Thursday 11 August 2011

The Alternative TOTP Canon #30: Terry Wogan - The Floral Dance

Again not exactly unknown, largely because it's Terry Wogan and nothing he could ever do would pass by unchecked, but it's classic Tel, pretending he's not entirely sure what he's doing here but he'll give it a go anyway. Camera cues missed, audience members reacted to for imagined slights, corpsing... you've rarely seen anyone less ready, odd for his stature even back then, but that's what makes it fun. Incidentally this was so rushed out that the Brighouse And Rastrick Brass Band version was still nine places higher in this week, and the week after this a record that had been steadily climbing suddenly fell fifteen places.



Seventeen years later, he self-effacedly made jungle substantially less massive.

5 comments:

Arthur Nibble said...

I knew the S+++house and Gastric (as my school mates called them) reached number 2, but I'd forgotten they spent six whole weeks stuck at number 2 behind 'Mull of Kintyre' - if ever you needed a reason for punk to happen?

Chris Brown said...

Except that those weeks were all over Christmas 1977, ie after punk was generally believed to have happened. Admittedly Never Mind The Bollocks was T10 in the album chart for all but one of those weeks.

Mark Radbourne said...

As far as I can remember the single actually came about after Wogan had sung over the Brighouse & Rastrick Band's version several times while playing it on his Radio 2 breakfast show.

wilberforce said...

a real sore point with me is when mega-loaded celebrities only donate their time to charidee events, and expect us penniless plebs who made them rich in the first place to stump up the required readies (btw, how much of the career-boosting post-live aid sales revenue of the back-catalogues of queen and U2 ever got donated towards feeding starving ethiopians?), but in wogan's case i heard that he actually asks for (and gets) a five-figure fee to participate in "children in need"...!

on a lighter note, it was rumoured that wogan owned several syrups with each slightly longer than the other, that he wore in turn for a week or so to give the inpression that his hair was actually growing before getting another haircut...

Anonymous said...

Roald Dahl in his autobiography tells of a fellow ship passenger whose name was U N Savory (honest!)who did the lengthening syrups trick.