A Christmas Song Made Entirely of a Menu
This one was pro bono, for a charity I'd happily do it again for tomorrow: the Beyond Food Foundation.
By Christmas 2013 they'd been going about eight years, using hospitality and cooking to help people who'd experienced homelessness find real, sustained work in kitchens. Their showcase restaurant, Brigade, in a converted fire station near London Bridge, was still fairly new at that point, having opened a couple of years earlier. They wanted a Christmas video to raise awareness. I wanted an excuse to write something properly silly, the kind of daft that only works if it's actually clever underneath.
Foodiewop
The idea was simple, and a proper piece of cheek: a lighthearted comedy song, built entirely out of Brigade's actual 2013 Christmas menu. Every line had to come from what was really on the plate that year, turkey, sprouts, the lot, set to something that sounded vaguely like a doo-wop number. I called it Foodiewop. Nobody asked me to make it a doo-wop pastiche specifically. It just seemed like the only genre daft enough to carry a song about stuffing.
Once it existed, the job was getting people to perform it, or at least look like they were performing it, without anyone involved being a professional singer.
Two Rooms, Two Kinds of Silly
The video came in two parts. The first was shot at a business conference at ExCeL London, roping in whoever was willing to lip-sync a line or two between sessions, mostly people who had no idea what they'd signed up for until the track started playing. It's a particular kind of chaos, handing strangers in conference lanyards a microphone and a menu-based comedy song and asking them to commit.
The second part was shot at Brigade itself, with the whole staff taking part rather than passers-by. That one felt different to make. These weren't people doing me a favour between meetings, they were the people the menu actually belonged to, singing lines about food they'd spent the week cooking, in the kitchen and dining room they worked in every day. It's a small distinction but it changes everything about how a silly video plays back: the ExCeL version is a nice bit of fun, the Brigade version is a nice bit of fun made by people who were proud of the place.
Why This One Stayed With Me
At the time, this was just a fun pro bono job I said yes to because the brief made me laugh, and because writing comedy that actually lands is a genuinely satisfying kind of hard. I didn't know Simon Boyle, the founder, well back then. I do now, and that's changed how I look back on it a little.
What I didn't expect was for the song to still mean something to them more than a decade on. Close to twelve years later, not long before Beyond Food finally left Brigade, someone dug it out and played it again for the room. That's not a bad life for something built entirely out of one year's Christmas menu.
Sometimes the least serious thing you make ends up being the one that lasts.
What do you think? What bit of quirky but poignant, purposeful endeavours have you been involved in at work?
important postscript
This page is dedicated to the fabulously talent Erwin de Boer, the talented one with the lens on this project and, like Simon, an utterly diamond geezer.