On Soldier Soldier’s Wikipedia page there’s a list of the places each season of the military drama was set- where Robson Green and Jerome Flynn’s squaddie characters were sent. Hong Kong, Cyprus, New Zealand… after Iraq, and a dozen years fighting in Afghanistan, the idea of a show about serving UK soldiers needing to get its drama from New Zealand seems bizarre, something out of a lost time.
But some things are constant: Britain is fond of its troops, whatever they’re asked to do. And when people start playing with ideas of Britishness and patriotism it’s no surprise to see a flash or two of khaki as the stereotypes parade. So, for the uninitiated or forgetful: this was number one for seven weeks, famously keeping Pulp’s “Common People” off the top. The singers are actors, who played soldiers in a long-running military soap. In one episode they have to do a bit of karaoke, and this is what they chose. Who, asked swooning viewers, will bring us this masterpiece on CD Single? A flash! – a whiff of sulphur! – enter Simon Cowell.
Cowell knocked together a recording, got it released, and it became the best selling single of the year. A great coup for the budding Svengali – perhaps, with a less handsome Robson Greene and a less sentimental public, the single would have flopped and much later grief might have been averted. Alas no.
Is the song any good? Yes, it’s “Unchained Melody”, it’s a great song. We were, of course, reminded of that only four years ago, but this is a standard (Simon likes standards) and there’s always room for a good recording. Is the recording any good? Ah. The singing’s – well, it’s passable, though terribly thin: we’ve heard worse from actors and we’ll hear worse again. Robson And Jerome don’t have the chops to handle the dynamics of “Unchained Melody”, but they’re not the worst thing about it.*
The backing however…if the brief was to recreate a karaoke system version of the Wall of Sound, then the brief was amply fulfilled. This is a very cheap sounding record. Cowell needed a hit, he called Stock and Aitken, late of “…and Waterman”, they said fine, and then in thirty seconds time, or at least that’s what it sounds like, he had a track. The drums are Tupperware, the keyboards toytown, the horns and guitars sound like Windows 95 alert sounds. The string parts – let’s call them strings – sound like they’re made from the kind of fabric Jarvis Cocker sings about. The one spark of intelligence on display is mixing this stuff high in time to cover up Robson (or Jerome) singing “Are you still miiiine?” and finally spluttering to the end of their range. Good sense from Stock and Aitken there. No need to give the enemy propaganda. There’s a war on, dammit! In New Zealand!
For the biggest hit of 1995, this has left almost no cultural mark. Robson Greene was a star for a few more years, Soldier Soldier wobbled on without him and Jerome for a little while, the song endured this insult and braced itself for the next one. But in one respect it’s important. It’s the moment Simon Cowell learned a very lucrative lesson: TV is far, far bigger than pop. You want to sell to common people? Give a TV audience an excuse to buy a single and the charts are yours to crush.
*(Which is which? The AA-side – by name only, it was barely played – gives them more to do separately. One has a firm, bland voice; the other is soft and paper-thin, almost creepily polite. Neither are strong. “The White Cliffs Of Dover” is still better than “Unchained Melody” thanks to its hilarious gospel breakdown – the only bold production choice made here. “When the world is free” sounds a bit like a gospel lyric, and now it is one, though on the evidence presented God has little to do with this record.)
Score: 2
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One morning, I woke up, as I often do, with a “new” song in my head. Often, I struggle to remember it past 30 mins of awakeness, sometimes I decide it’s not worth saving, sometimes I write it down, Jasper.
Anyway, one time I ended up with a bit of “Post-Punk” called “Stupid Little Soldier”, the rest of the lyric got lost in the mist, but I did reflect that this may, possibly, be the only way you could get banned in this day and age. Imagine, not supporting “our Boys”…
SAW have come up before, and I feel like we’ve been unduly kind to their efforts (Ferry Aid apart). But really, why do these backing tracks have to be so bad?! The same goes for nearly everything I’ve heard from the ensuing formula (Girls Aloud the exception – so far as I can tell, anyone else has to pay their dues before being allowed to do anything bold).
These are guys who know how to work a studio, what could go wrong if they threw in a jazz chord or turned the beat around? Would it really put anyone off a record like this?
