BOMBALURINA – “Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini”
Timmy Mallett is one of those horribly British professional funsters who seem to find employment as DJs and TV hosts and then worm their way to the heart of the UK’s pop culture. Pop, and life, is for them a kind of cosmic struggle between the serious and the fun, and it’s their duty to take balancing action any time the former seems like winning. So when pop in 1990 showed signs of being vibrant, original, and relevant to its audience it fell to Timmy to enter the studio and produce a record of such thundering witlessness it could ruin a whole year at a stroke.
“Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny” is that single. The second Brian Hyland cover to top the chart in little over a year, its original is a chirpy bit of beach kitsch, annoying, utterly undeserving of revival, but not atrocious. Mallett improves on it in only one way – trading up the schoolmarmish “one two three four” vocals for something more giggly. In every other sense this is a horror show. The pin-up cheekiness of the song is swapped for Mallett’s mocking leer, as he takes an Aslanesque relish in knocking pubescent vanity down a peg. Hyland made the song a silly high school anecdote, but for Mallett that’s too subtle. The Mallettian kind of fun is like an ideological tyrant, one which turns allies into enemies and liquidates them. Joy, summer, music, sex, pop and finally playfulness itself – all remorselessly ground down into abstract unthinking FUN as this ghastly record trots on.
It had one practical effect: it immediately made unusable a whole category of overdone but not hateful samples, staples of chart dance records up to this point. “I LIKE it”, “Woo! Yea!”, “uh YEAH” – all put beyond use by this record. To this day, I flinch when I hear “Uno! Dos! Uno dos tres quatro!”. As it happened, the funster class was about to face a crisis of sorts, but they had a few more chances to horrify us first.
1
Nothing to see here – please move along
A “Smile. You might even like it” sticker made into a record.
Very difficult to argue with that. I was 9 when this came out – and thus squarely in the Mallett demographic. I hated him then. I hated this then. Time has mellowed me a bit on Mallett – I still don’t like what he does but I’ve less inclination to actively loathe him (and thankfully anyone else to be honest) – but this record is still crap.
The Hyland original of this got to #1 in the US – in that horrible period in between Buddy Holly dying and The Beatles playing Ed Sullivan. At least in this country we had Joe Meek to keep things interesting – though he did manage to export Telstar and a few others to the US.
I believe that the 11-year old me was on holiday with my family at Butlins in Minehead when this was #1. This was played everywhere there at the time, a truly appropriate and horrific soundtrack.
Strange man, Mallett. Very, very strange man. Even as a child I remember finding him distinctly creepy.
Interesting to note that he was happy to front this frothy bit of female objectification, but he famously got into a strop and refused to allow Kim Wilde’s (fairly tame even by the standards of the late 80s) Say You Really Want Me video to be broadcast on his show.
Was Suzanne Vega still at #2 when this was on top? If so, unluckiest song ever? Held off by two of the worst #1 singles ever.
#3 yeah for all my hyperbole I don’t hate the funsters as people, least of all TM – it’s a role British pop culture seems to demand *someone* fill and he did it no more nauseatingly and less evilly than many. This record is actually a low point for Mallett himself, he kept himself to kids’ TV by and large.
I loved Timmy Mallett as a kid and I loved this too. 2nd year juniors (no-one got the hang of ‘Year 4′ until we got to ‘Year 5′) was the peak of puerile humour, with 85% of the school day taken up with boys saying ‘b00bies’ and ‘bum’ (the two RUDEST words, Uncle Stew) and the remaining 15% being Mrs Field telling them off. So the prospect of a tiny bikini that showed ones’ unspeakable nether regions was the utmost of hilarity – IBTWYPDB is very nearly the ‘Allo ‘Allo of UK #1s. Anyway, I like to think that the looks on everyone’s faces when I ‘dropped’ it during my first ever Poptimism DJ set made its existence is totally worthwhile.
A Tweeter writes: “Sky used that song for a montage of super-slo-mo Ashes-winning England moments. It was, therefore, glorious.”
I admit it would make a change from Elbow.
#6 Yep – there is always someone out there on kid’s TV plying the same/similar sort of schtick that Mallett did; Dick and Dom seem to be the current main culprits on BBC, unless anyone else can find someone more into the funster angle for kids.
