Mark liked it and used it, although it is hardly a laugh out loud song. I think he used it as a tone down.watershed song. It ran for a while I recall, despite my profound inability to spell Nagorno-Karabakh back then. I might be the only NewsRevue lyricist to have used that place name and attempted to rhyme with it more than once.
This is not the most profound song I ever wrote. The electronic file is dated just before Christmas 1992. The song premiered in the first run of 1993, about one month later.
As part of my research for the lyrics that follow, Janie and I did procure and attempt to use such a contraption on one occasion. How we laughed. The things we put ourselves through for my NewsRevue art.
♬ INSIDE A FEMIDOM ♬
(To the Tune of “Under the Moon of Love”)
VERSE 1
Lets go for a little shag, and use a Femidom,
Just me and you and a plastic bag, lets use a Femidom;
I wanna lover {wanna lover} with a cover {with a cover},
Like a great big Wellington,
Little darling, let’s poke and stoke, inside a Femidom {a Femidom}
VERSE 2
Loving you is so fantastic, inside a Femidom,
With your coat of thermoplastic, known as the Femidom;
This vaginal {this vaginal} polyvinyl {polyvinyl},
Is an artificial con,
Little darling let’s bonk and tonk, inside a Femidom {a Femidom}
MIDDLE BIT 1
We only bought the one, because the price is so steep,
By the time you got it on, I’d long since gone off to sleep;
{I think I would rather use my hand}
VERSE 3
Bring the groceries from the shops, inside a Femidom,
A pork salami and sirloin chops, inside a Femidom;
It’s the fashion {it’s the fashion} to kill passion {to kill passion},
With a jumbo freezer bag,
Little darling, let’s hump and rump, inside a Femidom {a Femidom}
MIDDLE BIT 2
At enormous cost, a polyurethane thrill,
I hope that we’ve not lost, our coil and our cap and the pill;
{Why not use a method I can stand?}
VERSE 4
We’ll avoid a misconception, without a Femidom,
Let’s use other contraception, but not the Femidom,
Then we’ll feel {then we’ll feel} something real {something real},
And we won’t feel put upon,
Little darling let’s play and lay, without a Femidom {no Femidom}.
I was reminded of this day in conversation with John Random in February 2021. I have just received a bundle of scripts and ephemera from Erica Stanton, Chris Stanton’s widow, including materials pertaining to the show, Swing Low Sweet Testicles.
John reflected on the show and mentioned a diary note about promoting the show on 15 December. I remembered seeing the show at that time, checked my diary and discovered that I saw the show on 17 December.
Below is the B-Side of the flyer for that show. The reviews must relate to an earlier Noel Christopher extravaganza, known simply as The Show, scripts for which also arrived in Erica’s bundle.
Swing Low Sweet Testicles itself mustered at least one decent review:
Can’t imagine where City Limits got that date range from – it ran from December 9th 1992 to January 17th 1993.
The cast and crew were NewsRevue stalwarts and most had been somewhat involved in my early successes with that mob.
I don’t think that Cliff Kelly had yet overlapped with my material in NewsRevue, but I might be mistaken.
Chloe Lucas had done a magnificent job of belting my Coal Digger song in the Autumn NewsRevue run preceding Swing Low Sweet Testicles. I’m pretty sure that the Coal Digger song, along with a couple of my others, was in the Christmas run of NewsRevue which I saw (for a second time) after Testicles.
Anyway, I rather enjoyed Swing Low Sweet Testicles. I was partial to Noel’s writing and was glad of the opportunity to see some of his less-topical, more-enduring material.
Below is the programme for the NewsRevue show that night, which I stayed on to see for a second time, having seen the opening night on 26 November.
Earlier That Day…Getting Into The Zone
My diary also records a memorable working day. Memorable for inadvertent, comedic reasons.
