Flanders and Swann were a British comedy duo. Lyricist, actor and singer Michael Flanders and composer and pianist Donald Swann collaborated in writing and performing comic songs. They first worked together in a school revue in 1939 and eventually wrote more than 100 comic songs together. Between 1956 and 1967, Flanders and Swann performed their songs, interspersed with comic monologues, in their long-running two-man revues At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat, which they toured in Britain and abroad. Both revues were recorded in concert (by George Martin), and the duo also made several studio recordings.
Flanders and Swann have had a profound and lasting impact not only on British comedy and music, but also on just about every other major point and place in the panorama of British entertainment over the last sixty years. From Beyond The Fringe to Monty Python; from the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band to The Duckworth Lewis Method; from That Was The Week That Was to Mock The Week; from Joyce Grenfell and Victoria Wood to Tim Minchin – there are significant cultural strands stretching back specifically to the two-man team of Flanders and Swann.
What was it about them, therefore, that proved so inspirational? It was a number of special things. One of them was their unprecedented ability, as satirists, to personalise politics. In songs such as There’s A Hole In My Budget (written in 1953 when Churchill was Prime Minister and Rab Butler his Chancellor, but reprised many times for future incumbents right up to the present day), they revolutionised the way that British entertainers engaged with current affairs, providing critiques that were immediately accessible and understandable to the broad audience, and, in doing so, somehow managed to seem both topical and timeless.
On other occasions, such as in Slow Train – their response to the imminent closure of many old railway stations because of the Beeching cuts in the early Sixties – they expressed a common sense of bitterness and regret in the form of a delicate and wistful elegy.
They were just as innovative in the manner that they mined the mundane irritations of everyday life. In such classic musical scenarios as The Gas Man Cometh (which charted the grimly familiar domino effect of routine ‘handyman’ mishaps), they produced observational humour that was so vivid, true and precise that it still sounds as fresh and as relevant today.
They were also the masters of a kind of witty and wry style of self-deprecation that set the tone for post-war and post-colonial English irony. In A Song Of Patriotic Prejudice, for example, they teased their fellow countrymen and women about their attitude to themselves (‘The English are moral, the English are good/And clever and modest and misunderstood’) and to their near-neighbours (‘The three unfriendly powers’) and to all the others (‘And all the world over, each nation’s the same/They’ve simply no notion of playing the game/They argue with umpires, they cheer when they’ve won/And they practice beforehand which ruins the fun!’), and, once again, it sounds as artful and apposite in the era of Brexit (and renascent Scottish nationalism) as it did more than fifty years before.