Fact is, this sort of wacky (pun intended) personality and associated gungings, pratfalls and silliness do go over well for kids even now. The audience for Hole In The Wall and Total Wipeout as far as I can tell is mostly kids. Maybe that’s where the funsters have gone now – they’re not actively on TV making programmes or utterly awful records; TV just gets members of the public to do the stupid stuff kids like instead. It’s probably cheaper in fairness.
I was nine too, and I remember really, really, hating this. Timmy Mallet, like Bodger and Badger, only made sense to me later in life: “oh right – he was for the thick kids!”
I think this might have been a crucial moment in the development of my critical faculties, because I don’t remember hating a song like this before. However, I do remember being about the same age and thinking to myself “I don’t really understand what people mean when they say they didn’t enjoy a film – going to the pictures is great”. I know that I enjoyed going to see The Bodyguard two years later, so cinematically I was more of a slow learner.
Wikipedia’s summary of Timmy Mallet’s early 80s radio show:
“The programme he hosted at Piccadilly was Timmy on the Tranny, a popular weekday evening show that ran from 8pm-11pm and took its name from Mallett’s show on Radio Oxford. Among Timmy’s team of helpers were Chris Evans known as ‘Nobby Nolevel’, Andy Bird who played the pirate radio character ‘Radio Diggle’, Karen Walsh was the original ‘Aunty Boney kneecaps’”
Just reading that paragraph has me fuming. I am really incapable of liking this kind of thing I think. (Tiswas being an exception but square that I was I liked Swap Shop just as much.)
I was in Year 3 when this came out, and I loved it at the time, as I did the bizarre accompanying album of 50s novelty songs given a hi-NRG makeover by Andrew Lloyd Webber (and I believe the same studio team who pumped up the Donovan-era cast recording of Joseph?). My Mallett fandom reached a peak when he opened the Tunbridge Wells Pantiles and ‘malletted’ me, but didn’t last long afterwards, and my ownership cassette of this very soon became an embarrassment.
Some years later, while DJing a college disco, I attempted to test the limits of ironic student appropriation of nostalgic tat by playing this, and cleared the dancefloor, perhaps reasonably.
Interesting to see Tom bring up the samples, it’s jam full of them – and because I came to this first rather than some of the ‘cooler’ tunes that made use of it, many of my later explorations of early dance music threw up unwanted recollection of Mallett and his kin. Has anyone bothered to list what all the sample are and where they’re from? (Probably not.)
And wasn’t there a rumour a few years back that Mallett doesn’t sing on this?…
[I rated this a 2, the extra point purely being for the nostalgia, however unwelcome.]
What actual age is someone in “year four”? #ironicgrandad*
*Except I actually do want to know
This is my least favourite and most hated number one of all time, much much worse than the Jive Bunny trio, and more than any bunnyable others to come.
In part it’s because I genuinely hate this record, although there are others that fit the biull. But mainly it’s because its stint at number one coincided with the year of the biggest chart music obsession of my life, and so there was no avoiding it. It genuinely upset my teenage tastes that anyone could even dream of buying this, I couldn’t think of a single redeeming feature – it even had the effect of making me flinch when I heard those overused dance samples in records that I’d previously liked, so it didn’t just ruin the charts for me it ruined other records. The memory of this is making me shudder at the memory, and unlike other awful records that we’ve seen here before, I’m not even mildly tempted to click on the video link to hear it again.
#13 – about eight or nine. I can only work it out by counting backwards, because my school introduced the new year names when I was in Year 6, which is the top year of primary/junior school. In much the same way as how no one born between 1970 – 1990 knows either metric or imperial measurements properly, just a confusing mish-mash of both.
#14 I sympathise! My own least favourite number one – still to come – is so awful I have never actually been able to get to the end of my MP3 to check it works.
I’d stopped thinking Mallett was a good thing a few years before this shower of shite – it really is the worst #1 covered for some time (yes I will take Belfast Child and assorted charity bobbins over this).
Good point about Mallett doing us a “favour” by rendering all those cliched samples totally uncool from this point on but I have to say the follow up single ‘Seven Little Girls Sitting On The Back Seat’ is actually a tad worse.
