With Ivor Novello, of course. We always like it when the Ivor Novello award for best song goes to something by Girls Aloud or similar, and pundits say “If Ivor was alive today he’d [insert slightly desperate ‘amusing’ variation on ‘turn in his grave’]” when as a composer he was largely cobblers, filling the West End with never-to-be-revived revues and whimsical musicals mainly set in some corny cod-medieval fairyland, filled with forgettable songs with titles like Mother, Teach Me How to Live, Bravo Bristol and Goblin Golliwog Trees, and therefore Girls Aloud are exactly the right people to win an award in his name. As a whey-faced, girly-mouthed, rake-thin star of the silent screen, however, he was second to none, and this bit of early Hitchery-cockery is well worth a watch, even if you (like us) don’t normally relish the idea of watching a silent melodrama, as it’s dead atmospheric and that. If nothing else, it’s fun guessing which expressions of female terror were achieved by Hitch waving his willy about on set.
