Posts tagged crackerjack

Manchester 1980 and the music world is rocked by the death of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis.

But , as the saying goes , every cloud has a silver lining and as a young singer about town I fancied my chances of filling the tragic frontman’s boots.

The remaining Joy Division lads - Hooky , Barney Rubble and the other one - held a series of auditions around the north of England , and after impressing them with my version of ’ Oops Outside Your Head ’ I was pretty confident about getting the gig.Even a recent chronic bout of hemerroids couldn’t stop me from feeling pretty good about my chances.

There was just one problem. Another singer called Stu Francis was also on their shortlist - and he’d done his homework.

Hooky had already told me that the band wanted to change direction musically and produce more danceable stuff. What I didn’t know was that Stu Francis had already written a song designed to impress the JD lads … and it was personal .

Francis had been told about my little problem and couldn’t resist alluding to it in his song .

In the end neither of us got the job. They thought it would be cheaper to carry on as they were . But I had the last laugh….

Stu Francis’s two female dancers and me ended up at The Flying Horse in Weatherfield and it wasn’t me grapes that ended up getting squeezed…..it was me nuts !

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Waiting For Glazo In 1981 I was acting in avant-garde theatre doing a production of Samuel Beckett’s play about the existential angst of constipation: Krapp’s Last Crap. Beckett was a difficult character, who wrote these dense, miserable plays about nothing -much, yet craved to have his work shown on mainstream television. He used to write scripts for programmes such as Emmerdale Farm and Crossroads and send them off to the producers in a vain hope that they might get made. I remember him showing me a script he’d done for Emmerdale. Mr Wilkes and Amos Brearley spent the entire episode in a ginnell by the Woolpack discussing the relentless cylical nature of misery, whilst, next door, Dolly Skilbeck knitted the vicar a bobble hat. Unsurprisingly it didn’t impress anyone and within a few weeks the rejection letters started piling up. His Crossroads script involving Amy Turtle’s silent 17 hour chess game with Miss Diane didn’t find any favour at ATV .  Beckett was a bit disheartened after this so I suggested that he try his hand at comedy .  Within a couple of days he’d banged out a script for popular Friday children’s TV show Crackerjack. Well , needless to say the Crackerjack guys loved it. Don McLean - fresh from singing his hit single American Pie on Top Of The Pops - couldn’t wait to get stuck in to Beckett’s joke- fest. With the help of funnymen Peter Glaze and  Ed ” Pisspot ” Stewart  Beckett’s hilarious sketches and routines brought smiles to the faces of pre-pubescents everywhere. Who could forget the classic window cleaning sketch where Peter Glaze got stuck up a ladder whilst having an internal dialogue about the of inevitability of eternal misery before ’ accidentally ’ dropping his chamois onto Stewpot’s bonce ? Or when special guest star Bernie Clifton on his comedy ostrich knocked over a bucket of soapy water - symbolising the stagnation of the human soul - onto Don McLean’s dungarees…. ….and to cap it off , in grand Crackerjack tradition ,the cast shoe-horned popular chart hits into a rousing musical finale . Unfortunately some daft berk had mistaken the Punk Charts for the real Top 40 and it meant that the songs at the end included Crass’s ’ What The Fuck ’ , The 4 Skins’ ’ Clockwork Skinhead ’ and ’ How I Wrote Elastic Man ’ by The Fall.

Waiting For Glazo

In 1981 I was acting in avant-garde theatre doing a production of Samuel Beckett’s play about the existential angst of constipation: Krapp’s Last Crap.

Beckett was a difficult character, who wrote these dense, miserable plays about nothing -much, yet craved to have his work shown on mainstream television. He used to write scripts for programmes such as Emmerdale Farm and Crossroads and send them off to the producers in a vain hope that they might get made.

I remember him showing me a script he’d done for Emmerdale. Mr Wilkes and Amos Brearley spent the entire episode in a ginnell by the Woolpack discussing the relentless cylical nature of misery, whilst, next door, Dolly Skilbeck knitted the vicar a bobble hat.

Unsurprisingly it didn’t impress anyone and within a few weeks the rejection letters started piling up. His Crossroads script involving Amy Turtle’s silent 17 hour chess game with Miss Diane didn’t find any favour at ATV . 

Beckett was a bit disheartened after this so I suggested that he try his hand at comedy .  Within a couple of days he’d banged out a script for popular Friday children’s TV show Crackerjack.

Well , needless to say the Crackerjack guys loved it. Don McLean - fresh from singing his hit single American Pie on Top Of The Pops - couldn’t wait to get stuck in to Beckett’s joke- fest. With the help of funnymen Peter Glaze and  Ed ” Pisspot ” Stewart  Beckett’s hilarious sketches and routines brought smiles to the faces of pre-pubescents everywhere.

Who could forget the classic window cleaning sketch where Peter Glaze got stuck up a ladder whilst having an internal dialogue about the of inevitability of eternal misery before ’ accidentally ’ dropping his chamois onto Stewpot’s bonce ? Or when special guest star Bernie Clifton on his comedy ostrich knocked over a bucket of soapy water - symbolising the stagnation of the human soul - onto Don McLean’s dungarees….

….and to cap it off , in grand Crackerjack tradition ,the cast shoe-horned popular chart hits into a rousing musical finale . Unfortunately some daft berk had mistaken the Punk Charts for the real Top 40 and it meant that the songs at the end included Crass’s ’ What The Fuck ’ , The 4 Skins’ ’ Clockwork Skinhead ’ and ’ How I Wrote Elastic Man ’ by The Fall.

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