As Jane Austen intended to say before last-minute notions of pride and prejudice distracted her, it’s a truth universally acknowledged that one’s funny bone can often be tickled by the unlikeliest of things.
Which was proved one recent Sunday afternoon, when I was feeling particularly cheesed-off because it’d been raining all day, it was almost dark, and twice (within half-an-hour!) I’d heard an annoying ad on the radio that featured a man telling me that a well-known electronics superstore was offering “Twelve mumf’s interest-free credit!”
Yes. Twelve ‘mumf’s’.
Is it possible The Advertising Standards Council have lowered the bar on their standards?
Anyway, as the radio began to assault my ears with the same ad for a third time within an hour, I switched it off and turned on the telly, which I hadn’t watched for a couple of days.
So the channel that appeared on the screen was the last one I’d tuned into – Talking Pictures TV, the home of vintage films and ‘retro’ TV series that’s achieved unexpected but well-deserved success since it came on air 10 years ago.
The programme on the screen was an episode of a 1950s series I’d never heard of, called “The Vise”. Each episode featured people caught in an emotional or moral vise (or vice).
This episode was set in a Monte Carlo nightclub where a performer named Edmondo Ros sang a song with a lyric which was so unexpectedly ridiculously hilarious it made me laugh out loud, lifting the gloomy mood of a winter afternoon.
When I heard Edmondo, accompanied by his orchestra, sing the plaintive lyric “Who stole the beans from my maracas?” in such a jaunty manner, it amused me so much I rewound it to watch again.
I discovered that Trinidad-born Edmundo Ros (who lived to be 100) was a huge star of radio, TV and upmarket West End nightclubs in the 1950s and 60s. A favourite of the Royal Family, one of his records, “The Wedding Samba”, sold three million copies.
So, I don’t think he was too despondent that someone pinched the beans from his maracas!