a curiosity only...
by deed of absurdist dissension, and conspicuously excluded from the 1984 Polydor release of Ian Dury & the Music Students' "4,000 Weeks Holiday", the executive decision to derail the project as the result of craven faint-heartedness prompted two years of bitter sparring between Dury and his financiers. Fearing legal action from the estate of Enid Blyton, or merely reluctant to yield to contractual mutiny, the label insisted on maintaining its censorial stance.
Dury was incensed and unrepentant.
Superficially a 'critique' on children's television, Dury's invective seems driven primarily as the result of childhood exclusion and his inability to forgive those moral tzars for papering over the cracks. His later experience as observer and educationalist seem to have infuriated him further. Provoked, presumably, by Blyton's inherent class and race division, and by the condescending remit of government licensed broadcasting in general, "Fuck off Noddy" is a return volley. The fury of a small child plagued by chanting bullies in the playground.
The chasm between projected ideal and reality.
Do I think he hit the nail on the head ?
Maybe. Not really. The BBC, virtually single handedly, wove my own security blanket as one of countless thousands of children regularly 'watched' by the box in the corner. A blanket with as many holes in it as unshakable convictions, maybe, it served both as genial babysitter and an eye into disturbing complexities revealed with little or no sentimentality.
Its impartiality in reporting current affairs. Its obligation to historical accuracy.
I am possibly as indebted to the BBC as any indoctrinated child of Stalin or Mao, but I don't believe the proliferation of political correctness over the past two to three decades has served that model well.
Do I think Polydor was wholly unjustified in imposing nonsensical standards of 'decency' on its contracted artist ?
Absolutely. Fuckin' A. I think Ian Dury - architect of "Spasticus Autisticus" (banned by the BBC in 1981); confrontational pearly king - was rightly pissed at seeing a bunch of suits hop from one foot to the other and urinate over each other like chastened whippets while he tore at the muzzle. In fact, it was probably Polydor's tacit refusal to throw its weight behind anything explicitly controversial after "Spasticus Autisticus" gathered condemnation during the International Year of Disabled Persons which prompted Dury's intransigence with regard to "4,000 Weeks Holiday" in the first instance. Beyond that, he was almost certainly fueled by resentment at the music industry's wholly successful bid to typecast him as curmudgeonly eccentric and rogue.
Or his own collusion to that end. Well. We've all of us painted ourselves into a corner at one time or another.
The cosiest liberals who initially championed him as a model of social inclusion were quick to distance themselves when his awkward utterances deviated from their own self-serving script.
Is it offensive ?
Only in so far as marionettes have cause to suffer indignation.
And wait. If one chooses to employ that same invective now, say, to channel contempt on the worst excesses of 'reality' programming - as in the X Factor - I suggest this casual barbed dart has almost certainly passed its flight test.
Fuck off, Jedward. Fuck off, Louis Walsh.
graphic by barney bubbles, 1981.† Music link deleted under public nuisance act (1957) 2 QB 169. Repeated play may soften one's brain and/or shower with splinters.
