MY BIG HIT WITH FIFTH BEATLE

ONE of life’s great gentlemen was George Martin, the record producer, who heard me sing a nonsense song in a West End revue and invited me to record a few humorous numbers. That was his speciality, in the days before The Beatles.

My first attempt was not quite a hit, but my second go was a winner — a song about a Cockney workman being pestered by a posh know-it-all in a bowler hat. It was called The Hole In The Ground.

We recorded it in less than a day, and it was a Top Ten hit. So was the follow-up, Right Said Fred, about some blokes trying to move a piano.

The best thing to come from The Hole In The Ground was an episode of Desert Island Discs about a year later, when Sir Noel Coward, out of his music choices by the likes of Sergei Rachmaninov and Giuseppe Verdi, chose The Hole In The Ground as the favourite of his eight discs — it was the only one, he said, that he would never get sick of. Now that’s what you call a compliment.