One person’s view: “Complete crap from beginning to end. ... Destroy this album if you come across it.” – gotofritz @ Rate Your Music, regarding the Pipkins’ Gimme Dat Ding! LP
The public’s view: 2.59 / 5.00
Media outlets generate massive amounts of video, audio, and text every day, and not all of it will be preserved for future generations to ponder. Much of it is already disappearing, thanks to the recent proliferation of paid digital subscription services. Archaeologists will be facing a big problem 1,000 years from now:
Flinders: Hey Claude, this newly unearthed article might give us fresh insights on 21st-century life. It’s titled “9 Things I Wish I Knew Before Staying at the Super 8 in Laramie, Wyoming”. But there’s only one sentence and then it says I need a subscription to Business Insider to read the rest. Can you help?
Claude: Sorry, buddy, that’s what those primitive anthropods called “clickbait”. No one actually paid for Business Insider, so that article has been lost if it ever existed in the first place.
Flinders: Oh, so it’s like that Celebrity Cat Sitters of West Covina reality series that was supposedly aired on the Peacock channel in 2026?
Claude: Yeah, just like that. I think we’ll dig up Noah’s Ark before we find evidence of a Peacock subscriber!
Paywalls can sometimes be overcome via the clever application of copyright infringement techniques. When researching the origin of the Pipkins’ “Gimme Dat Ding”, however, I ran into a more insurmountable obstacle: the recklessly wasteful practices of the British broadcaster ITV. Not even the miracle of piracy can allow me to see the source material that I would like to peruse. It has vanished forever.
The Pipkins’ hit was written for a children’s program called Little Big Time. This show starred Freddie Garrity, the goofy dancing guy from Freddie & the Dreamers, whose jovial personality did not prevent the series from taking a dark turn. Beginning with the second or third season, the action moved to a surreal setting called the Overworld which was almost exactly like the Neighborhood of Make-Believe from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It had puppets, a king, and a grandfather clock. There was only one slight difference between the two milieus: the Neighborhood of Make-Believe was a friendly, welcoming place in which conflicts were peaceably mediated, while the Overworld was a dystopian hellscape populated by dangerous pieces of machinery that had come to life. For example, Hungry Drains rampaged through the Overworld while seeking to devour everyone who they encountered. “Gimme Dat Ding” was born out of this bleak environment.
From what I can gather, the episode that contained “Gimme Dat Ding” centered on the theft of a bell from a metronome. The metronome warbled the tune as a musical demand for its “ding” to be returned. This plea was evidently ineffective, as the bell was instead repurposed to repair the Overworld’s grandfather clock. I would love to tell you more about the ding larceny and whether it was satisfactorily resolved, but virtually all of the tapes of Little Big Time were erased by ITV. Just a handful of short clips survive, and the remainder of the series exists solely in the distant recollections of those who saw it on the telly when they were toddlers. The only characters who are remembered clearly are the Hungry Drains, and that is because the Drains gave many young viewers a lifelong fear of plumbing. Little Big Time set British potty training efforts back by a decade.
We now have no way of watching the Little Big Time cast’s initial performance of “Gimme Dat Ding” in the Overworld. Without this context, it is difficult to comprehend that the song concerns a metronome’s calamitous anatomical loss. It sounds more like a meaningless drunken argument between Wolfman Jack and Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo. As such, “Gimme Dat Ding” is only slightly more intellectually gratifying than a Ben Shapiro podcast. But even though it is hardly a work of academic rigor, I consider this unusual record to be a fun break from the status quo. The critics who rank it among the worst songs of its era should be put behind a paywall.
My rating: 7 / 10
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