Michael Flanders (1922–1975)

Time Travel

A daisy-chain of memories down the decades, parent to child to grandchild. Some of these songs are as fresh and funny as ever - and read almost as well as comic poems. Others only work if you know the rhythm and tune. Some are funny mainly because they are old-fashioned. Others make me a tad wary. One is very problematic. Times change. We see darkness where we didn’t know it existed.

In the words of LP Hartley in The Go-Between:
“The past is a foreign country; they do things show more differently there.”

This book takes adult me back to childhood. Childhoods: my mother’s, mine, and my own child’s.

I was an odd child, an odder teen, and, I hope, am a slightly less odd adult. I knew nothing - literally - of pop music until I was twelve, but I did listen to records: LPs at 33rpm. My mother’s old Flanders and Swann albums were favourites: comic songs, with banter in between. I knew them all off by heart - and many of them still. A generation later, we bought Flanders and Swann on CDs for our child. Now, our child is at uni, and listens to them as MP3s and reads them in this book. I have similar assocations with Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales (my review HERE).

Here is a taste:

The Gas-Man Cometh

The universal frustrations of endless domestic repairs, one fix necessitating yet another. I remember writing my own, even longer versions, though I forget what they involved.

'Twas on a Monday morning
The Gas-Man came to call;
The gas tap wouldn't turn - I wasn't getting gas at all.
He tore out all the skirting boards
To try and find the main,
And I had to call a Carpenter to put them back again.

The carpenter nails through a cable and knocks out the lights. The electrician breaks a window. The glazier’s visit means the wall needs painting, and the painter paints over the gas tap, so it can’t be turned on until the gas man returns!

Full lyrics HERE.
Performance HERE.

Song of Patriotic Prejudice

The English, the English, the English are best
I wouldn't give tuppence for all of the rest.

Jolly tongue-in-cheek jingoism was fun. The song is equally and childishly rude about each of the European nationalities mentioned, so it’s harmless: mean Scots, Irish sectarianism. Welsh singing, red Russians, and garlic-eating Greeks and Italians. And for balance, it’s a little self-deprecating about our sporting failures:

And all the world over, each nation's the same
They've simply no notion of playing the game
They argue with umpires, they cheer when they've won
And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!

Nevertheless, with increased visibility of the nasty side of nationalism, before and since the EU Brexit referendum, proud Englishness is tainted. I’m a British European (for a little bit longer). And yet I still have affection for this.

Full lyrics HERE.
Performance HERE.

A Song of the Weather



The English may be “best”, but we can still mock our nation and ourselves. This celebrates the stereotypes of our cold wet weather, and our obsession with talking about it. The “tune” is two dull lines, repeated for each month, so the lyrics suffice:

January brings the snow, Makes your feet and fingers glow...
April brings the sweet spring showers, On and on for hours and hours...
In July the sun is hot. Is it shining? No, it's not.…
Freezing wet December, then
Bloody January again! (Repeat, ad infinitum)

Full lyrics HERE.

The Wompom

Glorious inventiveness, describing a plant of staggering versatility and utility, with a delightfully playful tune:

You can shape it, you can square it,
You can drape it you can wear it,
You can ice it, You can dice it,
You can pare it, You can slice it,
Oh there's nothing that a Wompom cannot do!

Drawing it would be trickier, though I bet you can make paper, pens, and ink from it, and probably wear and eat the results!

Full lyrics HERE.
Performance HERE.

I’m reminded of Philip K Dick’s equally versatile and ubiquitous Ubik. See my review HERE.

First and Second Laws (of Thermodynamics)

This one isn’t in the book - but it should be. Physics made unforgettable. Maybe it sowed a seed in my child’s mind.

This excerpt really only works if you can hear the rhythm in your head:

Heat is work and work is heat
Heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body
Heat won't pass from a cooler to a hotter
You can try it if you like but you'd far better not-a

Listen to it instead, HERE.
Full lyrics HERE.

Madeira, M’dear


https://www.varsity.co.uk/features/10787

I used to love this song. I knew the narrative was a bit risque, but it taught me the word “antepenultimate ”, and I was captivated by the cleverness of the wordplay, even before I knew the term for it. Here’s the zeugma:

He hastened to put out
the cat,
the wine,
his cigar
and the lamps
...
She lowered her standards by raising
her glass,
her courage,
her eyes
and his hopes.
...
She made
no reply,
up her mind
and a dash for the door.

But fill in the gaps, and you have an old man who gets a teenage girl drunk to make another notch on his bedpost. Full lyrics HERE.

Things were different in the 1950s, but I don’t want to listen to a comic song about date-rape, however much zeugma it employs.
Things were different in the 1950s, so this song doesn’t diminish my enjoyment of the rest of their repertoire.

The Hippopotamus (Mud, Mud)

Performance HERE.

I want to end on a happy, child-related note. Flanders and Swann wrote many animal songs, of which this is probably the best known, mainly for it chorus:

Mud, Mud, glorious mud
Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood!
So follow me, follow
Down to the hollow
And there let us wallow
In glorious mud

Full lyrics HERE.

I wallow in metaphorical mud, swamped in happy memories of playing this on trombone at school, accompanied by a string bass, and piano, with a small choir belting out the words. That, and knowing the generations above and below me enjoy it as well. A daisy-chain around the muddy hollow. And there let us wallow. In glorious mud.

The Authors / Composers / Performers

Michael Flanders (left) and Donald Swann (right)

Flanders and Swann were a successful duo, writing and performing comic songs, from the early 1950s to mid 1960s. This book contains the lyrics and score (voice and piano) of many of their best-known ones. The subjects include one-up-manship, science, history, annoying neighbours, food, new technology, music, travel, animals, and quotidian but varied frustrations. Unfortunately, the stand-up routines introducing many of the songs are not included.

The Illustrator

“We’d better have her examined - she’s resolved to be good.”

It has wicked illustrations by Ronald Searle. He also drew Molesworth and the St Trinian’s girls, books which I enjoyed in my pre-teens. (I went to an all-girls boarding school, though we were far less racy than the St Trinian’s lot. Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

Bonus: Transport of Delight

Back to the Routemaster London bus at the top:
That thirty-foot-long by ten-foot-wide,
Inside that monarch of the road,
Observer of the Highway Code,
That big six-wheeler
Scarlet-painted
London Transport
Diesel-engined
Ninety-seven horse-power
Omnibus!
Try singing that as fast as they do.

Performance HERE.
Full lyrics HERE.

Image sources:
https://c1.staticflickr.com/5/4113/4987680865_75e7fe49c8_b.jpg
http://media.nbcsandiego.com/images/620*389/rain-generic-umbrella-raindrops.jpg
https://www.varsity.co.uk/images/dyn/store/700/0/14881.jpeg
http://www.philnel.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Flanders_and_Swann_BBC_Radio2.....
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/a5/c7/d7/a5c7d7e43904998eefcbb457.... show less

This is a book about a Hippopotamus trying to impress a girl and get her to play in the mud with her. He sings a crazy song and is acting like he is having a ton of fun when it is just to impress the girl. However she plays in the mud with him and then they become friends and the whole town joins them as well.