I never did find a video of Jim Callaghan singing 'There was I Waiting at the Church' to a bemused TUC Conference in 1978. (He was mocking the press, who had turned up expecting him to call a general election.)
But here is his successor as Labour leader, Michael Foot, singing a song from the Twenties that appeared on the B-side of the Bonzos' first single 'My Brother Makes the Noises for the Talkies'.
h/t Alwyn Turner
There's a programme about Les Dawson that used to be shown regularly on high-numbered TV channels. One of the people who pays tribute to Dawson is John Cleese, who was a regular in two series of Sez Les.
Cleese describes Dawson as "an autodidact, a very smart guy who was fascinated by words " and mentions in passing that something the Monty Python team had in common was an interest in and affection for music hall.
And that interest in music hall may explain why Leslie Sarony is in the cast of The Crimson Permanent Assurance, the short that begins Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.
As I blogged last month, Sarony was the composer of Jollity Farm, a song from 1929 that the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band recorded in the 1960s, and also played Uncle Staveley in the final series of Peter Tinniswood's I Didn't Know You Cared in 1979. The Crimson Permanent Assurance was made in 1983.
So here's another of Sarony's songs. One of my pet theories is that the Victorians were less Victorian than we imagine and that much of that awful English mania for respectability actually dates from the early decades of the 20th century.
But Ain't It Grand to Be Bloomin' Well Dead! reminds us that there was a great appetite in popular culture for laughing at respectability then too.
I remember it 1971, when it served as the theme song for That's Your Funeral, a BBC sitcom starring Bill Fraser that was cancelled after one series but was still turned into a feature film, as many sitcoms were in those days, by Hammer.
One final discovery: it turns out that Jollity Farm was a riposte to a song from the previous year called Misery Farm.
