Peter Kay, Jimmy Savile, but almost no Tony Christie: the original Amarillo video, 15 years on

Do you remember early 2005? Tony Blair was in charge, Pope John Paul II was dying, and by mid-March, as Comic Relief returned, the music charts were in flux. For 11 Saturdays in a row, a different single was at number one. We were skipping through songs by U2, Jennifer Lopez, Ciara, McFly – even Steve Brookstein, for a week. 

Then came Peter Kay, marching alongside Emu and Jimmy Savile, and leading Tony Christie to a seven-week stint at the top of the charts. (Is This the Way to) Amarillo is one of those songs that was so ubiquitous that it locates you instantly in time. Nobody has forgotten it; it’s hard to see how you could. 

It was corny when recorded by Christie in 1971, it was cornier when Kay and co made that video for Comic Relief, and as they regroup to remake the video for The Big Night In tonight, it’ll only be better (or worse). But Christie’s song, then as now, was doing God’s work. The original video helped Amarillo to sell a million copies in 2005; it was central to that year’s £65 million drive. 

The video was designed like a series of parody tracking shots, a kind of lo-fi Aaron Sorkin, or 1917 on the cheap. A slate of celebrities march beside Kay, a few of them in real corridors, but most in front of green-screen backdrops that turn increasingly surreal. The faces, madly joyful, include Heather Mills, Brian May, Danny Baker and Christie himself.

Christie will appear again in Amarillo Redux tonight; he’s sent a new clip to the BBC. But he wasn’t meant to appear in the original, and the initial roster left him out. That may not be such a surprise; by the mid-2000s, you’d have remembered Christie as a sentimental balladeer who was once the New Tom Jones, but never supplanted the old one. Three decades before, Amarillo had only reached number 18; it eventually sold well, but I Did What I Did for Maria was a superior song, and gave Christie a number 2.

But Christie’s son and manager Sean noticed the singer’s absence, and threatened to withhold permission if his father wasn’t involved. A slot was duly found in the middle. Christie appears in front of the American desert, lip-syncing to himself – this did little to slow the belief, which grew among younger viewers, that the voice you heard was Kay’s – while wearing a trimmer version of Kay’s garish purple suit.

That suit, in such a fantastically unacceptable colour, is one of the aspects people remember too. It was made in Soho by Eddie Kerr, a 1960s tailor to showbiz stars. After Comic Relief was over, Kay signed the jacket’s lining with a nod to two of his stand-up jokes: “Best wishes and many thanks / and garlic bread? / and cheesecake? Peter Kay, Nov 2006”. It was donated to charity.

Before 2005, Amarillo had never topped the charts, but it was Kay’s choice all along. He liked its gaudy feel, the air of a classic British variety show. (Which is what Comic Relief and The Big Night In are, too.) In his 2010 memoir, Saturday Night Peter, he wrote of his early career in north-west England: “When I compèred, I always felt obliged to end the night with a song. It just gave the show closure. Nine out of 10 times, it would be (Is This The Way To) Amarillo. 

“I dug out the Tony Christie LP that my mum used to play, and I wrote the words down on a piece of A4 and sellotaped it to the back. I didn’t even have any backing – I just sang it ‘Acapulco’, as [his Phoenix Nights character] Brian Potter would say.”

The Amarillo time-warp is an uneven thing today. Many of the participants – Sally Lindsay, Bill Roache, Kay himself – are still going, but some – Ronnie Corbett, Michael Parkinson – have left us, or risen to “living legend” rank. (Sooty and Sweep, of course, are immortal, even if Emu has had to retire.) 

The obvious change made, whenever the video is broadcast now, is to Jimmy Savile’s part. There he is in the original, grinning along beside Sally Lindsay, smoking his cigar and wearing a tracksuit in manic red, but when all was revealed in 2012, he was silently edited out. In the revised video, you see Lindsay twice instead, which ruins the balance of the edit – two people, not three – and is obvious enough for a Streisand effect. (You can’t un-notice it any more.) 

But that doesn’t matter so much: the video already has a messy home-made feel. And today, Savile or no, Amarillo is doubly nostalgic, once for the 1970s and once for 2005. It’s an ideal song and video for a big, jumbled show like The Big Night In. No artistic ambitions, no attempt at sophistication: just smiling faces in front of green screens trying to cheer each other up. That’s how everything has to be done now. Kay was avant-garde.