Vid: Are You Having Any Fun? (Foyle's War)
Title: Are You Having Any Fun?
Music: Flanagan & Allen
Fandom: Foyle's War
Summary: What did you do in the war, Mummy?
Length: 1:58
Download: 46MB, mp4
Notes: Made for dkwilliams for
festivids 2014.
A wee note about the song, as I’m not sure how well-remembered Flanagan & Allen are outside my own family...
Foyle’s War wasn’t the fandom I matched on for Festivids - nor was it a show I’d ever paid much attention to before - but dkwilliams had requested a vid using a song from the war years and the request intrigued me enough to make me borrow my parents’ Foyle’s War DVDs (and subsequently fall head over heels for the show, especially Sam). Because I love that whole era of music - British dance bands, swing and jive music, the Great American songbook and all those jazz standards - and the idea of vidding music from the period tickled me greatly.
However, I then spent months - way too long actually when I probably should have been, y’know, vidding - trawling through my own music collection, then Spotify, YouTube etc., looking for the perfect song that would allow me to vid all of the many, many, many Feels I have about Sam Stewart. (Okay, so ultimately I failed, but hey, no regrets - I had way too much fun bopping round my living room to Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman...). I started with the iconic WWII artists DK had suggested, like Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters, then expanded the search to anything I could find, but nothing worked out and I kept coming back to this Flanagan & Allen song.
F&A were very successful British music hall comedians in that traditional music hall vein of very gentle, easy-going comedy, whose partnership ended right when the war did, Allen retiring in 1945 due to ill health. They did various stage, film and radio work; but what they’re best remembered for by the British public are the popular songs they recorded during the war - ‘Run Rabbit Run’, ‘Underneath the Arches’ and ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ are the most famous ones. There’s a reason Bud Flanagan recorded the opening theme song to Dad’s Army, and that’s because his voice - by the 1960s at least - was still so strongly associated with those gently comic wartime songs. And somehow that kind of gentle, almost cosy, but with a darker, mocking edge if you look for it tone - as opposed to the brash, in-your-face American swing music, or Vera Lynn’s sentimentality - felt more Sam to me somehow, and more Foyle’s War-ish. Okay, this particular song is actually American in origin, but this recording of it feels very British. You can just hear the residents of Hastings listening to it on the BBC Home Service...
And if I’m honest, it’s a song with a big personal connection for me, so I’m really happy I got to vid it. My Granddad was a professional musician, who played in ENSA during the war - couldn’t fight due to appalling eyesight and flat feet - and kept on playing up until the 1960s. Then the dance bands died out as pop and rock took over and he could no longer get enough work to support his family, so he became a junior civil servant instead. And he enjoyed that about as much as you’d expect a jazz musician who adored dancehalls and late nights and smoky nightclubs to enjoy becoming a junior civil servant in his 40s...but he never lost his love of the music he had played. Though he was a terrible singer by all accounts, he would sing my mum to sleep every night and when she was a girl he would dance with her around their flat, balancing her on his toes and singing the old songs at the top of his lungs. He did the same for my older sisters years later, and presumably for me too - though he died while I was still too young to really remember him. (The downside of those late nights and smoky nightclubs.)
Anyway, ‘Are You Having Any Fun’ was one of the songs he would sing throughout Mum’s childhood, and it’s one of the songs that can guarantee to leave her in floods of tears if she ever hears it, along with ‘Friendship’ by Cole Porter (“if you’re ever in a jam, here I am…”) and ‘Change Partners’ by Irving Berlin. It’s also one that my Grandma’s taken to singing in the last year or two as she succumbs to dementia - they didn’t have the happiest of marriages so she’s never mentioned my Grandad much before, but as her memory drifts, she seems to be going back to her youth, the war and their early courtship. And I sang it with my family as a child, because I grew up in the kind of family where we genuinely had sing songs round the piano, and this particular song was I think in a book of WWII songs that got dragged out regularly.
The song, as originally written, is a slightly satirical one where the singer mocks a rich man for being miserly, asking what good all his money does him if he’s not enjoying life. But in my family - where it was never sung with the intended introduction, which I chopped out for this vid - it’s always been a song about making the most of wherever you find yourself. We sang it as a positive song, about enjoying life even if it’s not what you expected it would be; whether you’re spending Monday to Friday filing paperwork in a windowless office while your saxophone languishes in the attic, or whether you’re spending the War stuck outside waiting by the car while the menfolk get on with solving the plot. One of the things I love most about Sam is how unsquashable she is - you can try to squash her or wear her down, but she’ll always bounce right back up again, she never loses her enthusiasm or joy or love - and this felt like the right song for her.
And my goodness, that’s a lot of text for what’s probably one of the shortest, slightest, most lightweight vids I’ve ever made! Screw it, am going to post it anyway. Thank you dkwilliams for the request, for the chance to wallow, and for the beautiful source it led me to.