BTW there are areas I’ve not really got into on this (already longish!) entry because – bunny be damned – I have to deal with these simps TWO MORE TIMES.
#2 this is just SA, W had broken up the ‘band’ by this point. I think cheap sounding production is fine when you’re going for a tinny back of the car walkman radio rush, but on something like this it stands out, particularly as the original is still fairly fresh in buyers’ memories.
Obviously the buyers didn’t give a fuck, though.
I had no idea to the background to this song nor knew anything about the TV series (other than its name): but, God, this is awful. So it WAS intended to sound like two blokes (and not the finest pair of singers) with a shit karaoke machine then!.
I had assumed (evidently wrongly) that the series was set in WWII, and this was a 50th anniversary thing – an inferior downturn from “Singalongawaryears” Max Bygraves, or for that matter from one of the pretty decent Lost Number 36 hits of 1982, Stutz Bear Catz “The Song That I Sing” (with proper orchestral backing – which is really what is required here), the theme tune from a contemporaneous ITV drama set in WWII, “We’ll meet Again”.
Evidently a case of the public being given what they want, rather than what they should want. Pure dross, even for such a great song.
The music for ‘Soldier, Soldier’ was arranged by my then girlfriend’s Dad (Jim Parker), and obviously he oversaw the karaoke episode. So indirectly he led to this this being inflicted on the nation, hence I hold him responsible. I broke up with his daughter shortly afterwards.
Placing my cards on the table, I know Unchained Melody is meant to be an unimpeachable classic, but I hate it, going round and round on its piano figure and boring the life out of me. Bobby Hatfield’s version does have chops, I’ll give it that, and as a result, I have slightly more regard for The Righteous Brothers take on the song than the multiplicity of other versions.
So, when you take all of the ability out of the vocal and replace it with something thin and nasal, you’re not winning any points with me. I’m disappointed that I have listened to this again to be honest, but I felt I had to in order to make sure that I wasn’t being totally unfair.
Tom is right about the instrumentation – the vocals set a low bar and the backing comfortably limbos under it. I can’t agree about White Cliffs of Dover though. If anything, it is even worse. The track itself seems to have been done on one of the presets of an old Casio “My First Keyboard”, by turns tinkling and lacking in depth. The vocals, naturally, are rubbish. Poor old Dame Vera.
Besides the well-known Common People fact, Tom mentions, this also kept Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me by U2 off number 1 – a record for which I have a sneaking regard. Sort of the bridge between Achtung Baby and Pop, it never really takes itself too seriously, unlike some of U2’s other, more po-faced, efforts. It would have made a good #1 in my view.
Soldier Soldier though eh? Must have had a substantial number of fans who bought this at Tesco. At least both of these guys went on to better and more interesting things – though not before torturing us two more times – whether it be going fishing or being a double hard bastard in Game of Thrones.
I had completely forgotten Jerome Flynn ended up in Game Of Thrones, and I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes, so I’ve not actually seen him in it! Well well well.
And I also assumed until starting the “research” for this that it was a series set in WW2. To be fair the sleeve isn’t exactly trying to avoid those associations – more of nostalgia and R&J next time we see them, though.
Have you read the books Tom? If not, I won’t spoil it. Jerome got a damn good part though – one of my favourites. It would be great if Robson turns up in some battle somewhere, only for Jerome to dismember him.
#9 No I haven’t – having got through most of Robert Jordan I decided I’d read enough unfinished fantasy monstrosities for one lifetime, and the TV series seems a much better way to experience GoT. But I don’t have much time for watching, so I’ll struggle through it slowly.
#10 Having read the books, I would say that the way to experience GoT is through the TV series. The books have great plots but the details and the length can be a bit of a slog – but I guess, it has regularly been thus in fantasy fiction. The TV series gets to the meat of the matter a bit more. The performances are good too. About the only advantage of being a book reader is that what might seem like the rather weird decisions made by the writers/directors with respect to focus on certain characters are based on the books, so it helps in not getting infuriated. I’m watching with my girlfriend who hasn’t read the books and she gets a bit pissed off when the narrative sails away from something interesting to go and focus on a character she doesn’t care about as much.
