I’ve been spending a few days gradually getting a great stack of digitised video files into a tidy state. The problem with video is that the files can be absolutely massive and get spread out onto multiple external disk drives and cloud stores. It’s incredibly easy to lose track of where the original files are, and what sequences of operations were used to construct finished versions from multiple sources.
Anyway, I’ve just about got things under control, and of course while doing that I did watch a lot of material I hadn’t bothered with for a while. And this is one from the pile, which turns out to be much better than I remembered.
The National Lottery live show, with Bob Monkhouse and Mystic Meg was a bit of a staple of primetime BBC Saturday evening TV in the late 1990s. And it was a big deal to be on it. Despite some daytime and breakfast TV appearances promoting the singles from “Andromeda Heights”, this is probably the last major prime time slot for Prefab Sprout, and one of the last promotional performances with Wendy.
And boy did they take it seriously… Apart from Paddy, Wendy and Martin, we have a young drummer, whose name I did know at one point but have shamefully forgotten. Plus assorted guitars including Dave Brewis, a keyboard player and a brass section. And a light show. In some fortunate parallel universe, this band took the album out on a triumphant stadium tour, but sadly not ours. It’s epic and wonderful.
At the end of the show, Wendy drew the short straw and got to stand next to Bob Monkhouse. But thankfully he seemed more interested in Mystic Meg. And I do owe him a grudging respect: Monkhouse had an archive of over 36,000 videotapes. It does make my little stash look a little paltry.