An odd fellow, Patrick Cargill. Difficult to categorise. As with most people my age, I initially knew and recognised him as a light-footed comedy actor; he was fairly astringent in the “we’re not all Rob Roys, you know” sequence of Hancock’s Blood Donor but otherwise he was probably best known as the well meaning but bumbling star of the ITV sitcom Father, Dear Father (a sort of upmarket parallel to Sid James’ Bless This House) or – for those with slightly longer memories – in the intermittent BBC2 French farce series Ooh La La, and it was in this persona that RCA coaxed him into the recording studio in the late summer of 1969 to record an album.
Then, slightly later in my life, I saw him playing Number 2 in the “Hammer Into Anvil” episode of The Prisoner and was shellshocked. He’d already appeared as a cynical ex-colleague of McGoohan’s three episodes earlier – “Many Happy Returns,” that dream within a dream – but now here was cuddly Patrick of Father, Dear Father pressing the blade of a sword into McGoohan’s forehead, slapping him around and quoting Goethe. His eyes alone could have frozen the universe. Having already driven a woman to suicide, McGoohan sets about systematically wrecking him through intimations of paranoia, and by episode’s end he is a piteous, blubbering, foetal ruination of a man. I hadn’t known at the time that Cargill had attended Sandhurst and served with distinction as an Army officer in India during WWII, but clearly there was a severity behind his benign façade, not that this characteristic was much exploited by writers and directors.
The involvement of RCA in the Patrick Cargill Sings “Father, Dear Father” album – they also bankrolled Peter Wyngarde’s infamous When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head the following year – suggests a tax loss manoeuvre, but then there was a popular urge for singing actors in the wake of “Macarthur Park” and all that – even Keith Michell and Edward Woodward scored hit singles and/or albums during this period. One briefly wonders whether the likes of Colin Gordon or Kenneth Griffith were ever approached by record companies.
The Cargill album is less obviously out there than the Wyngarde one – you couldn’t really get any further out than “Rape” – but it shares the notion of a concept, although Cargill’s is wisely far more modest; light hearted reflections on a middle-aged man’s views of the modern world, and clearly performed in character.
Well, to a point. There’s light hearted, and then there’s something like “Women,” the nearest the album came to “Rape”-style controversy with its cheery Black and White Minstrels chorus of “Women! Women! It’s a disgrace! That they are part of the human ra-a-ace!” and the track which will probably ensure that it never gets reissued on CD. Look closer, though, and the song systematically gets subverted; Cargill grumbles (essentially the whole album is 40 minutes of affable grumbling) about women drivers, women in supermarkets and restaurants, at the kitchen sink etc., is finally proved wrong and stops the song halfway with a resigned “Oh, I give up.”
Cargill of course was what obituarists habitually term a “lifelong bachelor,” hence the twist in “Out On A Sunday” where he turns out to be singing of his love for his vintage car and the numerous asides to his dog H.G. (there’s even a track entitled “Walking With Old H.G.” with offkey whistling and Cargill discussing the plot developments in chapter four of his latest novel – in Father, Dear Father, his character is a novelist). Certainly there is more than a hint of gayness in his Number 2 – not least in his relationship with his assistant, the equally gay Basil Hoskins, who ends up picking a fight with McGoohan for “coming between them,” lovers’ tiff-style – and that in itself could lead to a useful examination of the large number of gay actors who played the nominal Village head (Eric Portman, Colin Gordon, Peter Wyngarde, Mary Morris…) but the mood of the album is decidedly camp; check out the beyond-camp “foe-dee-oh-dee-oh-doh” backing vocals in “On Art” for a start.