And let’s not forget that Robson Greene remains a huge star, in such shows as Robson Greene’s Extreme Fishing.
Evidently a case of the public being given what they want, rather than what they should want.
Come on, that’s why the war was fought, to stop people who thought like that!
Jim Parker from those lovely old John Betjeman records, eh? Well, I suppose everyone has to earn a living.
I wonder if Robson is now primarily going to be thought of as a hard man angler rather than an actor. What was the last big drama he was in? Seems a while ago, now.
Again I’m taking the fifth amendment with this record because it does appear on a number one album and I’ll have something to say about it on TPL when the time comes/if I still have the will and energy to be doing it then. Five more of these to come in 1995, as well.
I’d never seen Soldier Soldier, never heard of these guys and had no idea the song was coming out until it appeared at number 1 on the Chart Show. What the hell?
I don’t begrudge it existing, though. I’m sure it made a lot of people very happy, and I prefer it to Hold Me Thrill Me etc which just seems to go on and on and on and is impossible to dance to.
Does anyone else listen to a commercial radio station in the morning? Then you’ll be familiar with the advert for Armed Forces Day, on which Ray Winstone (or, to be fair to the gambling enabler, possibly a soundalike) introduces a string of actors pretending to be members of the public, all with a simple-minded explanation for why they’ll be supporting “our boys.” This is the musical equivalent.
Soldier Soldier, good grief. We were between wars (Gulf War I and Kosovo) – normally we’d need one to push a record like this to the top (Korea for Vera Lynn’s sheet music no.1 Auf Wiedersehen in ’52, Suez for Ann Shelton’s Lay Down Your Arms in ’56, Afghanistan/Iraq for at least two bunnied entries).
So Simon Cowell spotted a gap in the market for a noxious mixture of sentimentality, romance, nostalgia (where’s our Blitz spirit gone?!) and patriotism. I’m not surprised that people thought Soldier Soldier was set in WWII. The only reason I remember it being set in the modern day was because a friend-of-a-friend Lesley Vickerage was in it, and rather modernly took her clothes off.
Re 7: Unchained Melody first had the piano figure on the Righteous Brothers version – the 50s hit recordings (including Liberace’s one and only chart placing) are surprisingly varied. And often very good.
I’ve called a few records “bad karaoke”, or some variation on that theme, but this one’s slightly different. They’re not great singers, but they’re not awful, albeit with those voices they’ve chosen completely the wrong song out of the book here. What this is isn’t bad karaoke, it’s just karaoke, recreated absolutely exactly.
Which explains why it was a hit (I may be remembering wrong, but I have a vague memory of this going to #1 a week or two before the Michael Jackson/Pulp records hit, and some R1 midweek DJ announcing that it was going to go to #1 automatically on the strength of the vast amounts of pre-orders). Karaoke with your friends is fun. Watching a bunch of strangers of varying talent doing karaoke is not fun. But the TV show racked up vast numbers of viewers to place those vast amounts of pre-orders, many of them older, most of them not traditionally singles buyers, and for those buyers, R&J were indeed their friends.
Or we can call this a throwback to Whispering Grass, although R&J’s future bunnyable #1s (with their “comedy” videos) fit that description a bit better.
Two personal memories. I disliked Soldier Soldier because my elderly aunt came to visit one evening and made us change the channel over to it from Reeves & Mortimer. I disliked White Cliffs of Dover because even though I’d never heard of Vera Lynn, at a school music quiz aged somewhere around 10, in a “fill in the blanks” round, I answered “BLUEBIRDS OVER…” with “The Mountain”, a Beach Boys/Ersel Hickey reference because those were the sorts of records my parents listened to in the car. 0 points, and the injustice still burns.
Weirdly, even though Pulp are my favourite band of all time, I don’t hold any grudge against R&J for this at all. Other than its being crap, I mean.
Was this the first Cowell number 1? He’d been around for a bit by then, and I believe he’d even done the TV tie-in wheeze before with a couple of hits ‘sung’ ‘by’ WWF wrestlers. What else did he try before this?
#15 Cheers for that. I should listen to a few and see whether my opinion changes.
It begins with a fall.
