Here’s TV’s Roy North butchering C&D’s Gertcha. It’s really bad isn’t it?
Incredibly, I recall him doing an even worse version with Roy in a cloth cap and braces giving it the full cockney sparrer treatment. Olly Beak in this clip is an improvement. Yes, really.
Roy being a local lad, each week’s episode of GIT was like a rite of passage for myself and my Hull Uni mates. Odd that i have no recollection of Ollie Beak appearing.
Me neither. The other version had the same singers (possibly the Ladybirds?) doing the “Gertcha” bits.
Presumably distraught at Ayshea’s dumping him for zroy Wood, poor Ollie’s life descended into a spiral of drink and drugs.
Increasingly rare Mentions of his name now produce nothing more than a disinterested “Whhhhhhhhhhooooooo?”
Lift-Off with Ayshea: dear reader – I did!
Ollie’s antics were head-spinning. @jaygee
Stroik a loight Meery Poppinsh!
Roy makes Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent sound like Danny Dyer.
He also wheels out that impeccable Cockerney accent, complete with cloth cap in 1980, doing Right Said Fred. You cannot unsee it.
@mattybur I can imagine it, you don’t need to provide a link.
I also remember him doing that creepy song about girls on the back seat of a car, “huggin’ and a-kissin’ with Fred”. I think Roy was the hapless driver. I don’t recall who played Fred. Ollie Beak?
You lucky people. I have found the version I remember seeing. Roy, sans Ollie, does his best Norwegian fisherman voice as he attempts cockney. He opens the show with it. No, you’re welcome.
Clicking on on play there is a bit “What does this button do?”
A few years ago some villainous fiend, possibly you BC, unearthed the clip of Peter Glaze doing Golden Years. I still haven’t recovered.
Wasn’t there a Crackerjack version of Ashes to Ashes with the line “Major Tom’s a cheeky monkey” too?
@hubert-rawlinson I really hope there is.
There was an unsubstantiated story that the Crackerjack Good Friday special one year featured a musical telling of the Easter story – complete with cover of Mott’s Roll Away The Stone. I hope that one is true.
I think I shared Glaze & co’s Making Plans for Nigel and then someone else responded with Golden Years. I don’t think this means I’m in the clear though. @moose-the-mooche
You asked for it…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-ZtpYfNq74
That’s pretty good, actually
I think the other feller does better, which shows you what you can achieve if you have clothes that fit properly.
What was Jan Hunt doing? ‘Wuhwuhwuh’ sounded like some pickled beetroot was repeating on her.
Enjoying the backing band watching their careers going down the toilet…
You’re joking. 1970s BBC rates? That’ll be the best £1.40 they ever earned!
ITV actually – we might be talking as much as a fiver.
Fascinating. I’ve never heard of this man or his TV show. Some endearingly mediocre acts on it – the past, foreign country etc.
Have you heard Roy’s definitive version of Tenpole Tudor’s Swords of a thousand Men ? Miles better than the original.
I saw it earlier while “researching” for this thread. I’m not posting that.
Interesting use of the word “definitive”.
This is already the best thread of 2023.
Good news on the Roy North front. Having sensibly eschewed working with kids and animals in favor of acting as a comic foil for stuffed owls and foxes who behave like children, Mr “Get It Together” is still “having a good time” at the grand old age of 81
I’m glad to hear it. He seems a genuinely nice feller and a really good children’s TV presenter.. He’d have been great on Blue Peter or Magpie.
I refuse to see if it’s on youtube but I still haven’t got over Flintlock covering Rocky Mountain Way back in the seventies.
It can’t be any worse than Mike-out-of-Flintlock’s evisceration of You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling with Paul Shane. You know the one.
Thankfully I’m not sure that I do, or maybe it’s buried somewhere deep somewhere in my subconscious. Either way please don’t feel that you have to go to the trouble of enlightening me.
“Baby-BABEH!”…Ring any bells?
Fortunately not as far as their version is concerned. Sounds like it may be more overwrought than the original.
Shall we put him into…. I mean out of his misery?
A veritable Paul Ross Mug of a clip. Some excellent comments, including this from The Emperor of Boxing Truth: “I believe the hand and arm movements at 2:31 is absolutely integral to the overall creative performance.”
Bloody hell. I managed 38 seconds, which was approximately 2 seconds after he started singing, for want of a better word. It sounded like someone had unplugged a record player while it was being used.
