2000

Some of you may have seen REG on An Audience With Elton John but for the benefits of those who haven’t I’ll go on. I managed to get hold of a copy from my nan and concentrated on the audience all the way through. This paid off as REG (there in leather! and Joan) asked a great question as follows;

After Lily Savage’s showbiz late entrance (Lily Savage is a drag act comedian, non-brits!) Elton said “I think Richard E Grant has a question for me.”

Richard answers with “I do. I’ve heard that you write your songs very very quickly and , um, I’ve brought some words along and hope that you can put music to it. Would you do that?”

The audience laughs.

“What is it?”

“Um, well it’s from – it’s the cooking instructions – the instructions form my oven!”

The audience howls.

“Would you do that?”

Elton gets up and REG hands him the instructions. Elton takes them back to his piano.

He plays a chirpy and quirky tune to the following words:

You and your new oven
are capable of great things,
but remember no two ovens are the same.
Rather than jumping in the deep end
with your brand new oven,
don’t forget it may differ in it’s cooking characteristic
to your previous model.
We strongly recommend you take the time
to read this leaflet
fully from cover to cover.
Get to know about your new oven
before you being preparing you own mouth-watering meals.
It may seem like a chore,
but it will pay off in the long run.
So lets begin at the beginning
with your new bloody oven!

The audience screams with delight.

Elton gets up and give REG his oven instructions back. REG then neatly tucks them back in to his leather coat pocket!

The icing on the cake had to be be that “The Cooker Song” is listed on the video sleeve and;

“WARNING: ALL RIGHTS OF THE LONDON WEEKEND TELEVISION AND THE OWNERS OF ANY MUSICAL COMPOSITION CONTAINED IN THIS VIDEOGRAM ARE RESERVED.”

Hope this made you laugh! If you want to put this up on the site, Dominique, all I know is that it was shown in 1997 and was a LWT production. I think LWT production are only shown on ITV (Channel 3) aren’t they Brits?

Chin Chin

Anna*

STOP PRESS: We now have a video clip of this segment which you can see below. Apologies for the out-of-sync audio track but it’s better than nothing.