The door opens up beneath you and you drop into darkness. The sound echoes around the room, filling your mind. A repetitive, incessant sound of rumbling bass and treblesome shakes.
An unassuming, spectacled man forms in front of you, only barely being able to make him out. He speaks in a staccato, slow, almost whisper of a voice, fixating and probing his gaze into yours. Although his words are strange you feel compelled to listen, like the lines he describes form the most important story ever told. The bass drills in your stomach ever deeper, the volume of voice and sound gradually, inconspicuously increasing.
Thump, thump, thump, THUMP the room begins to pound, like a giant above is strolling through his morning walk. But all you can see, all you can focus on is this one man, and this one voice. Something is building. You can feel it. Your ears begin to bleed from the intensity of the surrounding soundscape. The voice feels captured inside a box, a box getting thinner and thinner and imminently this voice is going to break out of this box and burst alive. It’s coming. You can’t stop it, and neither can him. She didn’t understand, he warns.
She just smiled. And held his hand.
LIGHTS. We jump from darkness to the brightest most powerful most dazzling white lights ever emitted. The man, and the voice is set free. He jumps, dances, screams around the room, bellowing out his words. Raw, euphoric, animalistic energy surrounds you and you have no choice but to dance with him. Climbing and flying off walls, spinning, running, singing along because it might just get you through and laughing, laughing even though they’re laughing at you. Shaking off the weight of the WORLD because this is all that matters and you don’t care how long it lasts because this is your moment. And you want to be with this man – in this state – forever.
You fall again, this time to the floor. The lights, now filled with colour, continue to shine. The bass continues, quietly. The sweat pours off you and soaks you in a puddle beneath. You’re short of breath, your throat and voice are bitterly shot to pieces, you feel that this may well be it. This may be your final moments, your final resting place, and he was there to see it. With the tiniest muscle of energy you have left, your eyes move to where he is. He too is on the floor, trembling from the power that just overwhelmed you both. He’s whispering something. You can’t quite hear – the music is too loud. But the whisper becomes a mumble. Becomes speech. Becomes shouting. He wants to live like you. You. And in one final throe, he screams that magical world. Y, O, U, YOU. Your lifeless body is flown around the room, his voice controlling you. Flying higher, higher, higher, up to the ceiling, the light getting brighter and brighter and brighter…
…and you awake, back where you started. Before the fall. You pick yourself up, wearily dust yourself down, and return to reality.
And wonder why the hell the British public chose two blokes from the telly singing a 50s song instead.
Got things to say about that one as well (to a point; Lena will, I’m pretty sure, have a lot more to say about it on MSBTW). But not the things I might have said about it in 1995.
I am actually quite grateful that I don’t have to go back to it again – when we did Poptimists on LJ it felt like there were about twenty threads arguing about “Common People”, and it’s the kind of entry that would have caused a 3-week umming and ahhing over writing, at exactly the wrong time. I know what mark it would have got, I think.
Vienna schmienna. This is proof that pop like life just ain’t fair.
“But some things are constant: Britain is fond of its troops …”
and #15
This is an interesting one because I’d always assumed that this sort of patriotism – and its expression in pop culture – were at an all time low in the mid-nineties, that in the absence of a “proper war”, and with the monarchy mired in its 1992-97 nadir, a less martial, vaguely countercultural version of Britishness (ie. Britpop and its offshoots) came to define the era.
But maybe, in light of this entry, that theory is total bollocks.
Cowell’s strategy was particularly clinical given that this was released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of VE Day the previous week. Common People might have won out without the leg-up WCOD provided in that context.
I like the way Let Robeson Sing is a related post. I’d always assumed that was about Paul Robeson, but obviously the Manics loved a spot of khaki karaoke.
Soldier Soldier had already been going on for 5 years so there was plenty of time for a head of fondness to build up for the characters – obviously draping oneself in the flag isn’t ALWAYS a route one method of getting to the top – as Lineman says there does usually need to be an actual war on. And while the militarisation of British life now is WAY ahead of anything in the 90s – nobody back then was assuming ex-soldiers should waltz into teaching jobs – I don’t remember there ever being a distaste for the army. The monarchy is a different matter, and obviously there’s an entry in a while where we’ll get plenty of time to talk about that.
