Even more exclamations of exasperation and surprise... starting with the ones I mentioned briefly yesterday...
And then we might also shout...
But I think this one has most of the bases covered...
Showing posts with label Blancmange. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blancmange. Show all posts
Monday, 26 May 2025
Wednesday, 14 May 2025
Teacher Songs #3: Home Economics
I don't remember my Home Economics teacher at all. Not her name, nor what she looked like. Maybe this explains why I'm hopeless in the kitchen and can only just manage to sew a button onto my shirt after stabbing myself in the finger a few times.
I can remember most of the other teachers I had at school by either name or face, but there's just a blank when it comes to Home Economics lessons. I vaguely remember having to take ingredients in when we were doing cooking... maybe we made an egg salad one time? Something with pastry? The only thing I definitely remember making was a blancmange. And it was horrible. I've not eaten blancmange since. Does anybody still eat blancmange? When was the last time you had one?
I wish I had paid more attention in Home Economics. I wish I'd taken it past the second year. Nowadays, boys might be more likely to do so, but back in the Neolithic era, it was very much seen as a girl's subject and the other kids had more than enough ammunition when it came to targeting me, I wasn't going to give them an easy goal like that.
Because I don't remember the name of my Home Economics teacher, I guess we'll have to call her Mrs Fucking MacMurphy...
Monday, 28 April 2025
Emergency Questions Bonus Round: How Do You Brush Your Teeth?
This isn't one of Richard Herring's questions, but it follows on from Friday's post regarding brushing hair...
How do you brush your teeth?
Or, more specifically, what do you use to brush your teeth?
Smart Alecs will already be shouting "a toothbrush, duh!" at the screen... but what I mean is: do you use an electric toothbrush or an old-fashioned manual one?
For many years now, we've all used electric toothbrushes at Top Ten Towers. And indeed, every time I visit the dentist, she encourages me to do this.
However, have you noticed...? NOBODY on TV uses electric toothbrushes.
Couples brushing their teeth together or having a conversation while one of them is brushing their teeth is a TV director's shorthand to demonstrate domesticity. It happens all the time in TV shows. Yet nobody ever uses an electric toothbrush. Now clearly, there's an obvious reason for this - the noise of the toothbrush makes it harder to have a conversation / hear the dialogue. But this is one of the TV quirks that, once you've noticed it, you see it all the time.
Most recently it came up in an episode of the new John Hamm show Your Friends & Neighbours. Here are a bunch of rich Americans with perfect teeth, living lives of obscenely excessive wealth (which is why Hamm has started stealing from them all)... yet they still use bog standard bargain shop toothbrushes. This has become a bit of an obsession of mine lately, so please let me know if you ever see anyone on TV using an electric toothbrush.
All good tunes, but the main reason for this post was to give me a chance to play this...
Sunday, 28 April 2024
Saturday Snapshots #341: A Top Ten Abba Covers
When I asked if you knew who was pictured below, you resolutely replied, "I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do, I Do..."
But Does Your Mother Know the connection...?
10. Smashed up Z-Cars.
Anagram!
9. When a Snapshot maker's clue is particularly hard to decipher.
A camera makes snapshots. This one might be a bit obscure though...
Camera Obscura - Super Trouper
8. Half Boy, Half Pickett.
Danny Boy meets Wilson Pickett...
Danny Wilson – Knowing Me, Knowing You
7. Get some unanimous okra mixed into your green salad.
"Unanimous okra" was an anagram for the biggest selling female of all time (depending on which figures you look at).
Nana Mouskouri – I Have A Dream
6. Found in a shoe box.
A shoe box.
5. Bus, Bunch, Blood, Bees... all washed out.
Pale Honey - Lay All Your Love On Me
4. Obliteration.
3. Keeps Clapton's clothes clean while he's eating.
2. DOA Hipster comes apart.
"DOA Hipster" is an anagram...
1. White mites, white eat.
Blancmange - The Day Before You Came
Indisputably the best Abba cover version ever...
Here are a few I didn't have room for...
