Val Doonican – comic nexus

Another record we have, an album, is The World of Val Doonican by Val Doonican. World? It’s two top ten hits, three comedy numbers and some fillers, but looking into it I find it’s been a major influence on my life.

And what is it with my parents buying music from people who have TV shows? Val kicks off on the telly in the early sixties and is a fixture of Saturday nights for twenty years, with audiences that peak at 19 million. Given that Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway only gets a peak of 8 million, and bearing in mind that the population was 20 per cent smaller in the sixties, you can see how staggeringly popular he was.

The World of Val Doonican features his hits: ‘Walk Tall’ and ‘Elusive Butterfly’, and various other middle-of-the-road tunes that meant very little to me back then and mean even less to me now, but it also contains three comedy songs that I still sing to myself to this day: ‘Delaney’s Donkey’, ‘O’Rafferty’s Motor Car’ and ‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’. Two of which mention dynamite, and one in which he sings light-heartedly about suicide.

Digging further into these songs, I discover that they have a deeper resonance with me than simply enjoying them at the time.

Start of image description, The record cover of Val Doonican’s 1969 album, The World of Val Doonican. A grinning Doonican, wearing a turtleneck, sits holding his guitar. The track listing reads Walk Tall, Delaney’s Donkey, Mysterious People, Elusive Butterfly, The Juice of the Barley, Cod Liver Oil, What Would I Be, The Jarvey was a Leprechaun, O’Rafferty’s Motor Car, Tender Years, Paddy McGinty’s Goat and Two Streets., end of image description

‘Delaney’s Donkey’ is an old-fashioned comedy song written by William Hargreaves in 1916. Hargreaves wrote a lot of music hall songs. Bizarrely, he was married to a woman who was a male impersonator, for whom he wrote ‘Burlington Bertie from Bow’ – a song I sing regularly to my grandson Bertie. I’m also married to an occasional male impersonator – one of the two fat sexist men in French & Saunders, and Liam Neeson in their Star Wars spoof ‘The Phantom Millennium’.

‘O’Rafferty’s Motor Car’ was written by Tommie Connor, who also wrote ‘Mickey’s Son and Daughter’, a song covered by the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, one of the tracks on their seminal album – the album that brought Rik and me together – Gorilla.

‘Paddy McGinty’s Goat’ is another music hall number. A ‘paddy’ song – based on the premise that Irish men are thick – written, of course, by two Englishmen, R. P. Weston and Bert Lee. They wrote more than 300 songs in around twenty years, including ‘Good-bye-ee’, the song associated with people leaving for the trenches in the First World War, which must have been an influence on the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore song of the same name. They both wrote words and music, alternating between the two, but according to Bert: ‘Bob has the brains. I put the laughs in.’ I think this is generally the way Rik and I operate in the writing room, with me at the keyboard thinking more structurally and Rik pacing up and down behind, firing off absurdities. I recognize the dynamic. They also wrote ‘Knees up Mother Brown’, and I wonder if Mum ever played it on the piano.

Uncle Douglas is always good for a ten-bob note at Christmas. ‘But that’s for your birthday as well, mind,’ he always says – ah, the curse of a January birthday.

Ten bob in the mid-sixties would buy you roughly seventeen pints of milk, today it wouldn’t buy one. But I don’t spend it on milk, instead I go into Boots on The Broadway in the middle of Bradford, clutching my brown bit of folding money – the fact that it’s a note makes it feel so much more valuable.

Start of image description, The record cover of Val Doonican’s 1966 E P, Doonican’s Irish Stew. A picture of Doonican with his guitar is superimposed on a cooking pot., end of image description

Upstairs they have a fairly limited selection of records but I know they’ve got the one I want because I saw it there on the rack before Christmas. It’s an EP by Val Doonican called Doonican’s Irish Stew. It’s got a picture of Val Doonican holding his guitar but the photo is inside a graphic of a stewing pot – one of those big ones you hang by its handle over an open fire – this is how I can tell it’s funny. It’s got ‘O’Rafferty’s Motor Car’ on it, which we already have on the album, but I haven’t heard of the other three tracks, and judging by the cover they must be hilarious. I spend my Christmas money, get it home and . . . it’s a huge disappointment. The other three tracks are mushy middle-of-the-road songs. I’ve been robbed. I can’t take it back because you’re not allowed to take records back just because you think they’re a bit shit. I’ve wasted ten bob – the biggest monetary haul of the year.