Given the frankly shameful response to the NME list kwizz, this is larffably easy, and adapted to the meanest intelligence (yours, probably). Let’s welcome our Quizmaster, Robert Robinson!
ROBERT ROBINSON [LIGHT CLASSICAL MUSIC FADES UNDER]: Yes, hello again from Television Centre. Our panel this week will type out, more or less phonetically, four iconic Rock Riffs. Your task is to identify the songs from which said riffs derive. Bonus points for more than one possible answer. Our panel will type each riff twice, to give you a better chance. So! Frank Muir – would you like to get things started?
FRANK MUIR: Weally, this is a little too easy-peasey. [COUGHS]
Duh duh DURR, duh duh du-DURR, duh duh DURR, duh durr. Duh duh DURR, duh duh du-DURR, duh duh DURR, duh durr.[APPLAUSE]
ROBINSON: Thank you, Frank. Ah – Isobel?
LADY ISOBEL BARNETT: One does so fervently hope one gets this right – please do forgive any lapses from the canon with which one’s unfamiliarity is perhaps not the best-kept secret! [LAUGHTER].
Diddle-diddley-diddley dee, DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE, diddle-diddley-diddley dee, DEE DEE DEE DEE DEE, [APPLAUSE}
ROBINSON: Absolutely no apologies necessary! A positively virtuosic performance. Barry?
BARRY BUCKNELL: This is me, hammerin’ nails into a door:
Dur-DUHDUHDUHDUH, dur-DUHDUHDUHDUH
ROBINSON: Oh jolly good! DIY skills well to the fore! And to finish this round, here’s Vision On’s Pat Keysell:
[MIMES] DUH DUH, duh-duh der-der-der-duh, DUH DUH, duh-duh der-der-der-duh.
ROBINSON: [SMILING INTIMATELY AT KEYSELL] So! There we have it! Let’s have your answers in the comments, please!
Comb Over Beethoven
I think Lady Isobel Barnett might be spanking out Layla by Derek & The Dominoes, although she may have mixed up her diddleys with her diddley dees.
@Boneshakers
Surely Shoplifters of the World Unite
Could well be. Lady Isobel was an eclectic game old bird.
I think Frank Muir is typing out Smoke On The Water by Deep Purple.
Yes, indeed.
In a private email, TV’s Robert Robinson tells me “I will sadly be unable to read or contribute to the comments, as I am dead”.
So! That’s that, then.
PING!
It sounds like Barry is attempting the first two bars of the overture to one of Rossini’s operas. But I’m not sure which.
Possibly The Barber of Seville?
Sorry I meant the 4th one not the 3rd. Obviously.
Barry Bucknell is playing Metallica ‘s “Master of Puppets”.
[CITATION NEEDED]
Funny you should have that third one on there. My family used to crowd around our PYE wooden-framed television set just as the affable Mr Robinson launched into his gentle introductory bon mots and shout “Here we are now….entertain us!”.
Would that it were, Mister Celebration, would that it were, but I fear it was the fourth and final riff which represented that particular aria.
Oh Lord! I’m such a silly old fool! (bounces on his seat and chuckles for about 10 minutes)*
*This is an impression of TV’s Arthur Marshall.
Hauntingly lifelike!
Is Pat Keysell miming the theme from The Flumps?
It’s Heartbreaker by the mighty Zep.
It’s not what I have on the card, but is it a bonus point?
Lady Isobel is – I think – banging out Instant Sunshine’s theme tune to ‘Stop The Week’, also starring Robert ‘pish and tush’ Robinson and Milton Friedman (sub ed check surname pls) which ran for what felt like decades on Radio 4.
Refer m’learned friend to my post about LIB’;s version of Shoplifters of the World Unite further up the page
Younger AWers may need to ask an older fellow poster to explain the joke
“Younger Afterworders” – Military Intelligence ectect
Isobel Barnett – panellist on What’s My Line?, broadcaster, radio/tv personality. Electrocuted herself in the bath, after conviction for shoplifting in late 1970s. Ubiquitous. See also Katie Boyle.
Stop The Week. The antidote to Start the Week. Long-running Radio 4 discussion prog on Saturdays. Milton Friedman (sic) – Shulman, really (drama critic for a newspaper) – seemed to be on most weeks. Wasn’t in Gentle Giant, anyway. or was it Milton Glaser?