Music: Flanagan & Allen
Fandom: Foyle's War
Summary: What did you do in the war, Mummy?
Length: 1:58
Download: 46MB, mp4
Notes: Made for dkwilliams for
festivids 2014.
A wee note about the song, as I’m not sure how well-remembered Flanagan & Allen are outside my own family...
Foyle’s War wasn’t the fandom I matched on for Festivids - nor was it a show I’d ever paid much attention to before - but dkwilliams had requested a vid using a song from the war years and the request intrigued me enough to make me borrow my parents’ Foyle’s War DVDs (and subsequently fall head over heels for the show, especially Sam). Because I love that whole era of music - British dance bands, swing and jive music, the Great American songbook and all those jazz standards - and the idea of vidding music from the period tickled me greatly.
However, I then spent months - way too long actually when I probably should have been, y’know, vidding - trawling through my own music collection, then Spotify, YouTube etc., looking for the perfect song that would allow me to vid all of the many, many, many Feels I have about Sam Stewart. (Okay, so ultimately I failed, but hey, no regrets - I had way too much fun bopping round my living room to Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman...). I started with the iconic WWII artists DK had suggested, like Vera Lynn, Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters, then expanded the search to anything I could find, but nothing worked out and I kept coming back to this Flanagan & Allen song.
F&A were very successful British music hall comedians in that traditional music hall vein of very gentle, easy-going comedy, whose partnership ended right when the war did, Allen retiring in 1945 due to ill health. They did various stage, film and radio work; but what they’re best remembered for by the British public are the popular songs they recorded during the war - ‘Run Rabbit Run’, ‘Underneath the Arches’ and ‘We’re Going to Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line’ are the most famous ones. There’s a reason Bud Flanagan recorded the opening theme song to Dad’s Army, and that’s because his voice - by the 1960s at least - was still so strongly associated with those gently comic wartime songs. And somehow that kind of gentle, almost cosy, but with a darker, mocking edge if you look for it tone - as opposed to the brash, in-your-face American swing music, or Vera Lynn’s sentimentality - felt more Sam to me somehow, and more Foyle’s War-ish. Okay, this particular song is actually American in origin, but this recording of it feels very British. You can just hear the residents of Hastings listening to it on the BBC Home Service...
And if I’m honest, it’s a song with a big personal connection for me, so I’m really happy I got to vid it. My Granddad was a professional musician, who played in ENSA during the war - couldn’t fight due to appalling eyesight and flat feet - and kept on playing up until the 1960s. Then the dance bands died out as pop and rock took over and he could no longer get enough work to support his family, so he became a junior civil servant instead. And he enjoyed that about as much as you’d expect a jazz musician who adored dancehalls and late nights and smoky nightclubs to enjoy becoming a junior civil servant in his 40s...but he never lost his love of the music he had played. Though he was a terrible singer by all accounts, he would sing my mum to sleep every night and when she was a girl he would dance with her around their flat, balancing her on his toes and singing the old songs at the top of his lungs. He did the same for my older sisters years later, and presumably for me too - though he died while I was still too young to really remember him. (The downside of those late nights and smoky nightclubs.)
Anyway, ‘Are You Having Any Fun’ was one of the songs he would sing throughout Mum’s childhood, and it’s one of the songs that can guarantee to leave her in floods of tears if she ever hears it, along with ‘Friendship’ by Cole Porter (“if you’re ever in a jam, here I am…”) and ‘Change Partners’ by Irving Berlin. It’s also one that my Grandma’s taken to singing in the last year or two as she succumbs to dementia - they didn’t have the happiest of marriages so she’s never mentioned my Grandad much before, but as her memory drifts, she seems to be going back to her youth, the war and their early courtship. And I sang it with my family as a child, because I grew up in the kind of family where we genuinely had sing songs round the piano, and this particular song was I think in a book of WWII songs that got dragged out regularly.
The song, as originally written, is a slightly satirical one where the singer mocks a rich man for being miserly, asking what good all his money does him if he’s not enjoying life. But in my family - where it was never sung with the intended introduction, which I chopped out for this vid - it’s always been a song about making the most of wherever you find yourself. We sang it as a positive song, about enjoying life even if it’s not what you expected it would be; whether you’re spending Monday to Friday filing paperwork in a windowless office while your saxophone languishes in the attic, or whether you’re spending the War stuck outside waiting by the car while the menfolk get on with solving the plot. One of the things I love most about Sam is how unsquashable she is - you can try to squash her or wear her down, but she’ll always bounce right back up again, she never loses her enthusiasm or joy or love - and this felt like the right song for her.
And my goodness, that’s a lot of text for what’s probably one of the shortest, slightest, most lightweight vids I’ve ever made! Screw it, am going to post it anyway. Thank you dkwilliams for the request, for the chance to wallow, and for the beautiful source it led me to.