Oooh Betty! Didn’t she do well? Not ‘arf

WHAT MAKES A CATCHPHRASE CATCH ON?

Viewed in the cold light of day, none of Bruce Forsyth’s most famous catchphrases — ‘i’m in charge’, ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’, ‘Good game, good game’, ‘Give us a twirl’, ‘didn’t she do well?’ ‘Keeeep dancin’!’ — seem particularly special. in fact, quite the opposite: they are almost unbelievably banal.

Yet, for some obscure reason, they caught on and became part of everyday banter.

when Larry Grayson took over The Generation Game from Bruce Forsyth back in 1978, he brought with him his own selection of already popular catchphrases, notably, ‘Shut that door’ and ‘what a gay day’. But he was also keen to make his mark on the programme by coining a brand new catchphrase. However, when he attempted to create one by repeating ‘what a lot you’ve got ...you HAVE got a lot!’ ad nauseam, it failed to catch on, and he was finally obliged to abandon it.

why didn’t it work? it’s hard to pinpoint anything about ‘what a lot you’ve got ... you HAVE got a lot!’ that makes it any more or less catchy than ‘Nice to see you, to see you nice’.

One certainly can’t pin its failure on anything else Larry Grayson was doing wrong at the time, since he was easily winning the TV ratings war against Bruce Forsyth’s great flop on iTV, Bruce’s Big Night, at one point achieving viewing figures of 25 million.

There seems no reason why some catchphrases catch on and others do not. it clearly has nothing to do with whether or not they are clever, or else we would never remember Michael Barrymore’s ‘Awwight?’ or Paul daniel’s ‘Not a lot!’ or Michael Crawford’s ‘Oooh, Betty!’ or Alan Freeman’s ‘Not ’arf!’, none of which reach Mensa standards.

it has always struck me as strange that one of Margaret Thatcher’s most famous catchphrases —‘You turn if you want to: the lady’s not for turning’ — was just a scripted combination of two particularly third-rate puns, one of them a play on the title of a long-forgotten play, The Lady’s Not For Burning. Yet it caught on, and now looks as though it will be remembered long after any of her more considered statements have been forgotten.

Like drunken soldiers, catchphrases refuse to obey orders. Some of the daftest enter into the language, but, even then, there is no guarantee.

david Frost made the same mistake as Larry Grayson when he attempted to introduce a new catchphrase to his Sunday breakfast show. Having become famous for his smooth ‘Hello, good evening and welcome’ in the Sixties, he thought he could perform the same trick by saying, ‘Top of the morning to you’ to all his guests. But, for some reason, it felt bogus and never caught on. On television, as in real life, there is a thin line between cheery and irritating. Repeating an embryonic catchphrase over and over can obviously boost its chances of survival, regardless of whether or not you are loveable. No- one would say that the daleks were loveable, but they managed to say ‘ exterminate, exterminate!’ so often, and with such conviction, that the phrase was almost bound to catch on. On the other hand, some of the most famous catchphrases were only ever said once, or, in some cases, not at all. Neil Armstrong said ‘ One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’ just the once, but in such unusual circumstances that it became his catchphrase.

The same is true of Princess diana with her ‘Three of us in this marriage’ quote, Basil Fawlty’s ‘don’t mention the war’, John Mcenroe’s ‘You cannot be serious’ and Harold wilson’s ‘ pound in your pocket’.

Many famous catchphrases were never uttered by the figures to whom they were attributed. Queen Victoria never said ‘ we are not amused’ and Jim Callaghan never said ‘Crisis? what crisis?’ Nor did Sherlock Holmes ever say ‘elementary, my dear watson’, or Tarzan say ‘Me Tarzan, You Jane’.

OTHERS were almost said, but not quite. Captain Kirk said ‘Beam us up, Mr Scott’. Neville Chamberlain said ‘ Peace for our time’. Humphrey Bogart said ‘Play it’. Harold Macmillan said ‘Most of our people have never had it so good’. Greta Garbo said ‘i want to be let alone’. Yet it is these real quotes that now sound off-kilter: the world hears what it wants to hear, regardless of the facts.

Perhaps the secret to a lasting catchphrase lies not in its sense, but in its sound.