Monday 23 July 2012

Britain’s Top 100 (actually 28) Rejected Pop Singer/Band Names (and some other stuff)

Judging by the All Staff emails my university’s suits occasionally send to everyone every day, I am, by implication, like every other non-suit in our learning environment, no longer dynamic, innovative, thrusting, and quite probably bumping and grinding enough to be an entrepreneurial academic in the modern world going forward.  I have therefore been attempting to break into the relatively genteel, service-based, and more old-fashioned intellectually-oriented world of television.  My attempts so far include a once-retweeted suggestion of a sexually-explicit drama about the violent struggles for control of a chain of seven medieval bakeries, called Game of Scones.  Then I had the idea, which received a similar level of Twittaffirmation, of an ancestry-based programme but with a more personal and critical edge than any so far broadcast, called Who the Fuck Do You Think You Are?  I also once blogged in more than 140-character detail a conceptual revamp for Extreme Fishing with Robson Green, called Really Extreme Fishing with Robson Green:  http://stevesarson.blogspot.fr/2012/04/really-extreme-fishing-with-robson.html . I have yet, however, to hit TV pay dirt.  Then, when watching one of Channel 4’s Britain’s top-100-whatever programmes, I realised I had been wrong end of things money-wise.  Each of the ideas I’ve had so far would cost literally money to make, but I need to make my mark at the cheaper end of entertainment before being allowed a budget.  And then, while watching Channel 4 in its it’s-the-weekend-we-can’t-be-arsed mode I came up with the idea of Top 100 Rejected Pop Singer/Band Names, which, over the course of several hours on a Saturday night, will reveal 100 pop band and soloist original names that, for various PR and PC reasons, had to be abandoned before the band or singer concerned, using a slightly different name, could finally become famous. 

Obviously, all the names below are totally made-up, but it doesn’t matter because link-man Vernon Kay will “remember” them and talk about them as convincingly as he does for all the other things on such programmes that he recalls from many years before he was born.  Kay is also perfect for the aforementioned economic reasons, because you only need to pay him minimum wage, which saves on the Pete Waterman standard fee of a Ginster’s scrotum pasty and three pints of Old Speckled Flatulence for a an hour or so of off-the-cuff scripted segments.  All I need to do now is write the script for the guffawing Kaymeister, whey hey, get in, as the rejected names of the bands and soloists are below, in roughly chronological order so that I can somehow marry up thematically to cartoonishly reductive representations  of their respective eras.  We begin in the Fifties, an era of absurd outfits and even more absurd hairdos, and end in our own time, an era of absurd outfits and even more absurd hairdos.  
Little Dickie
Stiff Richard
Willy Fury
Winklespurt Pumperdick
The Floaters (kept original name)
Cocker Joe
Mongo Jerry
The Pervs
Marvin Battyman
The Bo Gees
The Bumgay Dance Band
Stegosaurus Rex
Gadd the Ladd and the Kiddie Fiddlers
Alvin Spanglepants
Hot Chocolate Starfish
Sticky Little Fingers
Spastic Bertrand
The Cottage People
Spazzin’ Stevens
Kakapoopoo
Lemonorama
The Travelling Dangleberries
The Foo Foo Fighters
Pjork
Chaka Will
Boyz 4 Men
Nelly Farturdo
Gob’Shite


And that’s it.  I know I said Top 100 and this is only 28, but there are two reasons why the shortage doesn’t matter.  First, even I can only take so much of my childish bum jokes and knob gags, never mind the tendentious rest.  Second, by the time we get to number 28, it’ll be about 10 o’clock on the Saturday night of what the French call the emission, and so members of the target demographic will have pre-loaded and be on their way to a “nite”-club to spend the rest of the evening ululating to loud, repetitive pounding noises, like a tribe of savages who’ve just sacrificed a virgin, before starting a fight in a kebab shop, blowing chunks over the arresting officer, and losing what passes for their consciousness in the caged but heavily-padded environment at back end of a twat wagon.  Actually, that sounds, on reflection, a bit on harsh on those who comprise, after all, my intended audience.  So I’ll finish by admitting that their assaults on the concept of civility and the basic tenets of human social and cultural evolution are, obviously, nowhere near as barbaric or destructive as those of the suits I mentioned at the start. 

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