Cathy from Two Doors Down to the new mum who dares to ask her to turn her music down
Mr Roy has been a cult hero amongst a ‘select’ group of friends for many years.
A dear old pal of mine did this personal tribute to Roy (& Linda) a couple of years back
You weren’t one of the bunch of us who used to congregate in the front room of 73 Morpeth Street in “all in the summer of 77 or 78 were you Jim?
Morpeth Street? Blimey, here be dragons
Still there last time I visited in 2016. Barely recognised the rest of Spring Bank though
Your place will be probably exactly as you left it in the 1970s – same carpets, wallpaper, plumbing etc except that a family of 6 will be living in what was your tiny bedroom.
In other news, Hull is the best place in England to run “profitable HMOs”. So there’s a upside to large parts of the city being a fkin shithole.
No vocals, but plenty of cheese, and I LOVE cheese.
I’m a big fan of the James Last Band’s mash-up of “Silver machine/ Children of the revolution/ School’s Out”:
To which one might add Don Ellis’s “Roundabout” (he also does “Conquistador” on the same album):
I don’t like Don’s horizontal sidies. They look like he’s lost his nerve with his razor and has tried to make the best of it.
I’m sure I’ve seen bigger bands than the James Last lot operate quite happily without a conductor. Also I don’t think the keyboardist is creating the whooshy noise on Silver Machine.
That’s the flapping of flares.
The only other Crackerjack cover is this one.
Post Don Maclean so it’s Bernie Clifton doing the honours on this Quo classic
^That’s not a real owl, is it?
Singers often adopt an American accent to appear “with it” and “cool”. Patrick Hernandez didn’t quite hit the mark there – although the track itself is a Moroder-esque banger.
I love how North keeps shooting “Is this OK, am I getting away with it?” glances throughout his two versions of Gercha (yes, I’ve watched both). His cockney doesn’t extend to Chas’s dad’s insult of “cow son”, for some reason.
But have you seen him do Ging Gang Goolie, not once, but, I think, on 3 different episodes, as if someone thought it went so well the first time, why not do it again, and again!
I have a vague memory of that and I also have a unshakeable feeling that Mike Read might have been involved in trying to make GGG a hit. If he liked a song, he really, really pushed it – particularly on Saturday Superstore. I remember a video where the boy scouts are all about 18 with long hair and are pursuing girls. I know the Rutles did a version at around the same time, but I don’t think it was that.
Point of order it was Dirk and Stig from the Rutles who recorded GGG. I think they’d recovered from suing each other and were back on speaking and singing terms.
Here’s Su Pollard singing Back in the USSR. I’ve suffered, I don’t see why you shouldn’t.
Has anybody got Peter Jackson’s number?
Let’s go hunt some yellowcoat
Having seen her at close quarters back stage at a northern Panto ‘breezing in on a flying visit’ I can confirm she is even more insufferable in the flesh than that sensitive take on the Fabs suggests.
It’s as if she was put on the planet to set peoples’ fillings on edge.
Chillingly, that seems to be part of a longer TV show. What else is there…Duncan Norvelle doing Eleanor Rigby? Jim Bowen taking on I am the Walrus?
“Interestingly” I remember watching the short film about Elton going to the USSR in about 1979/80. In it, he says that the authorities told him that he mustn’t sing Back in the USSR. It’s not one of his songs so they’ve nothing to worry about. Except that Elton then put it in the set expressly because they said he was not allowed to do it.
I’ve become addicted to watching all the episodes of Get It Together on YouTube now. I can’t stop.
Although being born in 1970, so of the right age, somehow I never actually saw this at the time, so it’s all new to me now.
I find Roy North so… wierd… he’s like a cross between Cliff Richard, Tony Blackburn and Alan Partridge, before throwing Terry Wogan into the mix in the later series, and I’ve never seen anyone who looks *so* 1970s before.
I can’t stop staring at his weird facial expressions and I’m so intrigued how the way he smiles, contorts his face and moves his body when he’s singing or even just talking just wouldn’t happen now and I can’t work out why this was the way it was then but not now.
He also cannot sing at all, but seems to think he’s the ultimate teen-pop star and is presented that way!
Seems like a lovely bloke though!
I am 4 years older and watched every show – often from behind my fingers. Yes, he was presented as a heart-throb but there is no sense of danger with Roy. But he’s always eager, up for anything.