A better Mallett pop vehicle might’ve been a few recorded rounds of Mallett’s Mallet over Coldcut beats, scratches and weird noises – “7 Minutes Of Mallett” etc.
Was Mallett responsible for “sheet, pillow, dooooovet” on Wacaday? Was he also responsible for introducing Michaela Strachan to the public? In both cases, that means I’ll let him off the fact he was clearly in his mid thirties with the haircut of someone a third of his age and looked like he would be NO FUN AT ALL if you had the temerity to ask for his autograph.
I’m not letting Brian Hyland* off so easily. At least Timmy didn’t follow this up with Four Little Heels (The Clickety Clack Song) and Lopsided Overloaded And It Wiggled When We Rode It.
Shoreditch/Dalston types remind me of junior Mallet funsters.
*unsurprisingly made cataclysmically great records once his teen pin up days were over – Rainy April Morning, You, You’d Better Stop, all moody loner orchestrated pop.
A redemptive revisionist reading? Not here! Unlike ‘Sealed With A Kiss’ or ‘Tears On My Pillow’ this was a highly objectionable record in the first place – but at least it didn’t go on for FOUR SODDING MINUTES. Apart from anything else, this elongation dilutes the cheeky narrative effect.
I’ve just watched the video. Two thoughts – The two female dancers 1990 hairstyles, perms that end abruptly at the top of the neck, strike me as highly attractive now, but I would have seen them as being a bit common twenty years ago. And those two male dancers are clearly more interested in each other than the micro-bikinied lovely.
And you would have thought that Timmy Mallet’s pop career would have had ‘One hit wonder’ written all over it, but – Oh no – there he was back in time for Christmas with No. 18 follow-up ‘Seven Little Girls Sitting In The Back Seat’.
There was even an album, ‘Huggin’ & A Kissin’. Do you suppose that anyone got that, the Gazza & Friends album and the second Jive Bunny LP that Christmas?
#2 Watch. Two weeks of Deacon Blue’s highly tasteful ‘Four Bacharach & David Songs EP’. The tune-free version of ‘I’ll Never Fall In Love Again’, with fullblown Ricky Ross throaty emoting was the lead track. Its certainly a different approach to doing a cover version than Bombalurina, but, do you know, I think that I hate it just as much.
TOTPWatch: Bombalurina thrice preformed ‘Itsy Bitsy’ on Top Of The Pops. More about the Christmas show anon;
9 August 1990. Also in the studio that week were; Craig McLachan & Check 1-2 and The Hothouse Flowers. Gary Davies was the host. What an awful week.
23 August 1990. Also in the studio that week were; The Human League and Lindy Layton & Janet Kay. Nicky Campbell was the host.
Light Entertainment Watch: Away from his own programmes Timmy Mallett has rarely been a welcome guest on UK TV. I’m guessing that he appeared on all four of these shows to be mocked;
HARRY HILL’S TV BURP: with Tony Blackburn, Sarah Darlington, Peter Dean, Timmy Mallett, Andi Peters, Michelle Tate (2006)
THE JUSTIN LEE COLLINS SHOW: with Ben Miller, Katherine Kelly, Kirsty Gallacher, Timmy Mallett, Dennis Seaton, Here Come The Boys (2009)
NOEL’S HOUSE PARTY: with Gotcha (Timmy Mallett) (1992)
THE WORD: with Kathy Lloyd, Timmy Mallett, Dog Eat Dog, Lisa Moorish, The Charlatans (1994)
o you suppose that anyone got that, the Gazza & Friends album and the second Jive Bunny LP that Christmas?
^^^This is screaming for a “satirical” answer! As in “Yes: Brandon Flowers!! ahaha” or w/evs
As a littlie, I had several records — 45s and LPs — on which sanctioned “children’s folkies” sang amiable silly nonsense songs for tinies, Wally Whyton and the like (the “campfire” genre invented by the late Mitch Miller, i believe, and dominated in the UK over many decades by Rolf Harris*)
*Rolf who is plainly a more interesting, important and talented figure than Mallett in EVERY FIELD viz can also SWIM and PAINT and plus look stricken when yr puppy didn’t make it
Apparently one of the dancers in the video is now Mrs. Gary Barlow, fact fans.