Saturday 6 October 2007

Apotheosis of a crank


Those who say we're all unique, and you can't have degrees of uniqueness, so it's nonsense to describe anyone as more unique than other people, plainly never met Viv Stanshall.

In 1991 he gave a bravura TV performance entitled Crank, or Vivian Stanshall: The Early Years, which was shown again with a lengthy John Peel intro after his tragic death in a fire in 1995.

Glad to say it's all on YouTube, cut into three parts of eight minutes, eight minutes and six minutes respectively, and it's well worth taking in.

But embedding is disabled, drat it. That means I can't paste the video into my blog as I usually do. All I can do is urge you to click here. The first part of the video should start automatically. When it ends, Viv hasn't quite got into his stride; but if you're prepared to bear with him for a couple of minutes longer, click on the link to "Diamond Geezer: Part 2 of 3" in the applet to the right of the picture. When that ends, do the same thing again, mutatis mutandis, and Bob's your mother's sleazy, transient, substance-abusing boyfriend, is he not?

Hope you enjoy it as much as I do, vicar. To learn more, visit Ginger Geezer and the Vivian Stanshall Appreciation Society and Archive.

No comments: