Every UK #1 Single Of 1972 Discussion Thread

There’s an excellent US equivalent of this thread which aims to cover the American charts from the very first #1 to (hopefully) the present day. I wouldn’t attempt anything so ambitious for this thread and have decided to concentrate on the period when the charts were everything to me. This would be 1972-1984. I did continue to follow the charts for a good while after this, but my heart wasn’t really in it.

So, I thought we’d do the charts week by week. Offering a new number one every few days. Or when everyone’s done talking about the last one. Being as this is the UK charts, novelty records will ensue. Indeed, we’ll start off with one! Lots of great records amidst the not so hot stuff, though.

Feel free to join in and comment.

 

This is the first one. Week ending 1st January 1972. This was it’s final week at the top. It spent a month at #1!



The lyric's story line is inspired by Hill's early experience as a milkman for Hann's Dairies in Eastleigh, Hampshire. Market Street, mentioned in the lyrics, is a real-life street in Eastleigh. The song tells the fictional exploits of Ernie Price, a 52-year-old (68, in the original television version) milkman who drives a horse–drawn milk cart. It relates his feud with the bread delivery man ("Two-Ton Ted" from Teddington) and their efforts to win the heart of Sue, a widow who lives alone at No. 22, Linley Lane.

When Ted sees Ernie's cart outside Sue's house all afternoon, he becomes enraged and violently kicks Price's horse, Trigger. The two men resort to a duel, using the wares they carry on their respective carts for weapons, and Ernie is killed by a rock cake underneath his heart, followed by ("the concrete-hardened crust of") a stale pork pie in his eye; in the original television version it was a fresh meat pie.

Sue and Ted then marry, but Ernie's ghost returns to haunt them on their wedding night.

 

Oh you just don’t get quality like this anymore!

 

The uploader has not made this video available in your country.
I'm not complaining.

 

As a very young child I was exposed to Ed Stewart's Junior Choice on BBC Radio 2, where this one was a regular. My parents actually wrote and requested Rolf Harris' Two Little Boys to be played on my birthday one year. What were they thinking?!

Apparently 'Ernie' kept T-Rex's Jeepster from getting to no 1. Like the Oom pa-pa Euro-Vision entry, On the Buses and most of the rest of Junior Choice (Childrens' novelty songs) it is very much of its time but gets forgotten about in hindsight, when talking about early '70s British culture. It wasn't all Roger Dean covers and Glam-rock.

 

I think this is a great place to start as it was number 1 the day I was born!

 

In that video, Henry McGee played Two-Ton Ted, and Jan Butlin (in what would apparently be her last work with Mr. Hill) was Sue.

While it topped the charts in the UK, it was crickets chirping in the States when Capitol issued it in February 1972 as single #3272. I have the mono promo of that issue.

That Ernie was 68 in the original TV version of this track, was most ironic, given that was the age at which Benny would ultimately die, in 1992 - not from a stale meat or pork pie hitting him in the eye or a rock cake hitting him in the heart - but from heart disease brought about by his last years in morbid obesity.

 

I remember it well, and the TV shows...
In today's political climate...you would have most of the sketches cut!!!!!

 

Benny must've known long before the law did, what heels Rolf Harris and Jimmy Savile were, given the way he'd impersonated both on his TV show.

 

Great single

Yes in these days it would be banned, political incorrect...

 

How many singles merit a description like this?

 

Didn't know that. As someone who was sent to a UK boarding school in 1970s I have a lot to say about this - but maybe elsewhere. What were his Benny) impersonations like?

 

Great idea for a thread Bobby. I see a lot of glam rock singles coming up that had no presence in the US charts.

Darryl

 

Let's just say Mr. Hill portrayed both as lechers - and not in a good way, only hinting about their respective "dark sides."

 

I’d be 7 when this came out. A bit young to understand the smutty nature of Hill’s shows. I knew they were smutty..I just didn’t know what he was getting at. As the 70s progressed, Benny’s hour long ITV specials only got more popular. And I finally began to get his jokes. He’d spoof the pop, TV stars and movies of the day. The shows were a major discussion point at school the day after they’d been screened. ‘Little’ Jackie Wright getting repeatedly slapped on the head never failed to amuse. These things were great fun, though they’d certainly not go down well today.

Novelty songs could flare up at any time back then, but you were definitely assured of a whole heap of them at Christmas time. Ernie still makes me smile, and brings back happy memories of Benny’s TV show, as well as things like The Double Deckers, Follyfoot and Catweazle. Great days, and an ideal point to start this thread for me.

 

It’s like I knew, isn’t it?

 

When did milkmen disappear? And how many housewives ran off with them in the day? Here we have a very 1970s ad: The colour brown and a double entendre Ooh oer.

 

Just a different time.

 

I’m sure you can find it if you want to.

I chose that clip as it featured the ‘video’ of Ernie. Video’s weren’t common place for even legitimate pop stars in 1972..

 

Have to invite @bob60 to this thread.

 

Yeah, you can see it hear at 1.43. Also makes an unbecoming Bobby Gentry at around 3.51

 

Mr. Hill filmed this video because he'd been too embarrassed to return to his old stomping grounds, given the ill will generated within "the Corporation" (as "Auntie Beeb" was also known) upon his 1969 defection to Thames. (Among other things, his last three specials for the BBC, which had been his on-and-off home from the beginnings of his TV career in the early 1950's, were destroyed in retaliation; his very last show for them, aired on Boxing Day 1968, today only survives from a home recording.)

 

One uncredited extra at the end of his Gentry impersonation (as seen in a crowd shot) looked almost like Monty Python's Michael Palin.

 

BBC May 2006: David Cameron has picked his Desert Island Discs - and revealed the only lyric he knows by heart is Benny Hill's saucy 1971 hit, Ernie (The Fastest Milkman In The West), a childhood favourite of the Tory leader.

 

Very interested in this thread, and thanks to Bobby Morrow for starting it. I'd heard that Benny Hill record before, as part of the TV show. When Benny started appearing on American television, the song parodies were probably my least favorite part of the program, as the language was usually just too British for me to get - a lot of British slang that went right over my head. However, Ernie the Milkman did not go by misunderstood, and I always thought it was rather daring of Mr. Hill to do something like this in the face of the stereotypical stuffy English reputation. But then, subtlety was not Benny's strong point.

I saw a documentary about Benny Hill not too long ago that made me feel rather sorry for the man. He came off as a lonely man-child, and I think he was treated rather unfairly by the BBC after years of giving them extremely popular programming. As far as the content goes, yeah, it was kind of racy, but it wasn't anything you hadn't already seen on Laugh-In or Hee Haw.