Tinchy Stryder and the Chuckle Brothers? Don’t laugh, it’s perfect pop
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Version 0 of 1. Fame is all about people finding their moment in the spotlight. Most celebrities are lucky to get one such moment in their lifetime. Some of them figure out how to extend those moments. A few are lucky enough to experience two, and fewer still are true visionaries who engineer and cultivate moment after moment, reinventing their public image as they do so, becoming relevant to successive generations, often for slightly different reasons. That visionary count is relatively short: Madonna, David Bowie, Lovejoy when he was in that HBO thing. But now we can add Barry and Paul Chuckle to that list. In 1967, the brothers won Opportunity Knocks. By the 1970s, the pair were regulars on New Faces. The 1980s brought the double whammy of ChuckleHounds and ChuckleVision, viewed by many as their Thin White Duke phase; in the 1990s, To Me, To You! reinvented the gameshow just as effectively as it reinvented those Chuckles at its heart. The 21st century has seen Barry and Paul celebrated for their considerable achievements and now, in the dying embers of 2014, these cultural chameleons, both now in their late 60s, have brought their multi-generational gurn appeal bang up to date with the most audacious move of their careers: rapping on a track with Tinchy Stryder, released as a video this week via influential youth broadcasters SB.TV. News of this collaboration first broke via an Instagram video of Barry and Paul skanking with Tinchy in a recording studio. It followed a rather strange incident involving a Chuckle selfie taken after the brothers had given evidence in the Dave Lee Travis court case. The studio footage, however, sent (some of) Twitter into meltdown mode. Even so, few would have dreamed that the resulting pop artefact could be anything this perfect. There are catchphrases, there’s an extremely strong “to me, to you” hook and, in the video, there’s some argy bargy with a ladder – the Holy Grail of any Chuckle venture. At a point in pop when women are routinely objectified in all types of music video, the Chuckle Brothers objectify a ladder. It’s daring, it’s disruptive. It is, in its own way, dangerous. And it’s definitely a moment. |