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The
spoken intro to this song is meant to sound like Stephen Fry's Professor
Trefusis, as scripted by Les Dawson, Barry Cryer and Spike Mullins
over a gallon of vile & bitter in the Grafton Arms. (Derivative?
Yes. But diversely derivative, d'you see.) The speaker is - I hope
- a slightly different character from me, more acid and condescending.
I've thought about extending the idea into a comedy set, with props
and rudimentary cossie - maybe a gown & pince-nez - to see what
happened. But it's fun to do it as is, waiting for the audience
to work out that it's not me taking the mick, but... well, who exactly?
The liner notes claim that Fat John is based on a Hungarian folk
tale, and that is true, or fairly true. George Mikes, 1956 asylum-seeker
and author of the wonderful How To Be An Alien later wrote more
reflective stuff on Mittel Europa in general, and he quoted the
following story to demonstrate the romantic fatalism of your average
Hungarian...
A proud
peasant, whose only valuable possession is an ass, is delighted
to win the hand of the most beautiful girl in his village. One evening,
after a hard day's ass-haulage, he comes home to find his new wife
and baby dead on the birthing-bed. As a true Magyar, he has but
one way convincingly to demonstrate his grief. He kills the ass.
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Fat
John was intended simply to render this tale into verse as a ballad
of love, loss and spectacularly inept self-pity, but it didn't quite
turn out that way.
I
think it first went off the rails because I had a joke going spare,
the device-for-getting-Boy-Scouts-out-of-Girl-Guides line. I'd originally
used it in a family point song about my ex-father-in-law, Ron, lovely
bloke, Scout Leader, practical chap. Puts me to shame. He's funny,
too. (He gave me the line). In fact, while I'm rambling, the song
was a Formbyesque thing called I've Got a Little Tool That Might
Do That and while it was a reasonably neat piece of work, it had
far too many in-jokes for one's wider public, my dear.
So
Fat John got the gag and the scout-knife turned this into a hunting
song. Slippery chap, Art.
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