Even if you remember nothing else, anyone who watched Jossy’s Giants can remember the theme tune. The exact plot details may now be lost to childhood memory, but that jaunty Undertones-lite foot-tapper? It still echoes from the 1980s. Yet Jossy himself initially wasn’t a massive fan of the song.
“The bloke who wrote it had a pub band,” explains actor Jim Barclay, aka Jossy Blair, “and we all went to this pub to hear him and his band play this song. I didn’t like it! But Sid [Waddell] and Ed [Pugh], the director, said, ‘It’s perfect’. I was totally wrong, of course: it’s very catchy and works terrifically.” Barclay duly treats FourFourTwo to a rousing chorus of “We’re called Jossy’s Giants…”