Sunday 30 August 2009

The Rolf Harris Show





Before he made a career out of dying animals, Rolf had his own Saturday night show - although this was before my time so I never saw it myself. Shame, because if this record is anything to go by, it would knock today's Saturday evening light entertainment shows into a corked hat.

On the first track 'Poor Jenny', Harris recalls taking his girlfriend out and how he left her to be arrested after she was punched at a party and knocked out. You'd never think it would you? 'Roochama' has Rolf singing in Hindi (or whatever - how would I know?) in a vintage Bollywood-sounding piece, complete with wobbleboard..

His trusty old standard 'Jake the Peg' is on here but alas no 'Tie me kangaroo down, sport' - the famous death-bed marsupial bondage request song was recorded five years earlier (1963) and you can't have it on every record he did I suppose.

Little know fact - At points during the making of the 'Animal Hospital' series of programmes, all the animals kept getting better and Rolf was faced with no option than to injure a few himself. One insider commented - 'He would phone the vets surgery he was due to be working at that day and put on the voice of an old lady, reporting a cat or dog with a broken leg - we always knew it was him because he'd say 'cobber' and move the word 'but' to the end of a sentence. He would then turn up for filming with scratches on his face and arms'.

This was to be a 'Crate to Blog Challenge', but this is such a goodie I had to take a bit of time over it because Pigeonshit does not compromise on quality. Rest assured however, this was sitting in a rainy carpark not 5 hours ago.

The Rolf Harris Show 35Mb

Ripped and Encoded by Slothy@128kbps mono (equivalent to 256kbps stereo)

10 comments:

  1. Oh wow! This is a must grab! Many thanks for this. :) I met him back around 1992 - great bloke he was. Signed a batch of stuff and drew me a Rolfaroo. Great!

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  2. Wow, that's cool - I've a vague memory of seeing him at Butlin's Minehead in 1987 (glancing around, it seems he was doing stuff at Butlin's around this time so it's probably right). I walked out of the show when (I think) Keith Harris came on because I hated Orville. Does anyone know if Keith was at Butlin's Minehead in the summer of 1987? Bit of a long shot really.

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  3. It's very likely! Pantomimes and seaside shows are the likes of Keith Harris' main source of income, ain't they? I'm sure he was doing Pontins back in 1983 when I was in Prestatyn, too.

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  4. Now if only we could track down Rolf's track 'Boney's Coming' from his album called 'The Boy From Bassendean' then the world would be a better place. A small extract can be seen here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW4LfmZ_Bw4 and if you're not impressed by that I'm not talking to you ever again.

    Excellent blog. I'm glad you're back.

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  5. Thanks for posting this - much appreciated.

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  6. Seems to have attracted quite a few "dolly birds" to his show so he must be doing something right...

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  7. It's all that heavy breathing he does. Drives 'em crazy.

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  8. Rolf's The Man, Slothy. When you get to hell for dissing him, you can expect a severe beating from me.

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  9. These comments haven't aged well

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