This Bill Grundy interview took place 40 years ago today. I was in Leeds at the time, getting ready for the Anarchy In The UK tour to come to town in a few weeks, so was not able to see the interview shown in the London area. The following day everyone knew about it as the tabloids only had one story taking over their front pages. The Filth and The Fury! Needless to say the shit hit the fan but we stood our ground and refused to cancel. It also made it easier to sell out the venue.
Any regrets from that time? I wish I had kept the bundle of tour posters delivered to my flat instead of flyposting them around Leeds. They are worth a fortune now!
We did quite well out of the whole fiasco. Most punk bands of that time wanted to play Leeds Poly after that. It ruined Bill Grundy’s career though. He was probably more pissed than the Sex Pistols & chums on the night. Michael Parkinson describes him as,
“A difficult man to keep sober, but not to produce. He was one of the best front men I ever worked with…At his best he was a superb forensic interviewer…Sadly, as his career drifted, he let drink overwhelm his personality.”
Only noticed this today: Bill Grundy mouths “Oh shit” at the end.
He just knew he wouldn’t be getting out of that one
I only noticed today that the intro to Where’s Bill Grundy Now? by The Television Personalities is the closing theme of the Today programme.
A lot of people will have sat down to watch that thinking, “Those scruffy young oiks will come to absolutely no good and will never be seen again… unlike good old dependable Bill Grundy, who will be around for ever”
Brilliant. I’d somehow never clocked the bit at the end where they all get up and dance.
Imagine being 20 years old and having just written God Save The Queen. I’d have been doing whatever the bloody hell I wanted too.
I went to Scouts after that and nobody wanted to tie any knots that night. Properly memorable moment. 40 years ago, bloody hell………
Essentially all that happens in this clip is that a seventies TV presenter actually gets called on being a drunken pervert* there and then rather than forty years later. The Sex Pistols looked like they were from the future because they were.
(*by Steve Jones as well…. ouch!!)
Been parodied many times but never as strangely and accurately as this
and this is fab
Excellent.
Peel is probably in that clip after his endless plugs for the Fast Show in his Radio Times column. I still like Peel. Got a problem with that? I’m middle-class, so be careful.
Bill Grundy was also the first person to introduce the Beatles on TV. On 17 October 1962 the not-yet-Fabs appeared on a post-news magazine show titled People & Places, broadcast only in the north.
It was never repeated of course and I saw it go out live. Grundy introduced them like this:
“Now we have a song by a new group from Liverpool who go by the strange name of (consults clipboard) the, er, the Beatles. This is their new record and it’s called Love Me Do”
I looked up idly from my maths homework and then sat transfixed as my entire future life appeared on the tiny screen in flickering, grainy black and white.
Oh, I also saw the Sex Pistols interview go out live.
Me mam saw the Fabs on that show. It was the talk of the playground the next day – a real generational moment. For younger sorts that would have been Arthur Brown with his idiosyncratic heating appliance, or Bowie hanging on Ronno’s neck, or Ron Mael’s moustache, or -for my generation- the total absence of Relax on TotP because it had suddenly been deemed rude.
What have the young folk of today got? Miley Cyrus twerking at some bell-end in stripey trousers.
Bill Grundy – What a patronising arse!
I didn’t see this live, because my family always watched BBC News and Nationwide, rather than ITV, but I remember listening in disbelief as my friend, Paul told me all about it on the walk to school. And when I got to school…well the form room and the playground were buzzing about this interview, because these were words you just didn’t hear at teatime on TV.
Mind you, watching Nationwide wasn’t always plain sailing for my Mum (Dad was usually not home from work). I remember Sue Lawley was interviewing an actress and asked about what it was like to play a masturbation scene. Me: “Mum, what’s masturbation?” Long pause. Mum: [In anguished tone] “Oh, it’s when you rub your sexy bits” [Muttering under breath] “They really shouldn’t talk about this at this time of night.”
He’s not merely patronising, he’s insulting. He doesn’t like them and starts from that position, expecting them to crumple under his superiority and – this still existed in those days – the assumption that his seniority would somehow naturally make them touch their forelocks. It must have been fairly obvious to everyone in the studio that these people were a) a bit of a handful at the best of times and b) blind stinking drunk, so his approach was astonishingly incompetent.
It started a bit of a ratings war with Nationwide – in the following weeks, we watched in disbelief when Hugh Scully spiked up his hair and said “so fakkin wot?” to Harold Wilson when he resigned. The Spinners had an on-air fight with chart rival Vince Hill and the BBC’s top newsreader broke off from reading the news to reveal she was NUDE from the waist down and proceeded to can can around the studio! Maybe there’s something in the air every forty years.
The effect spread all over British broadcasting. Viewers were startled when the Two Ronnies Christmas Special concluded with the words “It’s goodnight from him, goodnight from me and no future for you”
….and then there was the time that Fingerbobs flicked the Vs.
I thought I read somewhere that the interview was a last minute thing because Queen had pulled out from an interview?
True.
God save Queen
The fat-bottomed regime
It made you Flash Gorrrr-don
Makes me wonder what a pissed-up belligerent Grundy would have got out of Queen. “Go on…say something shocking…”
Brian May – “I make my own guitars and I use an old sixpence as a plectrum. This is how I achieve my distinctive sound”.
Grundy … (Zzz….)