Re 22: Pulp scoring a brace of #2 hits seems miraculous enough to me. I’d settle for that if I were them.
Does anyone else listen to a commercial radio station in the morning?
Not now, but I was in 1995, to the extent that my 100% legally acquired copy of Hold Me Thrill Me Kill Me Kiss Me Etc (the only U2 song I’ve ever had any time for, for Batman Reasons) had Chris Tarrant’s burbly Krusty The Klown laugh over the end ‘WuHUH-ell it’s five past eight and you’re listening to’ *hits jingle button* Capital Efffff Emmmmm. This would come to bite me in the bum a few weeks later during the last Music lesson of the year, in which everyone could bring in a tape of ‘whatever song you like right now’. I was umming and aahing about whether to take in this or Karmacoma by Massive Attack, went for the U2 because at least I understood what that one was about (it was about Batman) (Karmacoma had the word ‘Karma’ in it which might have been something to do with the Karma Sutra i.e. SEX which would have been INSTANT MORTIFICATION in the classroom). At first it seemed like the right choice! I got some approving nods from the cool boys (who liked Nirvana as well) (I couldn’t bring in Nirvana though as that wouldn’t have been cool) (they all brought in Green Day). But then I had to dive over to where Ms Hartley was sat with the tape player before bloody Tarrant started chortling and arrrrrrrgh I didn’t quite get there in time…. *weeps* O FOR A TIME MACHINE (still wouldn’t have picked Karmacoma though).
Ms Hartley was the only teacher I ever got a detention off.
#15 A quick run around Youtube has brought me to the following conclusions:
The piano figure is the thing that really pisses me off. It’s not the tune. So thanks for the heads up.
Al Green and Sam Cooke’s versions are thus far my favourite. Soft and questioning, as opposed to strident and pleading. Very good.
Liberace is florid and sounds like what the original was, a soundtrack for a film. This is a good thing to my ears, though less affecting than Al or Sam for me.
Jimmy Young’s version is worse than the Hatfield/Righteous version, even though the latter has my least favourite piano on it.
I reminded myself of Righteous and bunny versions. I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Fisherman and Bronn the Sellsword’s version again. I feel like I have been sold a dummy on this tune by the British public.
Yeah, I was thinking that this is a sort of silent majority record for the nineties. Maybe it was just a TV spin off.
#28: there was another one… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqqNsyHajb0
Yes, that was reissued about this time, I got the CD single.
A friend, after I played it to him, said “um, do you just, like, buy *everything*?”
hmmph. What does he know? It’s Spike Milligan!
#30: Though I do indeed remember Eccles, I was not aware of this. The music is quite good in a ramshackle sort of way!
Mention of Jarvis enables me to roll out my Cocker related trivia question (wichita lineman knows the answer). Three Yorkshire-affiliated men called Cocker have sung on UK top three hits. Jarvis is one. Joe is another. Who’s the third?
I have little to say about this pointless record, except that I also don’t really mind it keeping Common People off the top. If it had gone all the way I fear that it would dominate the band’s history even more than it does now. And as Wichita says, two number 2s and another three top 10 hits isn’t at all bad for a bunch of freaks, mis-shapes and weeds.
#33 – sir, me sir me sir me! You’re referring to Les Cocker, trainer to the England World Cup Squad in 1970, whose voice is presumably well down in the mix of “Back Home”.
Much the coolest TV programme Robson Green has been involved in is Being Human. Playing a werewolf, the role called for him to appear naked more than once, and his arse gained quite a fan club.
#33 Did a Yorkshireman called Pete Cocker fill in the high bits of Nancy Sinatra’s part on Somethin’ Stupid?
Erithian gets the Crackerjack pencil! It was indeed Les Cocker, Leeds United and England trainer, for his memorable participation on Back Home.
Oh, soldier, soldier won’t you marry me/ with your musket fife and drum?
Oh no, miss maid I cannot marry you/ for I have a wife of my own…
The series was a big success and its two everyman stars were not your archetypal leading men…
And perhaps Soldier Soldier’s success gives us a slew of military themed dramas in its wake; Sean Bean (Game Of Thrones again!) in Sharpe, Ioan Gruffudd in Hornblower and Ross Kemp in Ultimate Force.
