writing
The songs of George Formby: An analysis
In 1943 the writer George Orwell published an essay on Donald McGill, the foremost ’saucy postcard’ artist of the interwar years. The essay contains an unsurpassed analysis of the content of such postcards and discusses their public appeal:
Their existence, and the fact that people want them, is symptomatically important. Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against virtue. They express only one tendency in the human mind, but a tendency which is always there and will find its outlet, like water. On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. [1]
In this essay I will apply Orwell’s method to an analysis of the songs of a performer from the music hall tradition: George Formby.
Formby’s comic persona, a gormless and naïve working class chap from Lancashire, was hugely popular with the British public. His films and records made him the highest paid family entertainer in Britain in the late 1930s and during the World War 2[2]. In common with the music hall tradition, most of his songs contain frequent sexual innuendo.
’When I’m cleaning windows’ [3], undoubtedly his most popular song, featured in the 1937 film ‘Keep Your Seats Please’ and was banned by the BBC because of its content. Such was its popularity that Formby or his collaborators wrote a sequel the following year. Of the 12 verses in the two versions 9 contain sexual references as follows:
- The sexual activities of newly-weds (3 verses)
- Women undressing (2 verses)
- Naked women (2 verses)
- Sexually frustrated ‘old maid’ (1 verse)
- His large penis (1 verse)
These parallel the themes of McGill’s art, but in addition, the song is sung from the point of view of a seasoned voyeur who has no doubt that ‘a window cleaner you would be’ if you could witness the above. One verse begins with the line ‘Pajamas lying side by side’. Orwell observed that homosexuality never featured in McGill’s postcards[4], but there seems no other reason to mention such a thing, other than for its gay (and at the time highly salacious) implication.
A line of dialogue that features in more than one Formby films, addressed to the attractive female lead, is ’you’d look good with nothing on’.[5] Where such a line to be delivered by comedians such as Sid James or Max Miller their macho personas would have made it course. Formby’s character delivers it in a voice that is just this side of camp, the voice of a wet mummy’s boy, and it is usually followed by an embarrassed ‘oh no, I didn’t mean…”. In consequence, we believe it was a gaff and laugh at George rather than with him. He employed the same voice for most of his songs and this perhaps rendered them almost innocent. It also makes the voyeuristic persona of ‘window cleaner’ creepily believable.
A comic device that does not feature in that song is word substitution, as in the following example from ‘Chinese Laundry Blues’:
‘Now Mr Wu, has got a naughty eye that flickers,
You ought to see it wobble when he’s ironing lady’s…blouses’. [6]
‘Aunty Maggie’s Remedy’ employs the same effect to underscore the risqué content:
Now I know a girl, who is putting on weight,
In a spot where it just shouldn’t be
So I said to Nelly‘Now you rub your…ankle
With Aunty Maggie’s remedy. [7]
In the song ‘With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock’ the very subject (a long, cylindrical pink object) suggests a double meaning that is reinforced by such lines as:
In my pocket it got stuck I could tell,
For when I pulled it out I pulled my shirt out as well.[8]
The song also includes a particularly bizarre verse in which are told of a drowning girl who asks the singer to save her only to be told ‘ well if you’re drowning then I don’t want to loose, my little stick of Blackpool Rock’. The tendency to underscore double meaning also features in ‘Little Ukulele’[9], a song in which the true meaning, the virtues of holding onto one’s penis, is particularly thinly veiled. Early in the song we learn that his mother had advised the singer ‘do what I say, and you’ll never go astray, if you keep your ukulele in your hand’, good advice, perhaps, given the shame of unwanted pregnancy and the fact that venereal disease was untreatable at the time. In second verse in he describes sitting by the sea with a girl:
I felt so shy and bashful sitting there
For the things she said I didn’t understand
She said your love just turns me dizzy
So come on big boy get busy,
But I kept my ukulele in my hand.
Formby returned to the voyeur theme with ‘In my little snapshot album’ [10] in which we are told of a camera that can ‘take pictures in the dark and even see through brick’. The resulting photographs, of the unspecified sexual activity of neighbours and family, are stored in the album of the title. The song ends on a theme more than once depicted by McGill.
I’ve got a picture of a nudist camp…
All very jolly tho’ a trifle damp…
There’s Uncle Dick without a care
Discarding all his underwear,
But his watch and chain still dangle there
In my little snapshot album.