The Volebeats - Knowing Me, Knowing You
Information Society - Lay All Your Love On Me
Richard Thompson – Money, Money, Money
Take A Chance On more Snapshots next Saturday.
Friday, 9 February 2024
Memory Mixtape #27: Coffee Time
Did anybody actually drink coffee in the 70s and early 80s? Everyone I knew drank tea from an early age, but the only coffee you could get was that nasty freeze-dried stuff, and although there might have been a jar in the cupboard, I think it was only there for if we had a weird workman in.
By the time I reached my late teens, I was drinking a lot of tea. A large teapot full every night. And because I don't like milk, I was drinking it black and strong. Three bags.
I've written before about how I was invited in for coffee after my first date, and I didn't even like coffee, but coffee was all that was on offer. I'm covering old grounds here (you see what I did there?), but I ended that post by explaining that I finally ended up a coffee drinker when I started using the Klix vending machine to keep me awake on nightshift. There weren't a lot of great options from that machine. The tea was white only - at least you could get coffee black. Beyond that, there was a hot lemon drink that tasted like wallpaper stripper... and a sub-sub-Bovril effort that I once tried in desperation and can still taste how disgusting it was 30+ years later.
You date a girl and find out later
She smells like a percolator
Her perfume was made right on the grill
They've got an awful lot of coffee in Brazil
I don't know when I first tried a proper coffee, maybe as an after dinner treat in a restaurant, but it changed my life forever. Nowadays, there are more coffee shops in the UK than there are pubs, but back then there were hardly any. The interweb tells me that coffee shop culture was a big thing in the swinging '60s but died away when people discovered instant coffee in the 70s and 80s. This confirms something I've long suspected: the general public are idiots.
Various articles online suggest that the UK coffee shop resurgence happened in the 1990s as a result of young Brits watching the Friends characters hang out in Central Perk. It may seem hard to believe now, but the first UK Starbucks didn't open till 1998. I'm not particularly a fan of Starbucks - a bit too close in texture to the Klix Vending Machine Gravy - but I will drink it as a last resort. Unlike Neil Young...
My preferred chain, Caffè Nero, opened its first in that London in 1997, so I'm guessing they didn't get to the rest of the UK till well into the noughties. I remember when the Bradford branch opened; I was working radio advertising and it became a daily ritual to walk across Bradford in the afternoon for a proper Americano. By then, I was pretty much a coffee addict.
And the long black dream is over
As the snow falls on and on
And it takes five cups of coffee
To calm down before I sleep
That addiction only grew when I became a teacher, but all that caffeine clearly wasn't doing a lot to help with the anxiety caused by the pressure of working at The Bad Place.
Nowadays I'm mostly a two coffees a day man, and visits to coffee shops have become a luxury rather than a necessity... who can afford at nearly £4 a pop? That said, I always feel more relaxed in a coffee shop than I ever felt in a pub. Even when I was a drinker, I found pubs to be intimidating places. And not just because of the stress of getting served at a crowded bar. I know I'm in the minority here - most people find pubs to be welcoming places, but I never felt like I belonged... even when I was handing over a small fortune for a double Jack Daniels and Coke. (I dread to think how much my former beverage of choice costs these days... one more reason to be grateful for being tee-total.)
My dad became a coffee drinker later in life, and I wonder if my love of strong black coffee was in some way an attempt to emulate or connect with him? Although Sam's way too young to indulge, he spends a lot of time in coffee shops with me... in the same way I guess many parents might have taken their kids into family pubs when they were growing up, to acclimatise them to that culture. Although he liked a pint of lager and lime from time to time, my dad wasn't a big drinker and I never went to the pub with him.
Some men drink alcohol
Some men drink juices from the vine
But as for me I'm very simple
Give me coffee every time
Every Saturday morning, about ten a.m. (once the Snapshots excitement has died down), Sam and I stop off at the local Co Op cafe before starting the weekly shop. I have an Americano, Sam has an Appletiser, and we both have a pastry. We sit and talk... it's good father and son time. The highlight of my week.
It wouldn't be my coffee shop of choice... but any excuse to watch this video again...
