Wednesday 15 February 2023

Celebrity Jukebox #70: Roy Walker


I still haven't had time to get to Burt, but with everyone dying lately, I started to wonder if I should still feature living celebrities in this series. I started to feel bad for them, being lumped in with all the RIPs. What do you think? Should the jukebox be posthumous only? 

While I await the decision of the jury, here's one I prepared earlier...


Roy Walker was the soft spoken Irish comedian who made it big as the host of ITV's nonsensical quiz show, Catchphrase. The object of the game was to watch a slowly revealed image created by primitive computer graphics and try to "say what you see", thus identifying the "catchphrase". Which often wasn't actually a catchphrase, but more a random collection of words you'd rarely heard used together. Well, it did run for almost 15 years, so I guess they soon ran out of actual catchphrases. You could say it was a precursor to Saturday Snapshots, except the clues were slightly better.

You wouldn't expect Roy Walker to feature in many pop songs, but you might be surprised. I was particularly pleased to discover this little gem from rapping young person Lejitt...

Improving my work ethic you should take some notes, chump
If the homies do some dumb shit, do you go jump?
Roy Walker with the way that I catch phrase
Never truant to the rap game like the past name


Meanwhile, from Manchester, here's a band that have listened to quite a lot of early Pulp albums...


And how about a bit of "authentic indie guitar music from the Scottish borders"? Extra points for also getting Lionel Blair into the lyrics...


However, they're not what brought me to Roy. Instead, here's a track from my favourite Belle & Sebastian album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress. I'm not sure why they named it after the Catchphrase King, other than the guy in the song is walking around quite a lot. Say what you see...



4 comments:

  1. Should the jukebox be posthumous only? Alive, Dead, Half Living - as long as there are some good tracks featuring the chosen name, post away.
    The irony is of course if Roy Walker now croaks, your blog will either be considered as a weapon of destruction, or you're back to RIPs only

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  2. When he said: "say what you see", no-one ever said "smug Irish tw*t" did they

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  3. Heck I thought he was already dead. It gets confusing as the obits are coming at us so fast.

    As this feature is really about the namechecking of celebs in lyrics I don't think they have to always be posthumous - unlikely someone very young will have had time to enter into many songwriters' canon of work though. You could of course prove me wrong.

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  4. Catching on old posts. Roy Walker once bought my Gran a Gin and Tonic at a holiday park in Essex. Awc.

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