I sort of remember the Karaoke episode echoing Maverick & Goose from Top Gun. The premise of revealing vulnerability behind the macho armour that all alpha-male types do work so hard to protect. All the girls swoon, and lo and behold Simon Cowell gets the alpha-males in the studio. Stock & Aitken put together a backing track possibly created entirely by computer, and the public in their droves hoover it up and propel it to the top. The very same common people indirectly referred to by Jarvis, keep Pulp at #2. Deduce what you will from that.
Injustice it may seem, but oldies radio has come down firmly on the side of Pulp in the long run, if you considered both songs on the strength of radio play alone.
Here’s a thing… is there an instance of one particular song performed by different artists getting to the top or near the top of the Billboard Chart?
As mentioned upthread, Jerome has more than atoned for KEEPING COMMON PEOPLE OFF NUMBER ONE, THE BASTARD by being ace in Game of Thrones (which, other than Doctor Who OBVIOUSLY is the Greatest Show Ever Made), and I can even sort of forgive Robson for KEEPING COMMON PEOPLE OFF NUMBER ONE, THE BASTARD for being in the likeable Being Human.
It’s odd, though, because this DOMINATED the charts. I didn’t watch Soldier, Soldier, and was shocked when it got to number one. As for the song – meh, Kareoke, a good song, but done blandly. And it KEPT COMMON PEOPLE (which I can’t really say anything new about, suffice to say it’s easily a 10) OFF NUMBER ONE, THE BASTARD.
Oh, and I rather like HMTMKMKM – it would prob get a 6 or 7 from me.
Re 38: I could be wrong but I think The Locomotion has been a Billboard #1 for Little Eva, Grand Funk Railroad and Kylie. The Twist was number one twice, both times by Chubby Checker.
Re 33: I did know, but only because you told me. And I’d forgotten the answer. I feel ashamed (but not as ashamed as Kat).
Re 28: Very good. Sam Cooke could sing the proverbial phone directory etcet.
Ooops – forgot to say. This one’s a two (hence my having to revise my mark for Dreamer!)
My nan use to complain that one of them never looked at the camera when he sang.
#41 And with that 2 overhauls St Winifred’s School Choir on the Readers’ Bottom 100.
For a little while there, R&J were on a flat 1 from the readers. I think I noted 200 views and still a flat 1 before it started to uptick (not that 200 views equals anything like 200 people and therefore 200 marks).
This was No.1 during my finals and when I left University, incidentally. I don’t remember it in that context at all – it was all about “Common People”, which I do remember, sitting around discussing the politics of it on the steps of an Oxford College Quad, on a gorgeous evening, subsidised beer firmly in hand. While the people in the discussion were from a pretty wide variety of backgrounds, it still seemed incongruous.
I’d like to add that Billy Hicks’ description of “Common People” @19 is a thing of beauty. Thanks Billy.
Oh boy. I was waiting for this one because I was curious what kind of reaction it would get, and I certainly wasn’t disappointed….
First, as an American, I of course never actually heard this record until I found it on Youtube a couple days ago (more on that below). That being said, my fascination with the UK chart was never quite the same after this one. By this point, my favorite radio show, UK Chart Attack, was off the air, and I was mainly following the chart via the weekly postings of James Masterton (noticed his name hasn’t come up here before – is there a reason for that?). So I was aware only that a karaoke version of Unchained Melody by two TV actors somehow debuted at number one. This of course sounded totally ridiculous to US-me, but I had managed to look past the likes of Blobby and Man U before. It was only after it then proceeded to become the biggest UK seller of the decade to date that I realized the Hot 100’s endless Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men wasn’t so bad after all. Suffice it to say that I continued to follow the UK chart, and will continue to post here, but again, it was never quite the same for me.
So as for the recording itself, I listened to both songs on Youtube a couple days ago for the first time. And while I wasn’t as horrified as I could have been, I was very underwhelmed. I mean, if you want to buy Unchained Melody, why not just get the Righteous Brothers version?? Of course this could be said of many, many remakes. I guess I just don’t get “it”.