Instant Sunshine. Several ‘musical’ doctors plus Miles Kington sang lightly comic songs, to an acoustic backing. Featured Alan Maryon-Davis, who appeared to be Radio 4’s go-to medical bod, on things like ‘You and Yours’. Sure that at one stage most R4 progs had a sodding theme tune by them.
Lady Isobel Barnett. Crikey … I haven’t heard that name for a while. The female panelist that I remember best from Call my Bluff was the very classy Nanette Newman.
Alan Maryon-Davis went over to Capital Radio at one point, where he was simply known as “the Capital Doctor”. He, Anna Raeburn and Adrian Love used to have a once-a-week call-in show where they’d answer “your personal, sexual and emotional problems”.
I don’t think I can ever forgive you for releasing Instant Sunshine from the Dungeon of Forgetfulness.
Suffer now, as I have suffered.
Thanks, but their theme to “Stop The Week’ is currently in my head, and I’m going to have to sing some boisterous Doris Day to shift it. I find the Deadwood Stage or Whipcrack Away kills 99% of all earworms, dead.
Everybody, now!
(You’ll note this is the rare mash-up of the two songs you mention)
Hurrah!
Instant sunshine were huge at St Thomas’ Hospital where I trained, always guaranteed to turn up and steal the show at Old Boys Night, the last night of the annual review/Christmas Show, which was a sort of greatest hits after hours lock-in. As such I can hear no ill of them. If David Barlow is still alive, the stout party on guitar and too much cider, I am sure they still do. The only non medic in the band, Miles Kington, was oddly the first to die. Here’s my favourite, which had us all singing and chundering along, back in the day, when a fortune was being spent on us learning to care for the rest of you ungrateful buggers:
See below, in case I lose me draft again….
Start the week at one point used Home Service’s tune “Bramsley” it was considered too loud for a Radio 4 audience and was dropped after a few weeks. The band would introduce the tune as “Startle the Week”
‘PM’ back in the Brian Widlake era used to have a little analogue-synth tune.
The Kings Singers were on TV quite a bit, possibly pre-dating Instant Sunshine. From Kings College Cambridge, they gave us witty ditties and a large vocal range – from Jolly Green Giant-esque deepest bass to the bald one who gave us castrato that would make the dog howl.
Oh, yes. They used to clutter up everything from Val Doonican to the Good Old Days.
Tish! Bosh! Aha! Oh-ho! No, let me stop you there! Fiddly-de-dee – would that it were, would that were!
Robinson Robinson in excelsis.
@Colin_H
The Bunteresque baldy wouldn’t last five minutes with one-time old lag Stephen Fry in a smug-off.
The actual programme looks far more frightening now – I lasted until the end of the introductions
Christ alive. Go on holiday for a week and come back to find the Afterword has gone all Flanders And Swann while I’m away. It’s like Radio Times still has a crossword and tells us if each programme is in colour or black & white. I’ve come over all H-shaped aerial, it’s doing my head in.
Why not start a thread on the Naked Jungle or Herbert Lom?
Captain Nemo versus the Killer Ants?
Hmmmm.
Marvel can keep pumping out barrel-scraping schlock, so there might be a screenplay in there…
Is one of them ‘Somewhere Down The Crazy River’?
I don’t think it is.
*peers over specs at card*
Frank Muir and Lady Isobel were accurate enough in their typing to get correct answers. Barry n’ Pat (surely a missed Galton and Simpson concept) however, are still waiting, although bonus points have yet to be verified (and damn well won’t be, at least by me).
Barry Bucknell – “You Really Got Me”
Pat Keysell – “Brown Sugar”
Surprised, disappointed ectect.
The Kinks – “Kitchen Cabinets With Hardboard Doors”
Al Hirt and Bert Kaempfert – “Morph Melts”
Tell you what about the Kinks though, Foxy. I can’t help imagining how fantastic their records would have been had they used Los Angeles studio session musicians and production. Ray Davies is right up there with Nanker-Phelge and Lennon-McC in terms of songwriting, but he was saddled with a strip club rhythm section and a damp cornflake box production sound.