Brian Hyland: "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini"

July 18, 1960 (3 weeks)

After returning from the 1988 Winter Olympics (which just so happen to have taken place in this humble blogger's hometown), the lovable loser Eddie "The Eagle" Edwards went back to obscurity as a roofer or whatever the hell he did for a living. Or so everyone thought. In actual fact, he invested in some tacky clothing, had a skin peel and went into broadcasting in his native UK. He also changed his name to Timmy Mallett and made some cash as a talentless children's TV "personality". The former ski jumper became so renowned that he even recorded a novelty pop hit in the broiling summer of 1990 under the name Bombalurina. The song? A cover of the not especially good Brian Hyland bit of silliness "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" which he somehow managed to make much, much worse.

(Some clarification: as far as I know, Eddie the Eagle and Timmy Mallett are not the same person. I merely jumped to that conclusion the first time I saw the latter on British TV in the autumn of 1988. In truth, they didn't look all that much alike unless you hadn't seen or thought about one of them — or both — in a long time, which does track. My schoolmate Grant, with his thick glasses and head-in-the-clouds personality, was actually more of an Eddie the Eagle clone, a fact we never failed to remind him of)

Brian Hyland's original version of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" is not very good. Even without all the irritating samples added to the Bombalurina recording, it's still a deeply annoying song. Plus, Hyland's voice is flat, almost as if he wanted nothing to do with such a stupid single. (Imagine that!) Though almost half the length of Mallett's abomination (and, speaking of which, why the hell did so many pop records in the eighties and nineties go on for four or five minutes when two was generally more than enough?), its two minutes and twenty second run time is still too long.

Yet somehow, the Timmy Mallett cover version makes this original seem just about bearable. (I was going to say "pretty good" but let's not go nuts here) Hyland's reading isn't great but he does manage to capture the persona of an older brother who feels both protective of his little sister and her overwhelming shyness while also teasing her a bit. (A moderately interesting idea for a version of "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" would be from the perspective of a bully; I said it was interesting but I'm in no way trying to suggest it would be any good) If not for the whole thing being so embarrassing, it would almost have been charming. Amazingly, Hyland's version even manages to avoid sounding creepy, a quality that the Mallett cover only seemed to embrace.

A hopeless song that still managed to catch on — this isn't the first example on this blog and it will be far from the last. Perhaps it was funny at the time and maybe it even shocked a few Baptists. Who the hell knows? The only thing shocking now is just how bad it is — although, as I say, it's still nowhere close to as woeful as the infamous cover version from thirty years later by a man who would be so lucky to have been a lovable loser ski jumper.

Score: 3