Wednesday, 19 October 2022
Celebrity Jukebox #44: Barbara Cartland
One of the best-selling authors of the 20th
Century, and the 6th most translated author worldwide*, Dame Barbara
Cartland wrote a grand total of 723 novels in her 98 years on earth, and holds
a Guinness World Record for Most Books Published In One Year (191 in 1977).
*In case you’re
wondering, Agatha Christie is at
#1, Shakespeare is at #4, just below Jules Verne, and I’ve never heard of the televangelist “author” at #2. I was at least
pleased to see Enid Blyton keeping Barbara out of the Top 5.
Just as I’ve never read any Henry Miller, I’ve never read
any Barbara Cartland either. So Barbara, what would you say is the biggest
difference between you and Henry?
“My heroines are always virgins; they never go to bed without a ring on their fingers—not until page 118 at least!”
No wonder Princess Di was such a fan. I wonder if the former
Lady Spencer owned a copy of Babs’s debut LP, recorded in 1978 with the Royal
Philharmonic Orchestra…?
You might not expect Barbara to inspire quite as much
devotion from the world of rock ‘n’ roll as Henry did… but you might be surprised.
The most obvious Barbara Cartland fan in rock is Bob Geldof.
Of course. Here she is in one of my favourite Boomtown Rats songs…
Oh, everybody tries
It’s Dale Carnegie gone wild
But Barbara Cartland’s smile
Long ago perfected the motionless glide
Boomtown Rats - Diamond Smiles
Robbie Williams, on the other hand, is trying a little too
hard to shock when he sings about being a Teenage Millionaire.
Bothered Judy Garland
When I buggered Barbara Cartland
Champagne in my bidet
The press all had a field day
20 years earlier, that might have been shocking, Robbie. By
1997, nobody gave a monkey’s…
Robbie Williams - Teenage Millionaire
New York folkster Christine Lavin seems a far more
traditional Barbara Cartland fan…
We’ll read Barbara Cartland novels
Cry at the end of every chapter
With heaving bosoms, the lovers
“Lived happily ever after”
We’ll believe it when she writes that
Christine Lavin - Please Don't Make Me Too Happy
Perhaps the most amusing reference I found to Ms. Cartland though comes from a changed lyric in a famous cover version. When Abba originally recorded The Day Before You Came, Agnetha makes reference to reading the work of radical feminist author Marilyn French to help her get to sleep…
I must have read a while
The latest one by Marilyn French
Or something in that style
However, when the song was covered by Blancmange a few years
later, Neil Arthur clearly found that a little too heavy for own his bedtime
reading…
I must have read a while
The latest one by Barbara Cartland
Or something in that style
Blancmange - The Day Before You Came
You could write a book about the difference between Marilyn
and Barbara… but I haven’t got time. Because I’ve got 80s punk band The
Gymslips to listen to. Who better than to pay tribute to the delightful Dame
Babs?
Barbara Cartland in a mansion
Manages on a pension
Poor old girl
What a life she's led
With a stately home
And a four poster bed
Monday, 5 September 2022
Celebrity Jukebox #31: Arthur C. Clarke
Arthur C. Clarke was, according to the intro to his popular TV shows, the "author of 2001 and inventor of the communications satellite". The former claim is irrefutable. Clarke did write the book that the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was based on, along with its sequel, 2010, and many more science fiction novels. And of course, in creating his Space Odyssey, he influenced a certain Mr. David Jones...
Imagine the far flung future of the year 2001... who knows what things will be like then? Well, there'll be monkeys everywhere, and computers that won't open the door for you. That's about all I can remember from that movie. Or the year 2001, to be honest.