Whilst a majority of Formby’s songs have a risqué component it is important to state that some did not. Songs such as ‘Riding in the TT races’, ‘Count your blessings and smile’ and ‘It’s in the air’ are cheerful and uplifting family numbers, and he also had a liking for the sentimental ballad, of which ‘Leaning on the lamp-post’ is the best known. That song and several like it contain no salacious content, and if an occasional line slips in it is of a more subtle variety than usual. In the song ‘My little Wigan garden’ Formby describes how his girl will ‘sit on my knee, And watch how the rhubarb grows’[11]. The song ‘I wonder whose under her balcony now’ was due to be included in the 1939 film ‘Trouble Brewing’ until the producers withdrew it due to the following line:
Is he kissing her under the nose,
Or underneath the archway
Where the Sweet William grows. [12]
Many of Formby’s films include a scene in which he sings a sexually suggestive song to an attractive female lead, to her apparent pleasure rather than embarrassment. In the film ‘Much Too Shy’ he actually sings such a song whilst being pedaled along on a bicycle by his younger brother in the film, seemingly a child of 9 or 10 (though actually the diminutive adult actor Jimmy Clitheroe)[13]. Such scenes seem ludicrous or highly inappropriate now, but at the time the Formby persona seemed to render them harmless fun, a private joke with the adults in the audience.
An edition of BBC2’s Late Show in 1990 carried a feature on ‘The cinema of the vulgar’, which included the films of George Formby[14]. The presenter concluded that since the liberalization of attitudes and speech in the 1960s the type of humour embodied by those films, or in Formby’s case the songs they included, has lost much of its’ impact and significance. The music web site I-tunes[15] actually classifies Formby songs as ‘folk music’ and that is perhaps the feeling they evoke when sung or heard today; akin more to sea shanties than pop-tunes; a ‘trip down memory lane’ that still has the power to provoke a schoolboy chuckle.
Bibliography
- Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards. The British Cinema in the Second World War. Second edition. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
- David Brett, George Formby: A Troubled Genius, London: Robson Books, 2001)
- John Fisher, The Entertainers: George Formby, (London: Woburn-Futura, 1975).
- George Formby Complete. Edited by Andrew Bailey and Peter Foss, (London: Wise Publications, 1988).
- John Munday, The British Musical Film. (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007).
- George Orwell, The art of Donald McGill, 1943. Reproduced in ‘Essays’, John Carey Ed, pp. 373-384. (London: Everyman Library, 2002).
Other media
- George Formby, The Best of George Formby, Delta Music Ltd, 1996, Track 3 ((music CD).
- Much Too Shy, in Comic Icons: George Formby Collection, , Optimum Classic/Studio Canal, 2007 (DVD collection).
- Cinema of the vulgar. The Late Show, BBC2, 27/2/1990.
- www.itunes.com.
Notes
[1] George Orwell, The art of Donald McGill, 1943. Reproduced in ‘Essays’, John Carey Ed, pp. 373-384 (London: Everyman Library, 2002),p 384.
[2] Anthony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards. The British Cinema in the Second World War. Second edition. ( Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), p.80.
[3] George Formby Complete. Edited by Andrew Bailey and Peter Foss, (London:Wise Publications, 1988) p.88.
[4] George Orwell, The art of Donald McGill, 1943. Reproduced in ‘Essays’, John Carey Ed, pp. 373-384 (London: Everyman Library, 2002),p 376.
[5] For example in Much Too Shy, Comic Icons: George Formby Collection, Optimum Classic/Studio Canal, 2007 (DVD collection).
[6] George Formby Complete. Edited by Andrew Bailey and Peter Foss, (London:Wise Publications, 1988) p. 52.
[7] Ibid, p.192.
[8] Ibid, p.115.
[9] This is from the recorded version: George Formby, The Best of George Formby, Delta Music Ltd, 1996, Track 3 (music CD).
[10]George Formby Complete. Edited by Andrew Bailey and Peter Foss, (London:Wise Publications, 1988) p.132.
[11] John Fisher, The Entertainers: George Formby, (London: Woburn-Futura, 1975) p.31.
[12] David Brett, George Formby: A Troubled Genius, London: Robson Books, 2001), p.83.
[13] Much Too Shy, in Comic Icons: George Formby Collection, Optimum Classic/Studio Canal, 2007.
[14] Cinema of the vulgar. The Late Show, BBC2, 27/2/1990.
[15] www.itunes.com.