With My Little Stick of Blackpool Rock by George Formby (1937)

George Formby, ukulele in hand and a grin that passed for innocence, built the biggest career in British entertainment on songs like this one: a jaunty music-hall number in which a holidaymaker's "stick of rock" is admired, mislaid and manhandled through a string of verses, each ending on the same object. The rock is never anything but rock. The audience is never anything but certain that it is not.

The BBC banned it on release in 1937, as it had already forced Decca to withdraw and rewrite With My Little Ukulele in My Hand four years earlier, the corporation by then running what amounted to a dedicated Formby desk. Neither ban touched him: by the late 1930's Formby was among the highest-paid performers in the country, and the song became a staple of his stage shows. It is still a music-hall standard, sung by people whose grandparents sang it.

Its afterlife is a whole national style. The seaside postcard, the Carry On films, Benny Hill and, in 1989, a Jethro Tull song written as a Benny Hill spoof all descend from this "stick of rock". Blackpool's rock shops still sell the pun on the promenade, which makes it the only entry on this list you can buy by the pound and eat in public without comment.