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Monday 24th February 2020

6278/19208
Once again being a monthly badger paid off BIG TIME. The April 6th RHLSTP is now totally sold out and I can reveal to you non-badge scum that the guests will be Lolly Adefope plus Adam AND Joe. Three pounds a month (or more if you like) and this isn’t even the best benefit, but looks like you need to be a badger if you want to see the high profile guests (or just take a punt on tickets before guests are revealed). It’s another great bit of news for my annus mirabilis.
And still five guests to announce for London, plus for the sold out gigs in Birmingham and Norwich. Book now for the non-sold out ones.

John O’Farrell tweeted that his history podcast was about British fascist Oswald Moseley which prompted others to tweet lyrics from a quite obscure Not The Nine O Clock News song from the time of his death. I found I could still remember all of it word for word, having learned it by listening to my “Hedgehog Sandwich” LP. Actually to begin with it was Phil Fry’s LP but so keen was I to lift the stylus to catch stuff that I had missed that I scratched the record and had to buy it off him. The song was largely made up of quotes from his obituaries and I found I still knew them off by heart - “Brilliant man in the commons, compassionate and humane - a man of genuine courage and inspiring leadership.” “Thought to have been the most handsome and gifted British political leader of the 20th Century. Brilliant debater. Lucid and compassionate.”
It may not be 100% but how strange is it that my brain has hung on to this. At the time I would have had no real idea who Moseley was and wouldn’t have found the swastika emblazoned screen as shocking as some older viewers. I probably didn’t even get that it was about the hypocrisy of journalists, choosing to be so generous to a bad guy, It’s a very catchy punky song (disappointingly Mel Smith looks like a real punk rather than a Mel Smith punk, but I am not sure he ever really looked like a Mel Smith punk and I have unfairly decried him), but it’s still remarkable that my brain hasn’t vacuumed out that piece of info, instead choosing to make me forget the plot of every book and film I’ve read or seen in the last five years.
Someone admitted that they thought the bit that went, “When they heard he was dead, this is what the papers all said.” Actually was “That’s why the paint’s so sad”. Back in the old days we had no way of checking the lyrics of a song and often just made our best punt at them.  Even if that was nonsense.
The other day I was remembering that I thought the lyrics to Hong Kong Phooey were “when the doing (the noise doing, not the verb) is rup, he’s super tough.” I just thought the doing is rup was an American phrase I didn’t understand. Clearly the lyric must have been “when the going gets tough”, but for years I thought it was the doing is rup. Not doing. Doing. Like a spring.
There can’t be too many of these. But Tony Deakin tweeted me to say “ For 10 years this man @MrGKMartin sang “Here’s to them, underneath that furmenson” during Band Aid’s Feed The World. When his mistake was pointed out and asked what he thought a furmenson was he replied “Some sort of African tent”. Which really made me laugh. Both the mishearing and the stretch to make it work.
We are all idiots.

I didn’t get much work done.



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