Thank You Very Much at 4am on the telly

Sometimes there is a song that you know so well, and is so imprinted on your culture - while being completely divorced from the actual creator - that you never really think about it. It's always just been there, and it's suddenly weird to think of it as something that was created by actual people.

This happened to me very recently, when I was listening to one of the bonus episodes on Andrew Hickey's always excellent A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and he got to this song:

If you'd asked me before last week about Thank U Very Much, I would have been able to sing every word of it - albeit with some significantly changed lyrics, for reasons we will get to - but would admit that I had never ever thought about it. 

I would have assumed it was the rendition of an old folk song, or some music hall tastiness from the 1920s, or even just some advertising jingle that escaped confinement like a great meme.

It was everywhere when I was growing up in New Zealand. It might not have originated as marketing, but it was used in multiple advertising campaigns, and most notably was the key song for the TV telethons. Every few years, they'd get every celebrity in Aoteaora, rope in outside names like that guy from Coronation street and Leeza Gibbons, or Sgt Schultz from Hogan's Heroes, and broadcast the whole thing for 24 hours from multiple locations in all the big cities, raising money for some worthy causes.

There wasn't much to do in the 1970s and 80s in NZ, and the Telethon was actually a big fucking deal  TV still finished around midnight with the Goodnight Kiwi jingle, the idea of something going right through the night was actually mindblowing. And every time they reached a significant, they would crank up this tune.

It had some significantly different lyrics, no mention of the mysterious Aintree Iron, just 'Thank you very much for your kind donation' and 'you don't know how nice it all seems'. But I must have heard that tune several thousand times growing up. And now it turns out it was written less than 10 years before I was born, and created by the brother of a Beatle, originating as a message on the phone, but go and listen to the podcast to hear all those gorgeous details. That might not blow your mind, but they exploded mine.

Upon further lazy research, it was unsurprising to see that New Zealand was the only country in the world where that song got to number one, because New Zealanders really do like being aggressively polite, and love nothing more than shouting 'THANK YOU' into other peoples' faces.

The moral of this story is, of course, become a backer for Hickey's podcast, because you'll get all the bonus episodes, and it'll change how you see the world, or at least the little bit of it tied into a very, very silly song.