I smashed your phone tonight, oh joy
The consequences will reverberate
Until eternity I'm told
I smashed your phone tonight oh joy
The consequences will reverberate
Until eternity I'm told
I smashed your phone tonight oh joy
I smashed your phone
Outside Yordas Cave
I smashed your phone
Splintering fragments
Like in an Arthur C. Clarke
Blancmange - I Smashed Your Phone
As to that second claim, about the satellite... well, I'd take that one with a grain of salt. Google "inventor of the communications satellite" and you'll find Clarke's pal John Robinson Pierce taking the credit, although with a little more digging you might discover that Clarke suggested the concept in a lecture that JRP attended. Clarke later said, "I'm often asked why I didn't try to patent the idea of a communications satellite. My answer is always, 'A patent is really a licence to be sued.'" Still, I suppose you can afford the lawyers by that point, Arthur.
Magic is the art of influencing the course
Of events by the intervention
Of spiritual forces or some other occult device.
Of events by the intervention
Of spiritual forces or some other occult device.
According to Arthur C. Clarke
Any sufficiently advanced technology
Is indistinguishable from magic.
I was never a fan of 2001, book or film, but I was an acolyte of Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World and its sequel, World of Strange Powers, two TV shows that ran throughout my childhood and informed much of my belief system. UFOs? Yep. Nessie? Absolutely. Big Foot... that video is incontrovertible proof in my mind. (A former colleague of mind practiced for ages until he'd perfected the "Big Foot Walk". He would saunter across the sales office, pause to look back, then continue on his way. But he wasn't as convincing as the real thing.)
I take my coffee black
I love Arthur C. Clarke
I'm more than what I lack
I'm ready to start
I love Arthur C. Clarke
I'm more than what I lack
I'm ready to start
Every day I get lost in the thoughts
That haunt my head when I wake up
Did I sleep through the only years I have
For a future I don't?
The intro to Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World informed us that the author was pondering these mysteries "in retreat in Sri Lanka", which always sounded a bit dodgy (especially when allegations were made about him in the UK tabloids, which were later proved untrue). However, it turns out the real reason he chose to spend his retirement there was that he was a big fan of scuba diving.
Who'd have thought Arthur C. Clarke would appear in so many pop records? And that's before we even get to the ones that feature his name in the title...
The Aardvarks - Arthur C. Clarke
But it's Neil Hannon who takes pride of place today. Being just 18 months older than me, and by his own admission, a child who didn't go out much in the 70s, it's no surprise that Neil and I ended up watching the same TV shows. The only difference being, he turned that experience into an amazing pop song. I turned it into this blog post. I think Neil's ahead on points.
Do you remember that old TV show?
'Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World'
Well, if ITV make a new series
They ought to come take a look at my girl
'Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World'
Well, if ITV make a new series
They ought to come take a look at my girl
I don't understand her
She doesn't make any sense to me
I don't understand her
It's like she's speaking in Swahili
Friday, 26 March 2021
Positive Songs For Negative Time #48: The Day After
File Carly Pearces in the "One To Watch" file.
Her new pop-country EP 29 evokes thoughts of Taylor and Kacey, Carrie and Miranda... and a little bit of Dolly and Tammy attitude on the lead track, Next Girl...
But the track that's sticking in my ears at the moment is the closer, Day One, which sounds like a direct sequel to Abba's The Day Before You Came. (Memorably covered by Blancmange, of course.)
Where that song tells of the day before a relationship, this one tracks the days after a break-up... it also makes me wonder what Day One, post coronavirus might be like. With the threat of a Third Wave on the way, that day seems like a distant prospect again now, but, as Carly's song promises us, things do get better... after a while.
Let's hope so anyway.
Sunday, 14 July 2019
Saturday Snapshots #92 - The Answers
It was a full-on battle between Charity Chic, Lynchie and Walter first thing yesterday morning. Lynchie looked set to take the trophy with 3 points to CC's 2 and a half... until a last second equalizer from CC clinched the draw. Thanks, as always, for playing.
10. Mucking about leads to romance for sprite-like creature and chess piece.
A sprite-like creature would be elvin. (Elfin or elvish?)
Elvin Bishop - Fooled Around And Fell In Love
9. Outdoor Master of Ceremonies: what a weirdo!
OMC - How Bizarre
8. Repetitive soup and shrieking sycamore wish the day away.
The lady is a Campbell.
The gent is a former Screaming Tree.
