"Swim" said the mama fishie, "Swim if you can"
And they swam and they swam right over the dam.

        Although these days Rolf Harris has become better known for his popular reality television shows, like Animal Hospital, his early career was dominated by song. Rolf was born in Australia but moved to England when he was 22. His own composition Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport featuring the sound of a wobble board, was released in September 1960. Further novelty songs from his stage act included The Court of King Caractacus, which he had originally seen in a scout's campfire song book. In the mid 1960s, while working in Canada, he saw an act in which the Dutch artist, Frank Roosen, sang about a man with three legs. Having made contact with Roosen, Rolf added extra lyrics to the song and in 1966 released Jake the Peg.
    Another musical comedian was the British character actor Bernard Cribbins. This Oldham-born star, who went on to narrate The Wombles on BBC Television and appeared in several Carry On films, recorded three novelty songs which reached the charts in 1962. Prominent among these was Right Said Fred which satirised the efforts of a gang of British workmen. The song became the inspiration behind the British band of the same name in the nineties.
      The trend of each generation of comedian to combine their own comic style with a novelty song continued into the seventies with Benny Hill's Ernie (the fastest milkman in the west) while in the USA Ray Stevens, too, saw major hits. Stevens first number one was a melodic ballad called Everything Is Beautiful but his major triumphs were with novelty hits like Bridget the Midgit (1971) and The Streak (1974). Streaking in public was a phenomenon of the seventies and, like Alan Sherman before him, the humour of Ray Stevens was both timely and relevent to the age in which it was recorded. This was, perhaps, the secret in making a successful novelty record: the song had to reflect the issues, concerns, values and, above all, humour of the time. Thus Harry Enfield caught the materialistic mood of Thatcherite Britain in the late eighties with his novelty hit Loadsamoney.Are novelty records a thing of the past? Sales of single CDs have shown a marked decline in recent years and these days the market for the novelty value single is as uncertain as it is for mainstream pop. However the genius factor can never be overlooked and the ability of individuals, by sheer talent, to impose their own personality on each new generation can never be discounted.
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