Mrs Robinson was attacked by a killer whale

Continuing my trip back through the 1981 album charts.

25/10/81 : Hedgehog Sandwich - Not The Nine O'Clock News

We've not had a comedy album in a while - and I'm pretty certain this is the most recent one we've seen chronologically. I was just a bit too young for it at the time but I'm aware of their best work retrospectively - I'm expecting this to be a mix of chuckles and "huh?"s

Yeah - it's got some classics on here which are still pretty funny and you still see quoted from time to time. "Constable Savage" still hits harder than it should ("Savage, would I be correct in assuming that Mr Kodogo is a coloured gentleman?") and "HiFi Shop" has only become more relevant as technology has taken over the world. Some of the sketches have obviously dated eg they do like to have a go at Ronald Reagan (although some of their complaints seem amusingly mild these days) and their accurate send-up of That's Life isn't going to mean anything to the kids (but Pamela Stephenson does do a cracking impression of Esther Rantzen). There were also more musical numbers than I was expecting - somewhat surprisingly, they don't work as well as many of the sketches without visual accompaniment but "I Like Trucking" and "England My Leotard" (with vocals by Kate Bush) still work OK for me ("Baronet Oswald Ernold Mosley" feels like it would have been odd even at the time though). Overall, I was pleased to catch up with this and think it mostly hadn't dated as much as I was expecting, which is a credit to the writing.

We're at a surprisingly high #5 in the chart this week on their third week of a surprisingly long 24 week run, with this being as high as it got. The rest of the top five were The Human League, Shakin' Stevens, The Police and the Blondie best-of (a new entry) with the next highest new entry being Elvis Costello (#8).

Wikipedia doesn't have an entry for the album, but the show's entry is quite lengthy and has some interesting stuff in there - Victoria Wood was invited to join the show (to be "the woman") but she turned them down so Pamela Stephenson got the job after she met the show's producer John Lloyd at a party. It also tells us that they had another album make the top ten, so we may see them again in '80. There's no word on the critical reviews, but I was surprised to see we do have commercial success elsewhere - it got to #89 in Australia.

discogs.com tells us you can pick up a version of this for a quid, but if you want to splash out a whole £16.99 on it then that option is available to you - but I think you'd be mad. I can see it holds fond memories for plenty in places but I struggle to imagine too many people listen to the whole thing these days.

01/11/81 - Misses the mark for me

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