SPITTING IMAGE – "The Chicken Song"

I hate, hate , hate this song – ‘a black hole of disdain’ succinctly sums up why

Fascinating stuff, another I’d never heard before.

The double irony of a song meant to mock the charts topping the chart makes me wonder who’s playing a joke on whom. Is it Spitting Image, fooling the public into mocking themselves and laughing all the way to the bank? Is it the public, repurposing a joke at their expense and subverting it by taking it literally?

Or is it 1986, laughing at the attempts of amateur cultural analysts in 2009 to make sense of it all?

OK, listening back to it for the first time since I was 4 now.

Oh dear.

Whilst I loved the TV show I never saw the point of this record. Black Lace never took themselves remotely seriously and in any case Agadoo was now TWO WHOLE YEARS OLD. Dire Straits or Five Star were far more deserving satirical targets in May 1986.

Though not directly aligned with the alternative comedy movement, the Central TV puppet show Spitting Image could be said to have shamed most of it from the point of view of political polemic; yet, as with TW3 a generation previously, the programme eventually demonstrated how any protest, if sufficiently popular, can be assimilated and nullified by any Establishment. The voice characterisations for the likes of skinhead biker Norman Tebbit, besuited cold rationalist Thatcher and the ventriloquist act of Davids Owen and Steel, were provided by the youthful likes of Rory Bremner, Harry Enfield, Paul Whitehouse and Steve Coogan. The caricatures and schematas were frighteningly spot on (and continued to be such into the nineties, with John Major literally The Grey Man), and few who witnessed it are likely to forget the 1987 election special which ended with the Thatcher puppet, hissing spite and sputum at the camera below, chillingly singing “Tomorrow Belongs To Me”; it remains one of the most terrifying things I have ever seen on television, and only slightly less terrifying than the resigned horror that the majority of British people were about to want it for the third time.

The downside of this type of satire, as always, lay in the easier targets the show found to pillory, particuarly in the light entertainment arena. “The Chicken Song” was written as a parody of the group Black Lace, erstwhile underperforming Eurovision entrants (“Mary-Ann”, 1979), who subsequently specialised in cheesy snare-the-tourists-at-the-airport Eurotack dance routine knees-ups, the most successful of which were “Superman (Gioca Jouer)” (#9, 1983) and the dreaded “Agadoo,” which stopped just short of becoming 1984’s eighth million-selling single and was kept off number one only by “Careless Whisper.”

However, Black Lace were perhaps too easy a target for a series which had set its main targets so high, and as with the continued jibes at punk rock in David Nobbs’ Perrin novels – but didn’t the writer realise that Reggie Perrin WAS punk? – there is a slight air of condescension in “The Chicken Song,” which adopts the standard Black Lace template and then becomes the Club 18-30 equivalent of “Imagine” in its dance instructions; starting off with “Hold a chicken in the air/Stick a deckchair up your nose,” it then progresses through ever unlikelier steps (“Form a string quartet,” “Learn to speak Arapahoe”) before culminating in the bloodied cheer of “Casserole your gran/Disembowel yourself with spears,” all delivered as a jaunty singalong. But its irony, almost inevitably, worked against it; despite its inbuilt warning of “Though you hate this song/You’ll be humming it for weeks,” that is exactly what its public did, sending it speedily to number one and clapping along to it on the dancefloor in complete ignorance of what the song was saying.

The other half of the “double B-side,” namely “(I’ve Never Met A) Nice South African” – and both were listed on the charts at the time – unsurprisingly received little airplay; another list song in the Lance Percival topical calypso/”I’ve Been Everywhere” mode (with more than a touch of Squeeze’s “Cool For Cats”) which again deliberately lurches toward the absurd (“I had lunch with Rowan Atkinson when he paid and wasn’t late,” “I’ve danced with ten-foot pygmies in a Montezuma ball”) until it gets to its payoff chorus of “But I’ve never met a nice South African…/’Cos we’re a bunch of arrogant bastards/Who hate black people.” It is unknown how many, if any, of the 800,000 people who bought the single gave this half any serious thought, or even listened to it; but bonus points to lyricist John Lloyd and colleagues for at least attempting a Trojan horse, and indeed making this the only chart-topping song to namecheck Breyten Breytenbach.

the lyrics were by the creators of Red Dwarf

In the words of Unlucky Alf: “Booger!”

re14 Picard and the Enterprise are the forces of blandness – viva la borg!

if the borg did line-dancing it would be AWESOME

noughties?

I have to say, though: as a Swede, the nonsensical humour appeals to me a great deal. Come on, “Behead an Eskimo”, that’s funny. Ha ha. Isn’t it?

I think there is a lot of the Police in the backing in I’ve Never Met A Nice South African, which I think a lot of people listened to a bit more than the a-side because, well the a-side grates quite quickly.

I had never even heard of “Agadoo” until now, and the same goes for “The Chicken Song”. Hence no unpleasant memories of being tormented by a song that (wittingly or unwittingly) became the very thing it set out to mock.

And while I’d say it isn’t very nice to sneer at people for their taste in musical entertainment, I’m also not saintly enough to be above a good sneer every now and then.

So – slightly funny the first and maybe the second time I heard it, but definitely not enjoyable as an actual song, only as cheap shot comedy.

