Juke Box Jury - Cultural References

Cultural References

Juke Box Jury has a history of being parodied, the format has been used a number of times for other programmes:

In 1959 the BBC refused Tommy Steele permission to use David Jacobs in a Juke Box Jury comedy sketch for his The Tommy Steele Show on ATV. The sketch went ahead in October 1959 with another BBC personality, announcer McDonald Hobley taking Jacobs' part.

Benny Hill parodied the show as 'Soap Box Jury' on a show for the BBC on 4 March 1961. He impersonated David Jacobs and the panellists. The sketch ended with a shot of Hill as all four panellists in one shot, achieved through filming each "panellist" separately and keeping the other three-fourths of the lens covered, which made this a landmark in both Hill's career and the development of television production. The sketch can be seen on the DVD compilation Benny Hill: The Lost Years, which was released in 2005.

Also in 1961, comedian Jimmy Edwards promotes a tea-shop band 'The Burke Adams Tea-Time Three', who have a record judged a hit on Juke Box Jury, in the programme The Face of Enthusiasm, part of his comedy series The Faces of Jim.

Finnish television ran its own version of Juke Box Jury called Levyraati. The Finnish version long outlasted Juke Box Jury - it ran from 1961 to 1992, and has both been revived since, and also re-imagined as Videoraati by Finnish cable TV channel MoonTV.

On 7 July 1962 BBC TV broadcast 'Twist Music With A Beat', a pop music programme about the dance craze 'The Twist', featuring a Twist competition between Juke Box Jury members and members of the cast of 'Compact'. The show featured Petula Clark, Don Lang & His Twisters, Tony Osborne & His Mellow Men and The Viscounts.

A ten-minute version of Juke Box Jury also featured as part of a regular 1960s BBC Christmas Day variety show A Christmas Night With The Stars on Christmas Day 1962 and 1963.

The 1963 Gordon Flemyng film about the pop music industry Just For Fun had a Juke Box Jury section which featured David Jacobs in his usual host position while Jimmy Savile, Alan Freeman and Dick Emery played the jury panel. The film was scripted by Milton Subotsky, who was one of the earliest guests on the programme.

In 1964 the Rolling Stones recorded an advert for the breakfast cereal Rice Krispies, which used themes from the programme including a jukebox, studio audience scenes and both the 'Hit' button and the 'Hit' signs that the audience jury used.

The British comedy duo French and Saunders, who appeared on the programme in 1989, referred to Juke Box Jury in their parody of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? in their self-titled 1990 comedy series.

The Generation X 1978 song "Ready Steady Go!" referenced the programme in its lyrics: "I'm not in love with Juke Box Jury/I'm not in love with Thank Your Lucky Stars".

Ian Dury and The Blockheads named their November 1981 album, Juke Box Dury.

In 1989, BBC TV's Arena produced a programme titled "Juke Box Jury" to commemorate the centenary of the jukebox. Hosted by David Jacobs, it also featured Juke Box Jury regulars Pete Murray and Dusty Springfield, with Phil Collins and Sarah Jane Morris making up the rest of the team.

The Late Show programme, "Classical Juke Box Jury" (1990) was a spoof of Juke Box Jury, in which a panel of three people with a background in classical music voted on different versions of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by a variety of conductors.