My first Cheeseybeat for a long time. I bought this mono 7" 45 in a charity shop today just because I loved the artwork. There's no copyright date, though www.45cat.com dates it around 1967. The music sounds like the library music used in any of the myriad of unfunny British 'comedies' of the period; there is also no mention of who the relentlessly cheerful voice-over artist is - but he sounds like one of those voices that, in my youth, caused much hilarity up and down the land by pronouncing street names wrong in cinema commercials.
In the olden days, before the internet, local firms used to advertise to cinema audiences via the medium of the off-the-shelf advert. It went something like this: local Indian restaurant round the corner from the cinema would get sold a ready-made, generic Indian restaurant advert consisting of several shots of a happy white couple enjoying an Indian meal while a voice over enumerated the many pleasures available. At the end of the advert, a title card with the name of the restaurant appeared and, if the restaurant could afford it, the title card was read out, address and all, by a different upbeat voice over artist than the one who had narrated the advert . the copy usually ending with the line: "Not five minutes from this cinema!". I never understood why the Indian restaurants etc. did this. The adverts were always awful. Most of them looked as if they had been filmed at least 20 years before and just screamed in your face with untrendy horribleness. Horrible wallpapers and suits, horrible 'advert acting', horribly uncomfortable haircuts. Watching one was like watching Abigail's Party in miniature.
Adverts for carpet shops were always really hard to look at.
They were fascinatingly kitsch. One joyous aspect of them came about as a result of them all being made in London. I guess down in the basement of Pearl and Dean was a little recording booth and every Tuesday some failed actor in a cravat would deliver the week's crop of Bengal Stars, Acme Carpets, and Fred's Taxis' scripts into a microphone before he was given his bottle of gin and told to come back next week. Being from London, and being an actor, he would read the script as it was given to him in a suitably upbeat manner and in a very southern British accent. All over the country, for years after, people would sit in the cinema and squirm with embarrassment, pain, resentment as his delivery of local names came out mangled into local incomprehensibility by being read out the way they were spelled. To give a couple of examples from Hull, where I lived for a long time: Whitefriargate, the old main street in the town centre, is not pronounced "White Friar Gate" by anyone who lives in Hull, it's pronounced "Whi'frigut"; Hessle Road road loses its H and the Ss get very like Zs and comes out as "'ezzul rooad"; both the As in Anlaby are short. Whatching the adverts in the cinema back then we never knew where they were talking about! "Where's 'An-Labey' road? Where's 'Hess-elle' ?"
What the advertisers made of all this I don't know but we were pissing ourselves in the cheap seats.
There are four tracks on each side (or rather three and a half, because one tune appears on both sides) and they are all pretty short so I just made one MP3 of the whole of each side. Enjoy. Knees up! And left and right and left...
In the olden days, before the internet, local firms used to advertise to cinema audiences via the medium of the off-the-shelf advert. It went something like this: local Indian restaurant round the corner from the cinema would get sold a ready-made, generic Indian restaurant advert consisting of several shots of a happy white couple enjoying an Indian meal while a voice over enumerated the many pleasures available. At the end of the advert, a title card with the name of the restaurant appeared and, if the restaurant could afford it, the title card was read out, address and all, by a different upbeat voice over artist than the one who had narrated the advert . the copy usually ending with the line: "Not five minutes from this cinema!". I never understood why the Indian restaurants etc. did this. The adverts were always awful. Most of them looked as if they had been filmed at least 20 years before and just screamed in your face with untrendy horribleness. Horrible wallpapers and suits, horrible 'advert acting', horribly uncomfortable haircuts. Watching one was like watching Abigail's Party in miniature.
Adverts for carpet shops were always really hard to look at.
They were fascinatingly kitsch. One joyous aspect of them came about as a result of them all being made in London. I guess down in the basement of Pearl and Dean was a little recording booth and every Tuesday some failed actor in a cravat would deliver the week's crop of Bengal Stars, Acme Carpets, and Fred's Taxis' scripts into a microphone before he was given his bottle of gin and told to come back next week. Being from London, and being an actor, he would read the script as it was given to him in a suitably upbeat manner and in a very southern British accent. All over the country, for years after, people would sit in the cinema and squirm with embarrassment, pain, resentment as his delivery of local names came out mangled into local incomprehensibility by being read out the way they were spelled. To give a couple of examples from Hull, where I lived for a long time: Whitefriargate, the old main street in the town centre, is not pronounced "White Friar Gate" by anyone who lives in Hull, it's pronounced "Whi'frigut"; Hessle Road road loses its H and the Ss get very like Zs and comes out as "'ezzul rooad"; both the As in Anlaby are short. Whatching the adverts in the cinema back then we never knew where they were talking about! "Where's 'An-Labey' road? Where's 'Hess-elle' ?"
What the advertisers made of all this I don't know but we were pissing ourselves in the cheap seats.
There are four tracks on each side (or rather three and a half, because one tune appears on both sides) and they are all pretty short so I just made one MP3 of the whole of each side. Enjoy. Knees up! And left and right and left...
A Side
1 Punchbowl - Arlon and Woodman
2 Bright As Day - Gordon Franks
3 Pretzel Twist - Solal, Lafitte
4 Jogging Along - Jack Dorsey
B Side
1 Girl On The Move - John Hawksworth
2 Trafalgar Twist - Solal and Lafitte
3 Bright As Day - Gordon Franks
4 Punchbowl - Arlon and Woodman
More photos of the sleeve and discs here:
http://www.45cat.com/record/wep1139
*Trade Mark
