The Jake Thackray Website - Ladies' Basic Freedoms Polka

“I can look down and after song number three without saying anything I can see them; and they're going: 'Say, can't the bugger talk?'”

Jake Thackray on talking bits

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Ladies' Basic Freedoms Polka - new verses plus an outtro

The Noel Edmonds TV programme "The Time of Your Life" some time around 1983, showed a clip from a Braden's Week programme from around 1970 of Jake singing The Ladies Basic Freedoms Polka. After the first two verses, the programme switched to Jake live in the studio, seamlessly picking up the song. He (deliberately) missed out some of the original verses but included two new ones.

Even though thirteen years have passed
Same old caper, same silly farce
Same old cliques, same old shrieks
Same old piercing pains in arse.

Thirteen years, much the same:
Women are everywhere in chains.
And the escapades of the daft brigades
Dismay, deride, demean, defame.

After the song, Noel walked over and exchanged a few words with Jake.

Noel Edmonds: Are you a male chauvinist pig, Sir?

Jake Thackray: Of course not. And that's not the point of the song. I'll tell you what I am: erm, I don't like loonies. In most - I dunno, it seems to me to be common wisdom - most organisations and groupings of people that are undepinned by a value or an ideal in society, they're like bloody flypaper: they attract the loonies! You know: the shriekers on the touchline; the hecklers; the prats; and the pratesses. And I think that the loonies on the borders have done as much damage to the admirable cause of women's liberation as have, say the Miss World competition. I think that they are as - I don't like using words like degrad - debasing.

NE: You think that beauty contests actually do degrade womanhood?

JT: Oh goodness me, yes! I'd rather look in Dewhurst's window - well I wouldn't really, but, you know, it's the same sort of display, you know: chops and loins.

NE: And these comments are coming from a man who wrote a song that started 'I like a good bum on a woman"?

JT: But of course! Yes! Oh, listen, I've - I reserve my - I don't mind if people want to be loonies, so long as they don't mind if I take the piss out of them.

NE: Ladies and gentlemen: Jake Thackray.

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