You're viewing the HTML version of the Shine website. If you haven't got Adobe Flash player Comedy Songs: The Pop Years
Comedy Songs: The Pop Years is a 90 minute documentary for BBC4 which traces the modern history of this criminally overlooked genre of popular music from the birth of the pop charts in 1952 to its reinvention in the new millennium. On this epic journey we discover that George Martin was the missing link between the Goons and the Beatles, the Barron Knights invented the parody song and that the Two Ronnies weren't big fans of Not the Nine O'Clock News. Almost everyone appears in the comedy song's chequered history of peaks and troughs. From the sixties satire boom to the golden period in the 70s of Monty Python and Billy Connolly and even in the wilderness years of novelty naffness in the 80s which found redemption in alternative comedy and Victoria Wood. Contributors include Victoria Wood & Alexei Sayle.