is scant, but I’d recommend reading Roger Wilmut’s ‘Didn’t You Kill My Mother-In-Law’ and William Cook’s Comedy Store book, for an idea of what it achieved and why it couldn’t last.

As far as records go, the Comic Strip album is interesting in having a record of what Keith Allen’s stand-up was like, and the Alexei Sayle material both here and on the ‘Cak’ LP is still genuinely really funny. The other Lp to look out for is by the ‘Alternative Cabaret’ group, the more radical wing of contrarians from about 1981; Tony Allen, Jim Barclay, Andy De La Tour and Pauline Melville. Heard almost three decades on only Melvile is amusing, in part because she’s adopting a character, but the Jim Barclay routine is interesting in understanding what these people were attempting to achieve.

As for ‘Living Doll’, the absence of Alexei Sayle by this point is crucial. Even to a comedy-besotted 13 year-old boy the transplantation of The Young Ones to a seven inch single was a bit thin.

‘Hole In My Shoe’ still stands up really well, though – A lot more care and thought seemed to go into that. And Alexei Sayle’s ‘Ullo John Got A New Motor’ is (especially on the 12″) a really rather astonishing single – and one of the most exciting Top Of The Pops appearances of the time, too.

Those other eighties Alexei Sayle non-hits in full;

Alexei’s Midnight Runners – Pop Up Toasters
Albania 1982 World Cup Squad – Albania! Albania! (“Not nearly as repressive as Romania)
Alexei Sayle – Didn’t You Kill My Brother?
Alexei Sayle – Meanwhile

I remember that broadcast of ‘The Comedians’ very well. Jonathan Pryce’s stage act in it made Alexi Sayle look like Ronnie Corbett. Also memorable for cuddly old Bill Fraser screaming about how he got an erection at Auschwitz.

And lo! I present to you the BBC Audience Research for that 1979 Play For Today;

AN AUDIENCE RESEARCH REPORT
(WEEK 43)
PLAY FOR TODAY: COMEDIANS
By Trevor Griffiths
Directed by Richard Eyre
Thursday, 25th October, 1979. 10.05-11.35pm, BBC-1

Size of audience (based on results of the Survey of Listening and Viewing).

It is estimated that the audience for this broadcast was 2.6% (1.4 million viewers) of the United Kingdom population. Programmes on BBC-2 and ITV at the time were seen by 8.5% (averaged over Circuit Eleven Miami and International Snooker), and 13.1% (averaged over various programmes).

Reaction of audience (based on 66 questionnaires completed by 4% of the Viewing Panel).

The reactions of this sample of the audience were distributed as follows:-
A+ A B C C-
% % % % %
13 23 34 14 16
giving a Reaction Index of 51. The current average for the Play for Today productions this year is 61, with indices ranging from 33 (The Last Window Cleaner by Ron Hutchinson, Week 7) to 79 (the Spongers, by Jim Allen, Week 36).

This play, which centred around an evening class for aspiring comedians, evoked a reasonably strong response from the sample audience. One third of those reporting found the production totally unappealing (‘absolute rubbish’, ‘if this is modern theatre then let it expire’). They disliked the constant coarseness of the dialogue and could see little point in the play as a whole. A typical comment was: ‘unworthy of the BBC’. Others who were less vociferous thought the basic idea sound, but felt the storyline somewhat shallow, failing to clearly bring out the author’s message. Nevertheless, a substantial minority were enthusiastic. These viewers considered the play a thought-provoking and ‘powerful’ drama which dealt with an unusual angle of comedy, making for compelling viewing. They considered that as well as showing the hard slog behind comedy, the exceptionally good script also successfully highlighted the prevalence of ‘cheap laugh gags’ as opposed to ‘truthful comment’ as a release of tension in society. In fact one respondent remarked: ‘It’s a long time since a TV play impressed me so much’.

For the majority of reporting viewers, though, the play was disappointing. When asked why they watched the broadcast most respondents replies ranged over: ‘I thought it would be funny’, ‘I like plays on TV as a rule’, and ‘the publicity generated interest’ (only a few said ‘there was nothing better to watch’), but apart from the minority who enjoyed the play, the audience’s expectations were largely unsatisfied.

Only a small section of the sample audience found the play totally inoffensive (17%). These viewers thought the racist and sexist jokes, together with the bad language, completely relevant ant justified within the context of the play’s message. For the remainder of those reporting the dialogue was in bad taste to some degree. One third felt very strongly about ‘the constant barrage of barrack-room language’. They considered that the ‘singularly uncouth speech throughout the play’ was unnecessary and not germane to the plot. This factor led several to switch off before the end. The largest section of the sample audience (49%) were less vocal in their criticisms. A few said that the ‘constant stream of bad language’ became boring rather than shocking while others admitted that they had found the dialogue slightly offensive even though they realized it formed an integral part of the play.

Although some respondents allowed their adverse views on the play to colour their opinions, the acting was generally considered to be convincing and of a reasonably high standard. A few viewers were extremely enthusiastic, remarking that the whole cast had been superb – particularly Jonathan Pryce and Bill Fraser, both of whom were felt to have given ‘outstandingly sensitive performances’. Nevertheless, there was a fairly wide-spread feeling that the cast were deserving of better material.

The production on the whole was well received, though there was little spontaneous comment on this aspect of the play. Viewers who were well disposed towards the work commended the realistic sets and felt the atmosphere of the school-room and nightclub had been excellently captured. Others, however considered all aspects of the play unappealing and were unable to single out any redeeming feature.”

“Henry, we’ve been relegated to the graveyard shift.”
“We’re falling to bits, Min!”

Mark, you wrote at some length about The Comedians in an ILX post in your ‘teach Mark S a lesson’ series – mine was the alleged lesson, the subject being Louis Prima.

A rather generous history of Comic Relief singles, from this great site;

http://www.offthetelly.co.uk/?page_id=431

Death, you utter, utter, utter bastard.

Watching this again on TOTP it occurs to me that I never did ‘get’ the elephant joke – anyone care to enlighten me? Was there one in the original film? It can’t be the ‘gonna lock her up in a trunk’ line, surely – though I suppose that’s no less achievable than sticking a deckchair up your nose.

This was a playground favourite for six year-old me, for obvious reasons (any mention of toilets at that age is unquestionably hilarious). I remember getting v excited at an early school disco when the DJ put this on, except the daft old coot was playing the original which had NO TOILET REFERENCES WHATSOEVER.

The Young Ones is patchy but has its genius moments. The bit in the University Challenge episode where someone has added a ‘P’ in front of Rick’s name has me giggling like an idiot every time.