Despite his breezy assurances on the Free Design-ish (no, really!) “Old Man Autumn” (his equivalent of Wyngarde’s “April”) that “Pop is on the top” (and the rather more sinister aside in the same song of “He knows there’s nothing like a fellow with a past”), he rants about modern ways very entertainingly – as a singer, Cargill is unsurprisingly proved to be a fine actor, but he had the substantial help of writer/arranger/producer Bill Shepherd (the same Bill Shepherd who oversaw Odessa amongst other masterpieces for the Bee Gees) though was responsible for most of the lyrics. And even then things are not quite as they seem; “Songs Of Yesterday” sees him yearning for “all the old humdingers played on Housewives’ Choice” in a deliberately out-of-tune voice (but also lobs in unexpected lyrical curveballs like “consummate nerve” and “frantic benders”). “Television” is a sort of pre-emptive negation (or confirmation) of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Nothing Rhymed” (“It’s lovely to sit at home while someone is burning Rome ” – also a subtle counterpart to the less than subtle rhyme on “ Holiday ”: “Give me Roma instead of home-a”).
At extremes, though, things can get rather proto-Morrisseyesque. “Nothing Is The Same Anymore” – with equally ludicrous backing vocals (“Hurrah!” “Hee hee!”) – sees Cargill moaning about everything from long hair to moon landings before concluding “We’re all deranged!” and signing off with an unusually bitter “I wish I was dead.” Meanwhile, “Weight Watchers Guide” has him suffer the constraints of the compelled diet (“Here’s your glass of unsweetened lemon juice”), beginning with a line entirely worthy of Morrissey, “I think I’d hang for a piece of lemon meringue.” His desires and cravings grow progressively bonkers throughout the song (“I’d smash any little herbert and then I’d steal his sherbet”) and he ends up contemplating eating the cat with a Vincent Price-style cackle.
Strangest of all, though, is “Alone On The Telephone” which starts with an enraged Cargill shrieking about being surrounded by “cretins and cranks” (definite shades of “Hammer Into Anvil” here) to a bemused parlour piano before yet another twenties vaudeville-style romp begins. He whines about the ‘phone always ringing (shades of the Fun Boy Three to come?), of “helpful ideas that reduce me to tears” or “old Fred – how I wish he was dead.” Halfway through the song he begins a tirade against bank managers: “Why are bank managers so interminably untrusting – and uninteresting?” and again his sanity is increasingly called into question (“Why weren’t dogs given hands?”). Offers for police ball tickets are met with an impatient whistle, the jokes that his cousin tells “have peculiar smells” and finally he cracks. He’s going out, and: “I’m not coming back at all. Come on H.G. – let’s take a peaceful and rejuvenating walk in the park.”
Hmm.
Then, slightly later in my life, I saw him playing Number 2 in the “Hammer Into Anvil” episode of The Prisoner and was shellshocked. He’d already appeared as a cynical ex-colleague of McGoohan’s three episodes earlier – “Many Happy Returns,” that dream within a dream – but now here was cuddly Patrick of Father, Dear Father pressing the blade of a sword into McGoohan’s forehead, slapping him around and quoting Goethe. His eyes alone could have frozen the universe. Having already driven a woman to suicide, McGoohan sets about systematically wrecking him through intimations of paranoia, and by episode’s end he is a piteous, blubbering, foetal ruination of a man. I hadn’t known at the time that Cargill had attended Sandhurst and served with distinction as an Army officer in India during WWII, but clearly there was a severity behind his benign façade, not that this characteristic was much exploited by writers and directors.
The involvement of RCA in the Patrick Cargill Sings “Father, Dear Father” album – they also bankrolled Peter Wyngarde’s infamous When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head the following year – suggests a tax loss manoeuvre, but then there was a popular urge for singing actors in the wake of “Macarthur Park” and all that – even Keith Michell and Edward Woodward scored hit singles and/or albums during this period. One briefly wonders whether the likes of Colin Gordon or Kenneth Griffith were ever approached by record companies.
The Cargill album is less obviously out there than the Wyngarde one – you couldn’t really get any further out than “Rape” – but it shares the notion of a concept, although Cargill’s is wisely far more modest; light hearted reflections on a middle-aged man’s views of the modern world, and clearly performed in character.