I was working as a management consultant for Binder Hamlyn at that time. On that day, I accompanied the National VAT Partner, Alan Buckett, to visit a large European Manufacturing Group, whose UK headquarters were out on the M4 corridor, to help them get their heads around something or other.
We were done with that by lunchtime and Alan suggested stopping for a bite to eat in Earls Court – a convenient stop on the way back to the City for him and a short hop to home for me, as I had an early-evening engagement with Testicles and didn’t want to go back to the City.
Alan parked his car and we walked down the Earls Court Road, in search of a wine bar/restaurant someone had recommended to him.
Ah, there it is…
…said Alan, striding towards the place he had been aiming towards.
But instead of walking down the stairs to, as I could see it, the entrance to the wine bar in question, Alan marched up the stairs and into…
Clonezone. I believe it is accurate to describe that particular store as a Gay fetishist fashion emporium.
I tried to stop him, but Alan had his stomp on and disappeared into the shop.
I waited outside for what seemed ages but was probably only a few seconds.
The tall, besuited Alan, who normally looked every inch a City gent, retreated from Clonezone rather sheepishly.
I smiled.
Alan and I went into the wine bar restaurant for a light lunch and a debrief.
Towards the end of the lunch, Alan said,
When you get back to the office, I’d just prefer it if you didn’t mention…
…I said that his Clonezone secret was safe with me. Alan is long-since retired now and I’m pretty sure, if he remembers the story at all, it’d be the funny side of it that has stuck in his mind.
Alan might well have shocked the clones within as much as they (and the place) shocked him.
It hadn’t been used in late 1992 (unsurprising, as the Christmas run tended to keep any December material out until January) so I resubmitted it in early 1993.
I don’t think the song was used, nor on re-reading it do I think it should have been. I cannot recall precisely why it seemed topical to write this song and/or to rhyme “Austin Metro” with “hetero” in Verse Three, but I think someone somewhere was caught doing something sexual with the exhaust of his car.
In autumn 1992, I was still coming to terms with what worked and what didn’t work for NewsRevue. After all, I had only discovered the place that spring. It is part of the Bowden submission of January 1993 and I’m pretty sure it didn’t get used.
This lyric is not topical and really doesn’t belong in that show, although it might have done something in some other show – still might.
I quite like it, although on re-reading it all these years later (December 2016) I thought the lyric needed some work and that I might work up a variant for my baritone uke.
When I did so, with very minor changes (Spring 2017 – not reflected in the text below), Janie really liked it, finding it delightfully nasty.
“Were you really pissed off with someone or depressed when you wrote that?”, asked Janie.
“I don’t think so…I’d just started going out with you,” was my reply.
I felt very sorry for the cast trying to learn such a difficult song at such short notice for their opening night. But no subject is sacred in News Revue and I think this version may raise the odd smile.
This is a little dig at John Random for his zealous blacklist of certain songs. If you really want to annoy John, all you have to do is use songs like “Chattanooga”, “My Favourite Things”, “Maria”, “YMCA”……….
When Paula was directing the show, her cast very specifically commissioned this odious ditty. Paula then spiked it, saying it was too nasty for public consumption. However, in the privacy of our own News Revue party, I think the least that Jon and Paula can do to compensate me is to give the song one solitary performance before it is laid to rest.
Now that 0898 is personga non grata, perhaps Clive Gehle could use this song to entertain the crowds in his wonderful J Arthur Ranker character. This song was never performed, so will be new to most of the throng.
Well that’s it. I hope the party is a barrel of laughs. No doubt I shall hear about it afterwards. Meanwhile, I shall be telling all my friends how good the new show is, and shall come and see you all again before Christmas.
Times change. These days (he says writing in late 2019) Up The Creek Comedy Club is located in trendy Greenwich and is perceived as a happening place on the comedy scene.
Mark Ahsmann [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
So what in the name of common sense were Janie, me, Annalisa and Gerry Goddin doing going to that place on a Saturday night?
