It’s time to go back into the rather unusual world of comedy records. By 1988, Harry Enfield was a comedian who had only been on the TV comedy scene for a few years, contributing to shows including Spitting Image and Saturday Live. His most successful character at this point was Loadsamoney, a young man who was rather fond of constantly telling people that he was in possession of a rather substantial amount of money.
But probably realising that saying “I am in possession of a rather substantial amount of money” wasn’t really a good catchphrase, he just shouted “loadsamoney!” all the time. So in May 1988 it was decided to launch this character on to the singles chart too when “Loadsamoney (Doin’ Up The House)” (I presume that’s a pun on the upcoming house music scene at the time there) was released.
And probably not too surprisingly, several songs that contained the word “money” were sampled. This ended up doing fairly well, and reached no. 4. Around this time, Loadsamoney also appeared on the cover of NME. Looking back now, there were also some contributions from a few people that went just about unacknowledged at the time, but they would go on to be rather successful too.
These were Paul Whitehouse and Charlie Higson, who worked with Harry for many years, before going on to further success themselves with The Fast Show. Charlie already knew a little about pop music, because in the early-80s he was a member of the group The Higsons (and at this point he was known as “Switch” Higson), and although they didn’t have any hits, they made one or two appearances in Smash Hits.
And also featuring was the writer and producer who would become known as William Orbit. They also performed this on Top Of The Pops (I bet that Charlie would’ve preferred to appear with The Higsons though, that would be much more credible). But after this, Harry decided that Loadsamoney was at the peak of his popularity, and the joke really couldn’t be taken any further.
So he decided to do what most comedians wouldn’t do in this situation, and he killed him off. He then went off to develop a new bunch of characters that would appear on his sketch show on BBC2 in 1990. Harry did sort-of make a return to the chart eventually though, when in 2000, a song from the soundtrack of the Kevin The Teenager film made the Top 20.
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