Maybe I’m a miserable sod, but I firmly believe that Red Nose Day would make even more money if people donated on the proviso that it would end an hour earlier for every million raised. Mix the two together, and you've got the prime conditions for something like "Combine Harvester" – both knowing in its dumb humour and weirdly loving – to take off.

Acid plus Jazz to create, well, Acid-jazz, pop plus technology gave us synth pop bands with both new songs and new haircuts. Well, it may not be a Christmas song, but on Christmas Day 1971, Melanie’s, Brand New Key was at the top of the US singles chart. It's has a long, and somewhat wandering monolog that tells a true story about a Thanksgiving Day event in Guthrie's life.It’s also probably one of the last, as they’ve become rarer and rarer since their heyday in the late fifties-early sixties. It's not quite the in-depth, complete answer I was hoping for – but maybe that's not a surprise from a man who's pushing 80 and just got back from playing three gigs over a weekend.

In actual fact, the station was only playing it because, they claimed, it had been released 40 years ago today.

With lyrics describing Best Film nominee Pan’s Labyrinth, Minnie Driver sang a parody of the song at the 2007 Spirit Awards.

By now it’s clear that the British public need no excuse to send utter dross to the top of the charts. The Trashmen reached the top 5 with " Surfin' Bird", a surf rock medley of two novelty songs originally recorded by The Rivingtons.

S. radio throughout the 1970s and 1980s, to the point where it was not uncommon for novelty songs to break into the top 40. Gershon went on to become a pioneer of electronic music through his discovery of the Moog synthesizer.