You great useless spawny-eyed parrot-faced wazzock

Artist: Tony Capstick
Title: Capstick Comes Home
Year: 1981
Chart peak: 3

Blame Ridley Scott. Back in 1974, as a jobbing young director, he made one of the most iconic British TV ads of all time, a sentimental sepia-tinted vision of a northern baker's lad in the early years of the 20th century, pushing his bike uphill on cobbled streets to deliver freshly-baked bread. Naturally, all was not what it seemed - the cobbled northern street was really in Dorset (Shaftesbury, to be exact), and the music that so effortlessly conjured up a northern childhood was actually written to suggest the culture of the Native Americans. When Antonin Dvorak wrote the second movement of his symphony "From The New World", he was thinking of Longfellow's epic poem "Song of Hiawatha", intending to some day use the theme in an opera or cantata based on the work. He never did get around to doing that, but the movement became one of Dvorak's most famous and popular works - even if in the UK most people hearing it think of cobblestones rather than prairies.

Anyway, by 1981 you would have needed to have been living in a cave for seven years (or been too middle class to bother with commercial television) not to have been exposed to the ad - and then along came Tony Capstick to send it up. A regular on the folk circuit and a frequent bit-part actor (you may remember him from such roles as brewer Harvey Nuttal in "Coronation Street" and one of the deply timid policemen in "Last of the Summer Wine") and radio presenter, Capstick gleefully ripped into the rose-tinted nostalgia of the original ad. With a hint of the classic "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch, Capstick told the tale of how he and his dad worked a 72-hour shift down t'pit then walked 48 miles home only for his mother to greet them with a less-than-substantial meal, resulting in his da' insulting his ma' and, er, throwing her on the fire. Capstick rounds off his tale with a bit of philosophising on how different things are now. "We had a lot of things then they don't have now. Rickets, diphtheria, Hitler...". One interesting thing about this record is that until recently, it provided the OED's earliest citation for the word "wazzock". (Actually, looking up the word in the online OED still yields a Capstick reference as the earliest use - from a "Melody Maker" review of the accompanying LP - though I'm pretty sure earlier references were turned up on "Balderdash and Piffle" a while back. Get the online edition updated, please!)

The disc was, incidentally, a true double A side, with both sides labelled "A" (not even "A" and "AA"!). The other side, "The Sheffield Grinder", was apparently the then-theme for BBC Radio Sheffield (presumably in an instrumental version) and was a non-comic song about people working in the Sheffield steel industry, grinding knives - which was, it would seem, a perilous occupation indeed, since you were always getting decapitated by loose grindstones and not being able to pay your debts and to cap it all you were considered old at 32, for some reason. Both sides featured brass backing by the Carlton Main Frickley Colliery Band.

As for Capstick himself, a long career in local radio came to an end in January 2003 when he was sacked from Radio Sheffield after his drinking became a major problem. He died later the same year.