Well, to a point. There’s light hearted, and then there’s something like “Women,” the nearest the album came to “Rape”-style controversy with its cheery Black and White Minstrels chorus of “Women! Women! It’s a disgrace! That they are part of the human ra-a-ace!” and the track which will probably ensure that it never gets reissued on CD. Look closer, though, and the song systematically gets subverted; Cargill grumbles (essentially the whole album is 40 minutes of affable grumbling) about women drivers, women in supermarkets and restaurants, at the kitchen sink etc., is finally proved wrong and stops the song halfway with a resigned “Oh, I give up.”
Cargill of course was what obituarists habitually term a “lifelong bachelor,” hence the twist in “Out On A Sunday” where he turns out to be singing of his love for his vintage car and the numerous asides to his dog H.G. (there’s even a track entitled “Walking With Old H.G.” with offkey whistling and Cargill discussing the plot developments in chapter four of his latest novel – in Father, Dear Father, his character is a novelist). Certainly there is more than a hint of gayness in his Number 2 – not least in his relationship with his assistant, the equally gay Basil Hoskins, who ends up picking a fight with McGoohan for “coming between them,” lovers’ tiff-style – and that in itself could lead to a useful examination of the large number of gay actors who played the nominal Village head (Eric Portman, Colin Gordon, Peter Wyngarde, Mary Morris…) but the mood of the album is decidedly camp; check out the beyond-camp “foe-dee-oh-dee-oh-doh” backing vocals in “On Art” for a start.
Despite his breezy assurances on the Free Design-ish (no, really!) “Old Man Autumn” (his equivalent of Wyngarde’s “April”) that “Pop is on the top” (and the rather more sinister aside in the same song of “He knows there’s nothing like a fellow with a past”), he rants about modern ways very entertainingly – as a singer, Cargill is unsurprisingly proved to be a fine actor, but he had the substantial help of writer/arranger/producer Bill Shepherd (the same Bill Shepherd who oversaw Odessa amongst other masterpieces for the Bee Gees) though was responsible for most of the lyrics. And even then things are not quite as they seem; “Songs Of Yesterday” sees him yearning for “all the old humdingers played on Housewives’ Choice” in a deliberately out-of-tune voice (but also lobs in unexpected lyrical curveballs like “consummate nerve” and “frantic benders”). “Television” is a sort of pre-emptive negation (or confirmation) of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s “Nothing Rhymed” (“It’s lovely to sit at home while someone is burning Rome ” – also a subtle counterpart to the less than subtle rhyme on “ Holiday ”: “Give me Roma instead of home-a”).
At extremes, though, things can get rather proto-Morrisseyesque. “Nothing Is The Same Anymore” – with equally ludicrous backing vocals (“Hurrah!” “Hee hee!”) – sees Cargill moaning about everything from long hair to moon landings before concluding “We’re all deranged!” and signing off with an unusually bitter “I wish I was dead.” Meanwhile, “Weight Watchers Guide” has him suffer the constraints of the compelled diet (“Here’s your glass of unsweetened lemon juice”), beginning with a line entirely worthy of Morrissey, “I think I’d hang for a piece of lemon meringue.” His desires and cravings grow progressively bonkers throughout the song (“I’d smash any little herbert and then I’d steal his sherbet”) and he ends up contemplating eating the cat with a Vincent Price-style cackle.
Strangest of all, though, is “Alone On The Telephone” which starts with an enraged Cargill shrieking about being surrounded by “cretins and cranks” (definite shades of “Hammer Into Anvil” here) to a bemused parlour piano before yet another twenties vaudeville-style romp begins. He whines about the ‘phone always ringing (shades of the Fun Boy Three to come?), of “helpful ideas that reduce me to tears” or “old Fred – how I wish he was dead.” Halfway through the song he begins a tirade against bank managers: “Why are bank managers so interminably untrusting – and uninteresting?” and again his sanity is increasingly called into question (“Why weren’t dogs given hands?”). Offers for police ball tickets are met with an impatient whistle, the jokes that his cousin tells “have peculiar smells” and finally he cracks. He’s going out, and: “I’m not coming back at all. Come on H.G. – let’s take a peaceful and rejuvenating walk in the park.”
Hmm.
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