Isobel Campbell & Mark Lanegan - Saturday's Gone
7. Outlaw sweethearts find stardom with pudding & pie.
Georgie Peorgie, pudding & pie, kissed the girls and made them cry.
Stardom is fame.
Outlaw sweethearts were...
Georgie Fame - The Ballad of Bonnie & Clyde
6. Pre-arrival dessert.
Blancmange - The Day Before You Came
Here's a question for you.
Why does it take him and hour and a quarter to get to work, but three hours to get home?
(How long does he spend in the Chinese takeaway?)
5. Hot rumours block authority.
Hot gossip, obviously.
Gossip - Standing In The Way of Control
4. Chess champion leaves Gordon a note.
Grandmaster Flash (Gordon's Alive!) leaves a message.
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five - The Message
It's like a jungle sometimes
It makes me wonder
How I keep from going under
3. Fashionable local authority watches Germany unite.
Well done to C for spotting a not-immediately-recognisable Mr. Weller on the left.
The Style Council - Walls Come Tumbling Down
2. Southern climbers defy death with sad Spanish bum singer.
Jackie was a singer with a Spanish bum.
Ozark Mountain Daredevils - Jackie Blue
1. Prince's house is the Pitts. All things must end.
Prince lived at Paisley Park, but not with Brad Pitt.
Congrats to Chris for getting "the hard one". (Although Mr. Paisley is a favourite of mine.) I'll have a dig around for some Toby Keith in future week, just for Lynchie. Who says I don't do requests?
This video must be watched right until the end... for the full Hoff.
Saturday Snapshots will be back next week. Michael Bublé may not be.
Friday, 9 November 2012
My Top Ten Diary Songs
I never kept a diary. The closest I ever came was writing a blog. Sadly, I can find only one record about blogging. Scribbling down your life in a diary though... there's plenty to go at.
10. Bread - Diary
David Gates. Hugely unappreciated 70s songwriter. We should have more of him round these parts.
9. Pink - Dear Diary
Yes, Pink again, two Top Tens running. Have we not got over my Pink addiction yet? Really.
8. The Ataris - In This Diary
Being grown up isn't half as fun as growing up:
These are the best days of our lives.
Discuss.
7. Eels - Jeannie's Diary
I don't have a chance at writing the bookNew Eels album coming in February - yay!
I just wanna be a page
In Jeannie's diary
One single page
In Jeannie's diary
6. The Kinks - My Diary
Sorry, Ray Davies's diary is too full to squeeze you in today.
5. The Real Tuesday Weld - The Day Before You Came
Written by Abba, a hit for Blancmange, but it's the Real Tuesday Weld version I can't get enough of. No actual diary in this song - but if the writer had kept one, his memory of the day in question might be a little better.
4. Yazoo - Nobody's Diary
Only in the 80s could a pop band have looked like Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke. One more reason I'm glad I grew up in this wonderful decade.
3. The Beautiful South - My Book
One of my favourite Beautiful South singles, yet one of their least successful. Heaton's on top lyrical form here... what a pity Soul II Soul felt the need to sue him for it for his "Back to bed, back to reality" refrain.
This is my life and this is how it reads
A documentary that nobody believes
Albert Steptoe in 'Gone with the Breeze'
Mother played by Peter Beardsley, father by John Cleese
2. The Bluetones - Solomon Bites The Worm
The Bluetones adapt the diary of one Solomon Grundy, esquire, for one of their greatest songs. It's a cracker. As Kevin Bacon says, doing his best Frank Carson impression on that advert. Now there's something I never thought I'd see...
1. ELO - The Diary of Horace Wimp
I found the story of Horace Wimp heartbreaking as a younger man. I could certainly empathize with his hopeless quest to find a significant other...
Wednesday. Horace met the girl. She was small and she was very pretty.
He thought he was in love, he was afraid - uh oh.
Thursday. Asked her for a date, the cafe down the street, tomorrow evening.
His head was reeling, when she said yes, OK.
Those were the best entries in my diary. Which one do you keep padlocked under your pillow so your mum won't read it?
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