SwedenWatch: No trace of it. To the best of my knowledge, Spitting Image never aired here – whether it was thought to be “too British”, too rude, or if it’s simply coincidence, I don’t know. Not the Nine O’Clock News was, for instance, shown on national TV and that seems British enough – so it’s anyone’s guess.

Seeing this title coming up, I’d assumed that someone had got to #1 with, say, a dance/silly costumes video to the old Chicken Dance polka (which often shows up in sloppy drunk settings in the US, and which did get some Pabst-swilling, hipster attention in the ’90s). Alas not. Next.

Number 2 watch: Three weeks of Patti LaBelle and Michael MacDonald’s ‘On My Own’. Certainly not to the taste of my 13 year-old self.

For some reason I have a 45 of Black Lace’s “I Speaka Da Lingo” which I assume I must have bought in a fit of studenty ironic japery. I think it made me laugh more than this did though, and I loved the TV show.

…or was it Michael Fenton Stevens? – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Fenton_Stevens

Spitting Image was always very ropey as I recall – I’d feel I’d seen a good episode if it had two good gags. More likely it would have an excellent opening skit followed by an entire show of filler.

I speak as a (pre) teenager though – I suspect the show pitched itself differently at different audiences and that others will have got more out of it. Even so, as a kid I felt caught between two versions of what it imagined its audience to be, so that the wordy stuff was usually too obvious and the puerile stuff just plain not funny. I was always happiest to note some minor gag going on off-centre, which at least speaks of attention to detail. Probably I was just oblivious to much of it – it seems like the kind of show that’d lend itself to the kind of public-school-type humour for which I would be no ready audience.

I’m amazed it aired at all outside the UK, to be honest. I’ve seen a French version of the idea and had not one clue what was going on, who the characters were, or even which bits were the jokes (and my French is pretty good, it’s a cultural reference problem). Even the British characters didn’t necessarily translate, at least to me – although, like the single, the show did accord a sort of cachet to those it sought to lampoon. I still would have little idea who John Selwyn Gummer was, for example, had I not frequently passed his house in Queen Anne’s Gate to see his puppet on display in his front window. At least I think that’s his house – it’s a bit try-hard, whoever it is.

The idea was revived with a fanfare about two years ago, with computer animation rather than puppets – which did seem to be missing the point rather. I presume that version sank without trace.

TOTPWatch. Spitting Image performed The Chicken Song on the Top Of The Pops of May 22 1986. I remember that as being a cumbersome appearance, featuring Ronald Reagan on drums.

Also in the studio that week were; Jaki Graham, Billy Ocean and Simply Red. Peter Powell was the host.

re37 that sounds like one of the dullest TOTP line-ups ever – with PP the tasteless icing on the cake.
That reminds me that for some reason he was championing an up and coming b(l)and (possibly called Rouen – but I may be wrong) and appeared at a gig they did at the University of London Institute of Education Student Union some time in 1986 – which in turn triggers memories of seeing Sonic Youth being photographed for the NME just outside the building on another day.

There was talk of the show returning to ITV a few years ago (strangely around the same time of satirical animation sketch show 2DTV) but this seems to have come to nothing. If it had I wonder how many of the original puppets could’ve been re-used.

It’s weird to think that it was actually still going right up until the arrival of Tony Blair (initially they portrayed him as a hyperactive schoolboy but only after he became the new Labour leader did they add the super wide smile iirc). Perhaps he was the one of the last puppets to have been made.

SI didn’t always hit their targets dead on, but as it became more news-driven and writers had to script on the hoof, it had a freshness of feel for a while at least.

Thatcher’s voice was by Steve Nallon (as was Major’s) and I think it’s that vocal caricature that endures in my mind more so than Janet Brown’s which was, at the time heralded as the definitive Thatcher Impersonation.
Nallon could absolutely turn soft tones (used particularly effectively when Thatcher was being patronising) into a harsh guttral roar (used when bollocking her cabinet) at the drop of a hat. Skinhead Tebbit in his biker jacket stroking a cosh was pretty much bang on as well.

#36 – Snooker Loopy, much more memorable than this one. the Edinburgh-Dundee train stops at Cupar, (and then) Leuchars before crossing the Tay. A friend can never hear the station announcement at edinburgh waverley without mentally triggering chas & dave

Funnily enough, I always think of Chas & Dave’s ‘Margate’ whenever I pass through Moorgate.

this was the second single i bought (i never much got the single-buying habit though and i’m pretty sure the next 7″ i bought after this was pavement’s “trigger cut”) and we all thought it was hilarious at the time. in retrospect it is unpleasantly sneery (the involvement of the loathsome r mcgrath would make absolute sense) but i’m pretty sure that nearly everyone buying it did get the joke, and unlike, say, frank zappa’s “satires” it does at least have the grace to be as good at the thing it is sneering at*.

i think the b side lasted a bit longer in our affections and i remember trying but failing to cause an outrage by playing it in the ‘bring in a song’ bit of a school music lesson. actually, we all had to note down and give a score to whatever was played each lesson in our music books – i’d love to see this now as a bit of cultural history. the other record i remember taking in was queen’s ‘stone cold crazy’. this received much awestruck praise for how fast freddie was singing iirc.

*(my views on zappa consist entirely of what i remember myself to have thought one night fifteen years ago when a z-loving mate played me some of his stuff, and so i admit they may be open to a degree of challenge)