Finally, I did listen to “Common People” for the first time a few years ago. A *great* record that really deserved to be UK#1, and I wish it had reached these shores back in 95. The fact that these two doofuses blocked both it, and later Oasis’s masterpiece, is about as great a travesty as one will ever find on a music chart.
Re. James Masterton – no slight intended! I didn’t read his stuff though, and while I *was* on the Internet at this point I was much more on comics USENET than music USENET – the University servers didn’t get the alt. hierarchy. More on the mid-90s web in a bit though, probably the next Oasis No.1.
We are a martial nation — as peoples all over the globe have had sour reason to know for centuries now — so it’s actually a bit strange that we don’t have a fvckton *MORE* TV drama based in this general area. As far as I remember it — of course I watched it, I watch everything — Soldier Soldier was pretty much in the slipstream of Auf Wiedersehen Pet or London’s Burning (not to mention any number of hospital drama and The Bill) without being as good as any of them (or anyway as memorable). Which is a pity, because it seems to me that the peacetime army is every bit as rich a topic for serial drama, as, say, British Gästarbeiten: the treatment needn’t be “hard-hitting” or “issues-based” — AWP was in a sense about class and unemployment (certainly it wasn’t stupid about these), but it was mainly about a mixed gang of ne’er-do-wells getting into ridiculous scrapes overseas.
The record is bad and Stock Aitken Cowell Robson and Jerome should feel bad, but I don’t hear (or recall) much cause for worry that show or song were a “noxious mixture of sentimentality, romance, nostalgia… and patriotism”, or the revenant voice of the reactionary silent majority. OK I’ll spot you sentimentality, but the actual real sound of noxious patriotism is surely not this: which is a 60s pop classic sung karaoke-style by two actors! With a cynically piss-poor arrangement. Spivs are not patriots (even if some self-declared patriots are spivs).
(This next is a bit off point, since as people have pointed out there were no hot wars at the time — there were peace-keeping forces in Yugoslavia, and of course troops stationed in Northern Ireland — but the kinds of people who might actually have strong sentimental reasons to buy such records, families of soldiers overseas, in other words, are by no means necessarily a lock for jingo politics, which tend to be much more brashly vicarious: the busiest flag-wavers are generally sending other families’ children off to face the cannons’ roar… But I actually suspect this social group and this phenom don’t have much to do with this record: this isn’t a forces wives charity release.)
Soldier Soldier was a popular show of several years’ standing, and this record recapped a popular — climactic? — episode, starring two likeably handsome and cheeky young fellers: reasons enough many people bought it, surely, recalling that they’d enjoyed the episode. And reason enough that it’s not been taken to the nation’s heart, also, because I suspect it’s pretty shoddy memorabilia for said episode. If the show was at all obnoxious in this vein, I’d probably remember it much better: I think it was cautiously clichéd at best and worst, and not very clearly pro- or anti-etablishment.
(Tho I’d actually quite like to see comparative figures — of the ordinary viewing audience of a well liked but not startling mid-week drama serial, compared to how many sales make up a number one in any given week — before I signed off on this as the main impetus for its sales. And the GBP did come back for more, which maybe undermines the argument I’m making a little.)
Tom @ 3 – and you’ve got to do the song a couple more times too I think. It is a good song, one definition of which is one that can survive very different interpretations, but it doesn’t survive this one.
I preferred Robson Green as the porter in early Casualty. He should have stayed there.
“The 1994 UK viewing figures had climbed to 16.1 million – an extraordinary 65% of the viewing share” – J Flynn’s website.
If true this really is whopping, even for pre-Internet. I suspect this was a special or Xmas episode? But anyhow it was a success.
Number one sales at this point? Not sure – THIS sold a bit over a million I think, across its 7 weeks and a few declining ones after. It’s definitely selling on the basis of TV – ‘shoddy memorabilia’ will become Cowell’s stock in trade, as I suggest in the review.
BUT the public are not rubes, or at least not always, and are happy to reject TV stars making singles before and after, so I doubt the particular subject matter (and VE Day anniversary, and choice of songs) hurt this one. And I DO think there was a bit of patriotic play going on in the waning Major years (and not just Cool Britannia) – this is the year Portillo did his “S! A! S!” routine at the Tory conference, isn’t it?