Tom Jones International

The people who post on youtube are having some good-natured fun with Sir Tom.

The video called “Tom Jones Dances Like Hell,” which was posted quite awhile ago and has Tom performing Treat Her Right, has recently drawn two video responses. It’s all in good fun — including the video essay on why Tom Jones is a black man.

I’ve taken the original and two answer videos (Does anyone remember “answer songs?”) and put them together into one. The quality of the originals is quite poor and I am posting this because it is funny and, also, I suspect Sir Tom might be a bit flattered. The person who posted the last video compared him to Justin Timberlake.

You can watch the it in the TJI.com Video Library.

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One British commentator asks what would happen if — can you imagine!!?? — TV producers in the UK broke with tradition and tried some new programming. He says, “It will be an unusual Christmas if Ronnie Corbett, Sir Terry Wogan, Noddy Holder, Tom Jones and Sir Ian McKellen and Penelope Keith do not appear on our screens at some point over the next few days.” (Of course, Tom will be on Jools Holland’s New Year’s Eve bash…..I know them all, except for Noddy Holder, and, in addition to Tom, especially enjoy Penelope Keith and would like to see her in roles aside from all those Britcoms shown on PBS here.) At any rate:

From Terence Blacker in The Independent/Wednesday, 23 December 2009

Time for TV to cut down on the Yule factor

Imagine, for a moment, a Christmas TV special produced by someone who has courageously decided to break with tradition. Jeremy Paxman is in the chair and among the guests gathered for yuletide are Sir Mick Jagger, Tracey Emin, Andy Murray, Russell Brand and Lord Mandelson. A Christmas message, sent by satellite from Barbados, is contributed by Simon Cowell.

It does not quite work, does it? There is something indefinably wrong about that gathering. Interesting enough at any other time of the year, it strikes an inappropriate, anti-festive note.

Here is another refinement to the increasingly subtle concept of early 21st-century fame: the Yule factor. Some celebrities are naturally blessed with it; others, however much they long to be welcomed in the nation’s front rooms at this season of good cheer and profitable ratings, remain out in the cold.

Click here, if you wish, to

So Sir Paul McCartney, hardly prominent throughout the year, is an obvious front cover for The Big Issue in late December. Victoria Wood and Dawn French are everywhere. It will be an unusual Christmas if Ronnie Corbett, Sir Terry Wogan, Noddy Holder, Tom Jones and Sir Ian McKellen and Penelope Keith do not appear on our screens at some point over the next few days.

On the other hand, the idea of Sir Mick Jagger bringing Christmas cheer is grotesque; it would be oddly shocking if Bob Dylan or Keith Richards appeared on a Graham Norton Christmas Special. Armando Iannucci has the yule factor, in spite of producing the brutal satire The Thick of It, but Sacha Baron Cohen does not.

As with so much in the world of fame, the way the Yule factor works is mysterious. Just as some people ease their way into celebrity without any apparent effort while others never make it in spite of their most desperate efforts, so the gift (or curse) of being Christmas-friendly seems to be largely involuntary. Certain public figures – Alan Bennett would be an obvious example – would recoil from the idea that they have a festive personality but can do nothing about it. If instead of the dreary Queen’s Speech, Bennett were to address the nation it would be a huge ratings hit. On the other hand, there are people who almost certainly long, but in vain, to be part of the nation’s Christmas. The Duchess of York, Sir Alan Sugar and Clive James are part of a long, sad queue.

Something odd is going on when certain public figures fit snugly into the entertainment schedules while others seem hopelessly out of place. Over the next few days, the comfortable, domestic part of the population will sink into a sort of nostalgic stupor. The only television which will be offered to us will be cosy, reassuring and backward-looking. It is good news for lazy-minded broadcasters, and for the old-lag wing of the celebrity compound, but the unquestioning way that every Christmas the nation fixes its collective eye on the past as a source of certainty and hope is not entirely sensible or healthy.

Perhaps the moment has arrived when the Yule factor should be reduced in the Christmas TV schedules – less Dawn French, a limit on the number of special episodes of a much-loved detective series, perhaps even an outright one-Christmas ban on Dad’s Army. There must surely be a rebellious little enclave within television which is prepared to put on innovative, perhaps even discomfiting, programmes at the one time of the year when decent ratings are almost guaranteed. Or maybe the broadcasting establishment has convinced itself that viewers are too sozzled and overfed to see that they are being offered the same old sugary yuletide pap year after year.