Comedy songs, British humour, and how ‘The Young Ones’ defeated David Bowie in the charts
If the history of the UK singles charts has taught us anything, it is that the British music-buying public can rarely be trusted to make the right decisions; hence why a litany of iconic, groundbreaking records have languished towards the bottom of the top 40, while a litany of dross often takes the number one spot.
David Bowie was not a natural-born hitmaker, and he dedicated himself to recording the most commercially viable material – it may come as a shock to some, but the pop charts of the early 1970s were curiously void of martian rockstars singing about the end of the world. Nevertheless, hit records were certainly something that Bowie recognised as a means of getting his art out into the world, a fact that is perhaps best signified by his string of failed chart-fodder singles that began his career back in the 1960s.
Despite this unconventional relationship with the pop charts, Bowie still found himself a regular feature of them throughout the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Whether it was his otherworldly output of the glam era, or the profound post-punk mastery of his famed Berlin era, there was seemingly little that Bowie could do to put listeners off during his heyday.
If anything, in fact, could have rivalled Bowie’s chart successes during those days, it was the blossoming landscape of novelty songs. Throughout the music history of this sceptred isle, the music-buying public has shown a bizarre willingness to buy novelty and comedy songs en masse, in doing so earning number-one hits for – among others – Mr Blobby, Spitting Image, and, perhaps most worryingly, LadBaby.
So, when David Bowie unleashed the earworm single ‘Absolute Beginners’ back in 1986, what should have been yet another number one single for the songwriter was blocked from the top spot by a rather anarchic comedy single. In an effort to raise money for Comic Relief, when the campaign was still in its infancy, Cliff Richard and Hank Marvin teamed up with the cast of the legendary sitcom The Young Ones to record a version of Richard’s ‘Living Doll’.
The Young Ones was already deeply ingrained in the music world by that point, having starred musical guests on every one of its endearingly chaotic episodes, and embracing the spirit of punk rock revolution, albeit within the confines of a BBC sitcom. The charity single saw Rik Mayall, Ade Edmonson, Nigel Planer, and Christopher Ryan reprising their student personas from the show, bizarrely colliding with the polished pop stylings of Cliff Richard.
As well as being one of the oddest singles to ever chart in the UK, the track spent three weeks at number one. While ‘Absolute Beginners’ had entered the charts at number eight and climbed up to number two in just one week, its progress was stalled by the arrival of Cliff Richard and The Young Ones, who also managed to take Motown queen Diana Ross from her place at the top of the singles chart.
It is, of course, difficult to complain too much about a charity single reaching number one, particularly if it’s connected to a show as rightfully beloved as The Young Ones or is quite as entertaining as ‘Living Doll’ was.
Nevertheless, when the singles chart is dead and buried, and its corpse is being dissected by musical archaeologists, the fact that ‘Living Doll’ triumphed over Bowie’s ‘Absolute Beginners’ will undoubtedly be seen as one of its most inexplicable stories.
