The Man on the Television
by Neil Tennant
Writers - Neil Tennant
Unreleased (1979)
Another pre-PSB song by Neil, which he wrote and played on his acoustic guitar in 1980. Its first public airing—albeit only a small part of it—was on the 2006 documentary Pet Shop Boys - A Life in Pop. But the full track has been made available for listening on the Boys' official website.
Somewhat reminiscent of some of David Bowie's early acoustic numbers, it expresses utter disdain for the titular "man on the television," who seems so out of touch that he generates equal disdain for the medium on which he appears: "I don't want a television." In fact, when Neil sings "The memory man has lost his marbles," it distinctly recalls a famous line from the Bowie/Mott the Hoople classic "All the Young Dudes": "The television man is crazy…." As for the melody, the Bowie influence is most pronounced in the lilting and frankly lovely middle-eight section: the best part of the song, at least in this commentator's opinion.
Speaking of "middle eights," it seems that a portion of the song near the end in which one-word questions are called out in response to statements ("What?" "Who?") was repurposed by the Boys, in an altered form, more than a decade later in the middle-eight bridge of "Was It Worth It?"
Annotations
- "A man on television from the DDR" – Neil has told this writer that he's referring here to East Germany, formally known in German as Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic). He had "seen an interview on TV where a spokesman from the DDR was claiming that life there was genuinely free unlike life in the west." This fact makes the apparent disdain felt by the song's narrator all the more understandable.
- "The memory man has lost his marbles" – As noted above, this echoes a similar line from Bowie's "All the Young Dudes." Neil has noted that he was alluding to "Mr. Memory," a character in the classic 1935 Alfred Hitchcock spy thriller The 39 Steps. In the film, "Mr. Memory" is the stage name of a performer who wows audiences with his astounding facility for memorizing and regurgitating facts, which proves a pivotal plot point. (This character was inspired by a true-life music-hall performer named William Bottle, whose own stage name was "Datas, The Memory Man.")
List cross-references
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