We went to see the west-country comedian Ben Murphy perform. Ben had recently engaged with some of us Newsrevue writers and had especially taken a shine to some of my lyrics, which he was proposing to try out at Up The Creek that night.
Here is a link to my first letter to Ben – only a week or so before the Up The Creek visit – a very business like and quite counter-cultural letter viz the Ben I subsequently got to know rather well. Perhaps that is why I tended to get paid by Ben, whereas some less commercially-minded writers are (I believe) still waiting for their royalty cheques.
Menawhile, back in November 1992, Janie and I actually moved an appointment to eat with Janie’s mum, plus twin-sister Phillipa and niece Charlotte, which was due to happen that evening. If my memory serves me correctly, we all went for a Chinese meal at North China on the Uxbridge Road at lunchtime the next day instead. I think that was the first time I met those three.
So, if I now point out that seeing my material, in the hands of Ben Murphy, doing battle with that seriously-arsy Deptford comedy crowd, was a far LESS daunting prospect than the thought of meeting Janie’s mum…
…but then you wouldn’t have tried mother-in-law/my girlfriend’s mother jokes at Up The Creek in 1992; that would not have ended well.
I do recall warning both Janie and Annalisa that it would be seriously risky for us to “take on the audience” if they turned against Ben. In those days, even Gerry Goddin was able to quell his instincts to chirp back in such circumstances, but I wasn’t so sure about the girls.
In the event, Ben went down pretty well at Up The Creek and we all survived the experience. Some acts that night were less fortunate than Ben…
…but then most of those acts were less naturally talented and less able to control an audience than Ben Murphy.
I have managed to find a video of Ben Murphy performing live, many years later, in less edgy circumstances – on that south-west coast circuit that he made his own for a long time:
I remember that Janie insisted on driving to Up The Creek and that we dropped Annalisa and Gerry home, as both of them, in those days, lived conveniently en route or near to Janie’s place.
Rummaging through my electronic filing cabinet, I found this little piece; unloved even to the extent that it had not even been catalogued back in the day.
I must have written it as an in joke for a NewsRevue smoker – we had a few of those “writers and performers parties” back then – perhaps to celebrate the opening of the Christmas run or the end of the run that preceded it.
So, he says, writing 25 years later, just ahead of the last Ivan Shakespeare Memorial Dinner of 2017, here is a question for advanced students – name all of the people referred to in my lyric.
I’ll up the answers (and any outstanding questions) when I write up the dinner. I’m good for all-but two names myself.
Part of the in-joke must have been in the choice of song itself. Graham Robertson had rattled off a brilliant topical song the week before in response to the Windsor Castle fire: “One Didn’t Start The Fire”. I’m guessing that the cast had struggled to assimilate all of the wonderful, wordy lines of that song ahead of its first Thursday performance. If Graham is able to dig out that lyric – I’d love to up it here as guest piece.
1992 might have been an annus horribilis for the Queen and the royal family but it was an annus mirabilis for me and for NewsRevue.
Anyway here is my end of 1992 smoker lyric:
WE DIDN’T LEARN THE LINES
(To the tune of “We Didn’t Start the Fire”)
(Cast take the stage looking exuberant and full of confidence)
On the back of the material I was writing for the Canal Cafe, I chatted with Harold Davison at lunch the Sunday before this letter. He is Gary’s dad; I have known Gary for ages through DJ and Kim.
Anyway, Harold wanted to show a lyric of mine to Frank Sinatra and Sammy Cahn…and who was I to refuse?
Flat 4 12 Clanricarde Gardens London W2 4NA 71-243-0725
23 November 1992
Dear Harold,
I’VE GOT YOU UNDER MY SKIN
It was a pleasure to meet you at the Royal Garden last week. I found your comments on lyric writing and satire both interesting and helpful.
I have produced a parody of the above number, as requested. I hope it meets with your approval, and with that of Sinatra himself. I would be most interested to learn how it is received.
I must now away, to prepare myself for the Venice trip with my Chiropodist friend!
