Music
Music featured regularly on the show, often with Wood singing self-penned songs accompanying herself on the piano. The best remembered tune from the show is the seven minute-long "The Ballad of Barry and Freda – Let's Do It". It concerns a couple, Barry and Freda; she is hungry for sex, he isn't. It climaxes with the lines "beat me on the bottom with a Womans Weekly, lets do it! Let's do it tonight!". The song has been performed numerous times by Wood in her live performances. Wood said of the number: "A joy to write, a sod to learn, and I daren't finish a show without it. The first time I performed it, a woman at the stage door asked, 'How long have you been cross-eyed?'"
As Seen On TV also featured other musical styles: So Pissed Off With Love, a duet with Wood and Denis Lawson; Keep On Shopping, an epic musical number about shopping; At The Chippy, with Wood, Walters, Meg Johnson and others singing in tribute to their local fish parlour; Marie And Clarie And Min, featuring Wood, Johnson and Hope Jackman as three old women on a seaside trip, as well as other numbers. The show also contained a skit on the old "fill in" footage often slotted into scheduling to cover technical breakdowns: "I'm Gonna Knock, Knock, Knock On Your Knocker". Comedy sketches also featured music, like the parody of the staging of a West End musical, Bessie, and a send-up of the Judy Garland–Mickey Rooney "let's put on a show" genre in "I'm Counting Moonbeams".
Preferring to work with people she knew, Wood hired David Firman to be musical director for the series. Firman had previously been musical director for Wood's play Good Fun.
Read more about this topic: Victoria Wood As Seen On TV
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“The music stopp’d, and I stood still,
And found myself outside the Hill,
Left alone against my will,
To go now limping as before,
And never hear of that country more!””
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions. But there is also, it seems to me, a moment at which democracy must prove its capacity to act. Every man has a right to be heard; but no man has the right to strangle democracy with a single set of vocal chords.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)
“Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)