People who follow my work will know that for every serious pursuit such as my podcast or music videos, I like to throw in something a bit silly such as the photo blogs documenting Skittles or cardboard police officers, and the fact that I have recorded three albums of Christmas songs on kazoo which frankly, nobody ever asked for. Part of me likes to act up and pretend I'm a conceptual artist with these projects although the truth is that I do things like this purely for my own entertainment it does raise the odd smile. As the old saying goes, if you throw enough shit at the wall then some of it will stick. The weekly podcast is a proper legitimate ratings winner while The Random Sessions doesn't exactly set the world alight, it depends on the artist's sharing skills to be honest, but it doesn't matter to me because the series is a delight to do because it means I get to hang out with musicians and drink beer.

Before I get to the main point of this blog, and please be patient because the photograph above will make sense in a minute, I need to provide a small prologue.

It is my belief that instrumental television theme tunes are deliberately arranged so that you can sing along using the name of the programme. The theme tune to Blankety Blank was (according to my own theory) an accident. The demo had the words put over it so that it could be approved as a sing-the-name-of-the-show style tune by someone at the BBC, but due to an oversight the demo was used instead of the instrumental version that we should have heard, and therefore been able to sing along to. Do you think it is a coincidence that Led Zepplin's 'Whole Lotta Love' was picked as the Top of the Pops theme tune when (try it) you can fit the words 'Top of the Pops' into that riff?

A habit I developed a few years ago was singing the Eastenders theme tune over the opening credits, try it with me, here's the music:

Easty easty Eastenders
Eastenders, east end, Eastenders, Eastenders,
Easty easty Eastenders,
Eastenders east end,
Eastenders Eastenders
East Enders, east end

What I then did (and occasionally still do) is sing a summary of what happened in the episode to the closing theme tune. You're at this point either wondering why I'm still single, or wondering how Mandi coped with eight and a half years of this aren't you?

This developed into an idea. Please remember that this was in 2011 before I made my name in radio and I didn't have the profile I have now. My idea was for a four times a week video of a song relating to each day's episode of Eastenders that would be released as soon as possible after the first broadcast (it was repeated on BBC3 at ten o'clock at night in those days). As is always the case with me once I get an idea in my head, all sorts of ideas suddenly swirled around my head. Aside from the video, I was going to get in touch with all the soap magazines and attempt to get some kind of tie-in deal or sponsorship, I set up a Twitter account and followed Eastenders actors past and present that I was going to use to drum up publicity, maybe the BBC would send me advance episodes so that this spin-off web series would properly take off.

What was my idea? The Eastenders Crocodile.

My daughter Emily was staying with us at this time, and Mandi had found online a cut-out crocodile puppet to colour in and mount to cardboard. Emily helped by filming me doing my totally improvised song in front of the television while I laid on the floor operating the puppet and singing in a bizarre high pitched voiced, not how you would imagine a crocodile to sing. We put this mess on YouTube and pretty much forgot about it. These days I can't remember the passwords for any of the accounts I set up, although as I archive everything it will be somewhere, I still have the puppet after all.

Every now and again when Eastenders is going through a strong storyline, I think back to what might have been with The Eastenders Crocodile. At the moment we have had all the saga of Max Branning trying to take revenge on Ian Beale for framing him for Lucy Beale's murder by teaming up with Wilmott-Brown and his company only for Wilmott-Brown to ditch him and leave him skint, the Carter family trying to keep the pub, and an Ealing comedy style attempt at an armed robbery after which someone has stolen away with the money. I am still singing the summary of the episode over the closing credits, but not capitalising on it. Not that I ever capitalised.

Idle curiosity led me to try and find this aborted attempt at a YouTube sensation as I couldn't remember if I had deleted it or not as I had done with another early attempt at a series, Charity Shop Film Guide. First of all, the YouTube channel is still online gathering dust, but a closer look blew my mind.

One video has racked up 17,634 views.
One video has racked up 12,431 views

What the hell? I know they have been up there for eight years but who has been watching this and how did they find this in the first place? Without knowing it I have had high ratings on something so stupid that I ignored it all this time. What really pissed me off was that if I had continued with this then who knows what might have happened. If I had monetised and stuck with it I might be a highly successful creator of a ridiculous cult web series and rolling around in money.

But in that parallel world, I didn't release three kazoo Christmas albums.

Oh, The Eastenders Crocodile YouTube channel is here. Lower your expectations.

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