‘In olden days, a glimpse of stocking/ Was looked on as something shocking’, carolled the company of Cole Porter’s 1934 Broadway smash musical Anything Goes. Eighty-five years on, in this age of Love Island and Naked Attraction, what wouldn’t you give for a retooled version?
Not that the song is wholly out of date. When the show opened at the Palace Theatre in London the following year, the lyric to ‘Anything Goes’ was nationalised. Out went Porter’s lines about Rockefeller and Max Gordon and in came two couplets on current parliamentary antics: ‘When in the House our Legislators/ Are calling each other “Traitors”/ And “So and So’s”/ Anything goes’. Hmmm. Let us note in passing that ‘Bercow’s’ rhymes with ‘goes’, and that Porter, as devout a worshipper of the double-entendre as Sid James, would have had a ball with the current PM’s surname.
In point of fact, those amended London lyrics were the work of P.G.
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