Feeling My Age

Photo taken with Instagram

Wife just told me the silliest joke I’ve heard in ages…
Q: What do you call someone who cuts hair between two rows of houses?
A: Ali Baba.

Phot taken with Instagram

In view of his huge national popularity following the battle of Waterloo, the Duke Of Wellington was pressed to accept the post of Prime Minister. After his first cabinet meeting, somebody asked him how it had gone.  “It was the most extraordinary thing” said Wellesley. in genuine puzzlement. “I gave them their orders. then all of them wanted to talk about it.”

When a friend told me this anecdote today it reminded of the Spitting Image sketch where The Iron Lady takes her cabinet out to a restaurant:

Waitress: Would you like to order, sir?

Thatcher: Yes. I will have the steak.

Waitress: How would you like it?

Thatcher: Oh, raw, please.

Waitress: And what about the Vegetables?

Thatcher: Oh, they’ll have the same as me!

Wife steered me towards this 1973 public safety film from the Central Office Of Information: which the government closed down at the end of last week.

Some of its films were highly memorable – though not always for the right reasons – Dark And Lonely Water offered priceless comedy value, even at the time.

“Sensible children… I have no power over them” mutters The Spirit Of Dark And Lonely Water from beneath his dark and lonely hood.

“Oi luk, vair’s samwam en va wor-ahh!” comments  Hordriss The Confuser on YouTube. ” I remember when nearly every child in documentaries or public service announcements had an estuary accent which could strip paint from steel.”

But some of the COI’s intentionally funny films were genuinely hilarious, and put their point across all the more effectively. 1945’s “Coughs & Sneezes” was an alltime favourite…

Harry Worth’s shop window routine – from the opening credits of his TV series “Here’s Harry” – was justly famous and of course we all tried it for ourselves at the time. The uncredited theme music was Comedy Hour by Ivor Slaney. Until searching for him on YouTube this morning I’d forgotten how genuinely likeable he was. But this clip advertising a compilation DVD of his later work brought it all back…

Previous TV Themes Of The Week:
Top Cat
Grandstand
Dixon Of Dock Green
Steptoe & Son
That Was The Week That Was
Maigret
Z Cars

Child A has only just told me about Horse_eComics. It’s a Tumblog inspired by @Horse_eBooks – a spam twitterbot that, in an effort to bypass spam filters, posts random excerpts from its online book database.

Horse_eComics creator Burton Durand illustrates some of the tweetbot’s more gnomic utterances, resulting – as he rightly says – in pure comedic genius.

Rolf Harris performing his hilarious Jake The Peg routine in 1969.

Over the years Rolf’s got slicker – and better at remembering the words: there’s a more recent version here where he’s got the funny business off to a T.

But he’s also still doing the inexplicable and faintly disturbing cod-Yiddish accent. What’s that all about, eh?

Wife gave me the latest Armstrong & Miller DVD this Christmas, which includes their daft and hilarious song The Farmers Market:

Take me out to the ring road
Down beside the LaserQuest
A little slice of Arcadia
Out the back of the Toys’R’Us

Cos there the horny hands of toil
Sell muddy veg and rapeseed oil
Brought straight from the farm
…for people like us

There’s ostrich steaks, smoked venison,
And eggs with shit and feathers on;
There’s cauliflowers
With gritty bits in between

If normal markets turn your head
Then wheel your bugaboo here instead –
It’s the furthest thing from Eastenders
You’ve ever seen

The Farmer’s Market, the Farmers’ Market,
You drive here in the Volvo and you park it
Market! the Farmers’ Market!
We find any old crap and sell it in a basket.

Kumquats, bananas
And cheese from Southern France
Brought right here all freshly from the ground

We’ve got cupcakes from our cupcake field
Just harvested this morning
They’re yours for a steal at six for thirty pounds.
(I’ll take the lot!)

Market! the Farmers’ Market!
I’m no more a farmer than Morten Harkett
But here are some fools and here’s their money
The two are so easily parted
We’ll soon have enough to buy a farm
[click for more lyrics…]

When Richard Pryor Live In Concert was first released on VHS in 1979 me and my mates bought a cassette of the soundtrack and listened to it so many times we could recite pretty much the whole thing by heart. To this day I haven’t heard or seen anything to touch it.

This clip can only give a flavour of Richard Pryor‘s unique comic genius. To appreciate it fully you need to witness the longform performance to get the cumulative effect as he draws you into his world.

Luckily you can now buy a remastered DVD of the whole 78 minute show on Amazon for a paltry £2.99. It’s a crying shame – and an incredible bargain: I’ve just bought a new copy so we can chuckle at it all over again.

“There are two things about getting old” cracked the well-preserved female comic on American TV: “Number one, you lose your memory…” (pause) “…and I don’t recall the other thing” (audience erupts with laughter).

Was it Lily Tomlin, Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers – or someone else entirely? Unfortunately I can’t remember who it was, what show she was on, or even when and where I saw it.  Without further information to narrow it down even Google – the amnesiac’s friend – is no help.

An American friend of a certain age once recommended Ginkgo biloba capsules to me as a treatment for for failing memory – she’d been using them for months and had noticed a real improvement. So I went out and bought a big bottle of pills, but could never remember to take them.

Exactly how long ago this was escapes me, but it occurs to me now that it might worth trying them again. Only question being – where did I put the damn bottle.