Kenneth Cope is the much-loved actor who people of a certain
age will remember fondly for playing the role of dead detective Marty Hopkirk
in the cult TV show Randall and Hopkirk
(Deceased), which aired in the US under the title My Partner, the Ghost.
Cope trained at Bristol’s Old Vic, making extra money by working
part-time as a hospital porter. Still with us at the grand old age of 87, during
his distinguished career he has appeared in more than 30 movies, and in such
iconic TV shows as The Avengers, Coronation Street, Brookside, Casualty.
Minder, a Touch of Frost and Doctor Who.
But there’s one thing that I’m pretty sure the
Liverpool-born actor would rather forget, his one stab at pop success. In May 1963
he issued a Mike Sarne-inspired one-off single for Pye records, Hands Off, Stop Mucking About backed
with Why Am I So Shy. Credited to
Ken Cope and the Breakaways, the disc came out while he was still a regular cast
member of Coronation Street and, at the time, Cope boasted that “It’ll get me a
golden disc if one in every 24 folk who watch ‘Coronation Street’ go out and buy
the record,” but sadly, despite the promotion the disc received, the TV watching
public did not all rush out at once, and it sank without a trace.
The Breakaways, incidentally, were a Liverpudlian vocal trio
who recorded a handful of discs for Pye between 1962 and 1965: Breakaways
member Margo Quantrell penned the flip side of the disc, with the A-side co-written
by Tony Hatch under the pseudonym Mark Anthony. With so much local talent on
offer you would have thought the scousers would have gotten behind the disc, but
as Disker (a.k.a. Tony Barrow) wrote in the Liverpool
Echo “Mike Sarne has pumped every ounce of value from the Cockney comedy
approach to love-making and love-resisting and The Vernons Girls have already
done the same for the Liverpool parallel. ‘Hands Off’ is moderately amusing and
it has a jolly, catchy tune, but it lacks that extra something which might have
made it a best-seller.”
Anyway, here are both sides of this fun little 45.
Enjoy!
Download Mucking HERE
Lol I Remember him..Didnt he wear a wig?
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