It's over - let it go

Continuing my trip back through the 1963 album charts.

21/04/63 : That Was The Week That Was - Various Artists

Some comedy for a change - it will be interesting to see how dated this has become.

Well, a lot of it is political and quite a bit of it is class based, so those aspects have certainly dated - but my overall feeling was one of confusion because there was so much of it I just didn't understand how it was supposed to be funny. The general vibe is one of clever wittyness, but there was almost a complete absence of laughs on my part - it wasn't so much that the jokes weren't landing, but that I just didn't recognise where the jokes were supposed to be. So, all in all, this was a most peculiar experience - it was nice to recognise Roy Kinnear and Willie Rushton's voices though. 

We're at #17 in the chart this week on the last week of a nine week run, with it having peaked at #11 in its third week. The top five this week were Cliff Richard, The Beatles, Buddy Holly (starting a run of six weeks at #3), Elvis Presley and Frank Ifield and there were no new entries in the chart this week.

Wikipedia has quite an entry on the program which explains it was a big deal back in the day. It was rare because it didn't try to hide the fact that it was a TV program and whilst it was political, it wasn't party political (basically having a go at everyone) and it wasn't always as balanced as the BBC tried to be, with it deciding (controversially?) that things like racism were actually bad and no effort should be made to defend them. It had quite the list of scriptwriters as well, including John Betjeman, John Bird, Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Peter Cook, Roald Dahl, Gerald Kaufman, Frank Muir, David Nobbs, Denis Norden, Bill Oddie, Dennis Potter, Eric Sykes, Kenneth Tynan, and Keith Waterhouse!

It also sent me down a somewhat unexpected Daphne Moon shaped rabbit hole - because I learned that Millicent Martin (who was an integral part of the show and sang the theme tune every week) played Daphne's mum on Frasier - she's still with us at the grand old age of '92 and was last seen in Grace and Frankie in '22, so she might not have finished with us yet. I also learned that Daphne's dad was played by Brian Cox - he's popped up in some odd things over the years. She also had seven brothers, a couple of whom were played by Richard E Grant (with a posh accent) and Robbie Coltrane (with an unintelligible Lancashire accent)  who I'd completely forgotten - and another by Anthony LaPaglia, who unfortunately I hadn't because of his dreadful "Cockney" accent. Daphne, of course, had a "Manchester" accent despite Jane Leeves (who got her start as one of Hills Angels and also appeared in Monty Python's The Meaning Of Life) coming from the South of England.

discogs.com only has two copies available, both from the US and costing $9-10. I struggle to imagine too many people are looking for copies of it these days though except as a historical piece - if I didn't understand it then I'm intrigued as to what proper youngsters would make of it (but I don't think I'l try playing it to my daughters to find out). 

28/04/65 - Completely inessential