It must be the onset of Christmas that’s making me think of old times and old songs, and I don’t just mean “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” or “While Shepherds Washed their Socks by Night.”
I’ve had a great old music-hall comedy number going round my head all day. Don’t ask me what triggered it, I haven’t heard or sung it for years, but I used to love singing it in the days when I belonged to a concert party and we toured round raising money for charity. It’s a darkly humorous tale of noir crime, and it might make a good horror movie. (Probably already has.) The scene: an old-fashioned fish-and-chip shop. The cast: a chorus of lovable (I think) cockney characters singing to a waltz-time tune:
Put away the chip-chopper, Charlie,
We’re frying the guv’nor tonight.
There he was standing a-chopping up chips
When he puts his foot out and suddenly slips.
Right into the boiling hot dripping,
He’s tumbled in heels over head…
So put away the chip-chopper, Charlie,
We’re serving the guv’nor instead.
There are several verses – if you google, you’ll find Max Bygraves singing it on YouTube, which makes a nice change from his soppier ditties, like “I’m a blue tooth-brush, you’re a pink tooth-brush” (or is it the other way round?) But I’m sure it goes back way beyond good old Max.
Remembering entertainers called Max, here’s another bit of music-hall nonsense, more of a poem than an aria, from the “cheeky chappie” Max Miller. He was a star comedian, a master of innuendo who sailed very close to the wind of correctness in 1930s and 1940s Britain, and in so doing proved that you don’t have to be aggressively shocking to be funny…something that some present-day so-called entertainers could do to take on board.
One of my favourites is this - shall we call it an ode to romance?
I like the girls who do,
I like the girls who don’t.
I hate the girl who says she will
And then she says she won’t.
But the girl I like the best –
And I know you’ll say I’m right –
Is the girl who says she never will,
But looks as though she…all right, that’s enough of that!
Quite enough, Max, I agree.
Oh dear, I’ve still got “Chip-chopper Charlie” in my head. Maybe I’ll try a couple of verses of “While Shepherds Washed…”
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