When I'm Cleaning... etc.

Ah, George Formby Jr. Classic, supremely talented yet unfairly neglected, etc.

I just about 'get' what the George Formby thing is all about. It's a Northern thing. It's a British thing. It's the kind of thing that makes movies like The Full Monty successful, the idea that 'we' can never be as good as them because we're not as privileged nor as confident in ourselves as they are... But we can try and have fun amidst all the hardship and a sense of community and identity will result. And along the way we can produce pretty good music, films, etc. In other words: we lowly, down-to-earth Brits are not the Americans. And we Northerners are not like you guys from the South...

Frank Skinner's documentary about Formby (August 5th, BBC Four) was dressed up as a reappraisal, designed to persuade us that Formby was deserving of a position in the Twentieth Century roster of brilliant, influential artists. A brilliant ukelele player, and a composer of neat, comic songs, yes. But influential? There's the problem. As Skinner's own performances of Formby songs showed, it seems impossible to 'do' a Formby song without 'doing Formby' (ie. singing in that silly voice). It becomes an impression, a karaoke performance. Given that the style of Formby's music probably descended from ragtime roots and is thus flexible enough to be reinterpreted, it seems surprising that no-one's tried to re-do Formby's songs in his or her own style. But then we come to another problem: those lyrics...