“Living doll” by Cliff Richard & The Young Ones

In 1986 Cliff Richard took "Living Doll" back to the top of the UK charts, cutting a fresh version with the Young Ones in aid of Comic Relief. He'd been there with it before: in 1959, backed by the Shadows (still calling themselves the Drifters back then), it was their first number one and the biggest-selling single in Britain that year.

Lionel Bart wrote it for the film Serious Charge. The idea hit him one Sunday morning in October 1958, when a small newspaper ad for a child's doll that could supposedly do just about everything caught his eye, and he said the song took him ten minutes. He wrote it as a light, up-tempo rock and roller rather than a ballad, and that's how Cliff sings it in the film.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.