Surprised there’s so much bewilderment about The Brothers it got massive airplay and was one of the few songs that I remember filtering down into our generally uninterested First Year class to the extent that I remember it being sung around the school by someone

Likewise as regards loads of airplay (on Capital anyway) the Andy Fairweather-Low record which I also haven’t heard since – unusual that a vaguely catchy tune with that kind of exposure and on the back of 2 big hits should have been such a flop. Capital saturated their playlists with those 2 too they must have really like him.

The Moments – not a patch on ‘Girls’ probably echoed in the fact that that track (and often elongated with the mixing in of it’s b-side ‘More Girls’) was the only one of theirs I remember getting played occasionally on the jazz-funk scene as an oldie in the 80s.

Why can’t they have someone in charge of broadcasting these re-runs with a genuine interest in them – AFAIK they’ve got a keen and regular following and are discussed on quite a few websites so the presenting of this should refect their significance.

The way they’re being done makes me think that the people involved have no more realisation of their real value (as social documents etc)than their counterparts in the 1970s would have had and if they had their way they’d probably still be wiping them.

1) /Slade is what happens when the amount of work they previously did to win (i.e. Dave’s outfits, the production of the song, the song itself) seems like too much bother, so they loosen up a little and end up with no hit/ .. / Donna Summer’s live video not as good as the actual single / .. / That Jesse Green song suffers the BBC orchestra treatment, the single was OK / .. / Silver Convention’s song came from their concept album “The world is a madhouse” about mechanised society and also contains the not-hit-single “I’m not a slot machine”

Here’s a time capsule – The Brothers on Opportunity Knocks, complete with songwriters Mr and Mrs Greenslade from Exeter, Hughie and the clapometer. Can’t have been all that WTF though Jim – reached number 8, although they’re true one-hit wonders. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixNJC6uZHVA

I wonder what Jenny and Vicki would make of Napolean XIV…

I think I’ll stick to the late night full-length reruns. But who schedules these useless peak time broadcasts? Who is responsible for editing the life out of these programmes such that anything remotely interesting, or different, or prickly, gets routinely cut (and they’ll do it with the Pistols; you wait and see), leaving only the blandest, least offensive (and therefore to my mind the most offensive) tripe?

Actually I know the answer. I know who these schedulers and hackers are. They have names like Jenny or Vicki. They hold a 2:2 in media studies from Dudley University. They are unattached. There is nothing in their fridge except nail varnish. They listen to Heart FM for pleasure. They think Bridget Jones’ Diary a truthful social document. They cry to their copy of 21. Their idea of modern philosophy is M. Scott Peck. They are, at root, petrified thirtysomething beings who see the ideal BBC4 viewer as themselves – timid, thwarted, mousey office managers who’ll immediately switch over to Channel 4 News if they catch a glimpse of Evita or Gary Glitter or Can – and, like their imagined target audience, instantly see educated, mouthy viewers as the equivalent of the naughty boy at the back of the classroom who needs to be micromanaged and kept in check. The sort of idiot who berates Brian Matthew about Sounds Of The ’60s, complaining that they don’t like all that obscure stuff and all they want to hear are number ones followed by more number ones.

I’d rather they didn’t repeat the shows at all than show them in this bowdlerised form – David Parton as hopeless holiday camp compere, vainly trying to rouse the interest of a disinterested audience, most of whom aren’t even looking at him, is just one instance of what is considered “acceptable.”

And yes, The Brothers won Op Knox, but they still look like a cruise ship which has had an unfortunate accident with a shipment of orange Quality Street wrappers.

“Must dash now, there’s a new Best Of The Moments CD out” – you won’t hear that said.

The Brothers – I had no idea about this at all. It was one of those WTF? moments. Erithian suggested they may have been Op Knox winners. Neither of us cared.

David Parton – I think this one’s been covered. The suggestion that it provided an opportunity to bag this track as a single (by anyone who sounded remotely like SW) is undoubtedly correct. You only have to look at Parton’s chart position to understand that. He himself looks like a cock.

The Eagles’ “New Kid In Town” – And Legs. Only there are no legs at all. The Gals frustrate their panting, salivating admirers by full-dressing up as gangters’ molls from the twenties (I think) and then the performance is brutely cut half-way through in order to give way to…

Fatty Briggs! – Look! This bugger can’t f’king sing, okay? The man is squeaky and tone deaf. And check out the pink outfit three sizes too small for him. Small wonder this is a song about loneliness. Jesus! Nice number, though.

Quo – Introduced by Tony and fetching young woman plucked out of the audience. Quo are just Quo.

Mr Big – Highlight of the night for me. A great little record, this. Well done!

Andy Fairweather-Low – Well, okay but wallpaper music really. What audience was he targeting?

Moments – On screen to sing “Jack In His Box”. And they’re also decked out in pink! Was it that year’s colour? Good song and a good performance, which Big Bazza could only dream about. I personally preferred “Dolly My Love”, though.

New Seekers – Lovely, wholesome Eve bashes out another old time sing-a-long before being savagely cut. An outrage!

David Soul – We say goodbye to this. But it was a good number one. And Hutch might well be back.

Titles to “Car Wash”.

This was a strange show. Everything in a rush. And certainly short-changed on our Mucky Sue fix.

http://nohardchords.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/142-sonny-and-cher-i-got-you-babe/

How long do you think we can go on like this before Management cuts us off?

Didn’t someone do a sort-of scientific paper on the optimum time Coyote (or Bugs or whoever) can stay suspended in the air before they realise the cliff is no longer there?

And I suspect (#50) that “Kill Dem Batty Man” is a gag somebody inserted in the Wiki article on Shabba that has been adopted in sites that lift wholesale from Wiki. To quote a cartoon in this week’s Private Eye: (schoolteacher to pupil) “This homework is incisive, original and full of accurate facts… Wikipedia must be down again”.

Perhaps the Advanced Level study group can similarly consider Wile E Coyote’s pursuit of The Roadrunner. Wile E is neither fiendish nor clever and powerful. Basically he’s a lunatic and a fuckwit. It’s clear that satifaction of appetite has nothing to do with what he’s doing or he would simply retreat to KFC and be done with it. Coyote instead invests in a succession of ACME contraptions, all of which fail. The capture of the Roadrunner thus itself becomes a means to an end. As Dostoyevsky argues in “Crime and Punishment”…

(Continued on P.94)

‘Informer’ is an incredible record, I’m delighted to have had it brought to my intention. I can’t get my head round how such a thing comes to be – his wikipedia biography barely explains it.

Speaking of wikipedia, it tells me Shabba’s 2010 autobiography was titled ‘Kill Dem Batty Man’, suggesting a charming lack of repentance. There are no independent references to the tome elsewhere on the net, though, so I suspect this is untrue.

As we noted on the Readers’ Poll thread at New Year, Klunk from “Stop The Pigeon” = Jessie J on the Christmas TOTP.