G-G-G-G-G-Granville! (#5): The Dark Side

I’ve previously explained why stammerers are the world’s dancers, poets and cool people, but, yes, there’s also a dark side to stammering, a bedlam inhabited by shades, ciphers, liars, amoralists, freaks, ne’er-do-wells and gits, a netherworld where the sun of pleasant conversation doth never rise. But, as without darkness there cannot be light, without stammering there cannot be fluency. You and I live in symbiosis… without me, you are nothing. As I explained the more celebratory aspects of stammering through song, I shall here also.

The Toy Dolls - Keith's a Theif: Surely there's nothing more stammer-worthy than being caught for benefit fraud - I mean, it's illegal but it's not even cool! Stammering on the all appropriate words: tax, dole, court, etc .

David Bowie - Changes: “Ch-ch-ch-changes”: Bowie, bless him, is the world's least likely stammerer; he’s therefore affecting this, as he’s affected much else in his career, but the fact that he gets away with it is sinister enough in itself.

James Brown - Please Please Please: Saying "please" to a woman once should be once too often for any self-respecting stammerer. In fact most of this song from Stammering Brother No. 1 is a cry for help. Pathetic.

Talking Heads - Psycho Killer: “f-f-fa-f-f-f-f-fa-fa…… You start a conversation but you can't even finish it... I'm tense and nervous, can't relax... I hate people when they're not polite”. Yes.

The Dickies - Paranoid: Most of what comes out of The Dickies vocalist's mouth sounds like speech impediment, especially here when trying to out-Ozzie Ozzie Osbourne. “Can you help me, help me with my brain? Oh no!" No.

Darts - Come Back My Love: All doowop sounds like stammering, but Big Den Hegarty's “B-b-b-b-baby” (2:14 minutes in) sticks in the mind, and he famously looks like Frankenstein's monster, amply qualifying this song.

So, 6 stammering songs here; nothing particularly significant about that number, though if you stammer it a bit you could be invoking the number of The Beast. I bid you good evening!

TV Transylvania #3

The Director General has failed again and again to reply to my suggestions for great new programmes and I really am losing my patience. I bet he's not even read them. I bet he's sitting in a jacuzzi right now at the Trans-TV Mansion with Sofia Vicoveanca, Lidia Bejenaru, Laura Lavric and any other floozies still lying around after last Saturday night's 5 hour extravaganza of folklore and cookery. So, I've summoned up all my energies for this last attempt to get his attention. It's the big one.

At Home With The Wurzels

A reality TV show. With a bit of luck, the last one ever made. As must now be yawn-inducingly evident to anybody reading this rubbish, this place does peasantry very very well. Get Germans to make your cars, Frenchmen your food, and Italians for design, fashion and everything else that’s totally meaningless, but if you want a bit of land cultivated and not too much backtalk, employ Transylvanians. But this puts me in a dilemma, for (1) not only am I still homesick but (2) I now also have a freshly awakened taste for yokels wearing silly costumes - they look great, dance and sing, make their own hooch and they’d give you their last plate of pork dripping. The only people who can administer to both these needs and so fill this aching chasm in my soul are The Wurzels. (The concept's not as daft as it seems: think, America's awash with stumbling ex-junkies yet chose to take Brummie Ozzie Osborne to its heart). And, here’s the clincher, does anybody remember Graeme Garden on I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue singing these words to the tune of Beethoven’s Ode To Joy? That’s the Anthem Of The European Union, ladies:

“I am a cider drinker,
I drinks it all of the day,
I am a cider drinker,
It soothes all me troubles away,”

(all together now, Europhiles, especially Daphne...)

“Ooh aargh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh aay,
Ooh aargh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh ooh argh ooh aargh ooh argh aay.”