Honey's off, dear

Continuing my trip back through the 1959 album charts.

06/12/59 : The Best Of Sellers - Peter Sellers


This is my third visit with Mr Sellers and the results so far have been very mixed - but this is the best of his output, so it's gonna be great, right?

Well - it's not dreadful, but the sketches are generally way too long and they're very much going after targets that just aren't relevant any more. I just about understand some of it because I'm very old, but the only way I'm getting belly laughs out of this is to play it to my daughters just to watch their faces. Having said that, I did have the odd chuckle at "Balham - Gateway To The South", "I'm So Ashamed" is well done and "Party Political Speech" is still surprisingly relevant, consisting of a speech which contains a lot of words, but no useful content (I'm looking at you, Boris). I can imagine that this was different and actually quite daring at the time, so I'm happy to just say "times are different now" and move on - after all, it was 65 years ago now!

We're at #3 in the charts this week on his 18th week of a 20 week run, with this being as high as it ever got. This was actually its second run out of seven - it managed 47 weeks in total between '59 and '61. The rest of the top five were a soundtrack-heavy South Pacific, Cliff, My Fair Lady and Gigi and there's one new entry for, errr, Peter Sellers (#9) - Songs For Swinging Sellers, which sounds absolutely appalling, so hopefully we'll avoid it. There are, of course, no named women artists in the chart.

Wikipedia tells me that, despite the title, this was his first studio album and was produced by George Martin (the title was used because EMI were unsure that anyone would want "a whole half hour" of studio comedy, but George insisted it would all be OK) and is allegedly the first British comedy album created in a recording studio (as opposed to for a radio show, I guess). There are some familiar names involved - "Balham - Gateway To The South" was written by Frank Muir and Dennis Norden and "Auntie Rotter" was written by Bob Monkhouse. Prior to its release, Sellers wasn't convinced it was going to succeed but it got great critical reviews ("one sidesplitting comic confection after another") and as we've already seen, it did very well commercially.

"Customers also listened to" Max Miller, Roy Hudd, Tommy Cooper and Terry Scott. The Terry Scott album is him singing Scottish and Irish songs which I had to check out to see if it was as bad as I expected - and let me assure you it was considerably worse. I guess I "enjoyed" listening to Mr Sellers's effort, but mostly as an antique curio - it certainly feels very much of its time.

29/11/59 - Surprisingly not dated
13/12/59 - Truly dreadful

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