Today, it’s Teach-In’s victorious 1975 Netherlands entry Ding-A-Dong, perhaps the ultimate expression of that all-important combination of ridiculous nonsense lyrics and vaguely psychedelic chord changes with a worrying amount of beards. And, of course, one entirely made up ‘fact’…
- Ding-A-Dong finished just one place above that year’s UK entry, Let Me Be The One by The Shadows. Less successful prospective entrants for 1975 included Lionel Morton, Barry Blue, Glam Goose, Roger Ruskin Spear & His Giant Orchestral Wardrobe, and A-AUSTR.
- Ding-A-Dong was covered by Edwyn Collins for A Song For Eurotrash, but – more significantly - was fleetingly performed by Alan Cumming in a Eurovision-parodying episode of fondly-recalled mental air stewarding sitcom The High Life. That summary alone is funnier than anything Ricky Hervaid has ever come up with.
- Despite rumours to the contrary, Ding-A-Dong did not inspire the title of Derek Griffiths-fronted lo-fi cheapo forgotten Watch With Mother prop-improvisation extravaganza Ring-A-Ding, which actually began in 1973. There’s nothing amongst that 1973’s entries that has a title anything remotely like Ring-A-Ding, though whether Finland’s 1973 entry Tom Tom Tom inspired Euro-derived fellow forgotten Watch With Mother effort Thomas is open to speculation.
- Teach-In were responsible for a notorious on-air technical blunder when a performance on long-forgotten Roy Walker-presented Saturday morning ITV show The Leicester Coracle ended abruptly when their amplifiers blew the power in the studio. This led to over two minutes of a blank screen across the entire ITV network, before an episode of Fangface, recorded over the master tape of Doctor Who And The Space Pirates Episode 5, was cued in as an emergency replacement on the orders of producer Charles McHaltenwood.
