Irish songstress Clodagh Rodgers died last month.  She is perhaps best remembered for representing the UK in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1971, singing Jack In The Box (a rather too obvious attempt to repeat the success of Puppet on a String. I also recall Monty Python’s Flying Circus  lampooning the song.) As a result of her agreeing to sing the UK entry she apparently received death threats from the IRA.

Prior to that she had had UK hits in 1969 with Come Back and Shake Me (a no 3) and this song, which made no 4 in the charts.

Clodagh Rodgers: Goodnight Midnight

Clodagh Rodgers: 5/3/1947 – 18/4/2025. So it goes.

The Rime of course is that of the Ancient Mariner (a nickname bestowed on a 1980s full-time team’s part-time goalkeeper of my acquaintance – he taught in the same school as me – on the grounds that, “he stoppeth one of three”) by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In another piece in Saturday’s Guardian Review, Philip Hoare, remarks on the poem’s continuing relevance, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick through to Fleetwood Mac’s Albatross and beyond.

(Aside; when I hear the word, “Albatross!” I nearly always think “Gannet on a stick.”)

The instant recognition of the lines, “Water, water, everywhere” and “all creatures great and small,” he says, have become part of the lexicon.

At which point my senses pricked up. All Creatures Great and Small is nowadays best known as a television adaptation of a James Herriot set of novels.

But surely, rather than from the Rime, that quote comes from the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful of which it is the second line? To my mind that is a much more likely source for a collective awareness of the phrase than the poem.

The hymn’s writers may well themselves have been inspired by the poem and its almost identical line “All things great and small” (which is followed by “For the dear God who loveth us; He made and loveth all,”) itself very close to “The Lord God made them all.” However that is not quite what Philip Hoare claimed.

I was so saddened to hear of the death of Terry Jones but it was even sadder that his fertile mind had been undermined in the last years of his life by dementia.

Everyone knows Jones from Monty Python (and his eponymous Flying Circus) but I first remember his appearances in the ITV series Do Not Adjust Your Set which ran in the late 1960s. I see some of that programme’s episodes are now on You Tube.

Many of the traits later to be expanded on in Monty Python’s Flying Circus were there in embryo.

There are many classic Jones/Python moments. Here are just three:-

Mouse organ:-

Terence Graham Parry Jones: 1/2/1942 – 21/1/2020. So it goes.

One of the last things I expected to see on our trip to Ypres/Ieper was ….llamas. In a field by the Menin Road, grazing peacefully on what was a battlefield 100 years ago.

The photos were taken late in the evening when it was beginning to get dark.

I just can’t help it. Every time I see llamas I always utter the quote which I used for this post’s title.

Monty Python didn’t come out of nowhere. There was a ferment among English comedic talent following in the wake of Beyond the Fringe in the early to mid-60s, with individuals coming together in various combinations, splitting apart and recoalescing in TV shows like At Last the 1948 Show and Do Not Adjust Your Set as well as the immortal radio comedy I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again – two of whose songs have appeared in this category previously – before the main players settled down into their most famous incarnations as Monty Python’s Flying Circus and The Goodies.

I first remember hearing this classic (I can’t bring myself to categorise it as music however) on I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again but it had been performed earlier in At Last the 1948 Show and it also counts towards those singles from my elder brother’s record collection – see this category numbers 53-56.

John Cleese with the 1948 show choir: The Ferret Song from the 1948 Show