A dancer shimmies in a spangly silver bikini to the sound of energetic bongo music, when the image stops, runs backwards, then forwards once again. This is because it is being controlled by Sam Costa (as himself) who is eagerly viewing this through his binoculars and wearing pyjamas while lying in a huge bed as he does so; "This is the life!" he exclaims as he relaxes in front of his computer which is the latest model. But the machine informs him in its broad Northern English accent that it is time to get up, after all it's eight o'clock - not eight o'clock in the morning however, it's the evening, yet Sam is more interested in watching the screen to see what other pop acts he can enjoy...
Once rock 'n' roll and pop music became established in the fifties, they naturally made a transition to the movies because followers of the new movement were keen to see what the folks whose records they were buying looked like when they performed, it was the next best thing to seeing them in concert, or that was the idea. This gave rise to a kind of jukebox film where the producers would assemble a bunch of acts who had some kind of profile and get them to mime to their songs, then string them all together with a perfunctory linking plot. In some cases, they hardly bothered with that, but with Just For You Costa was the man presenting in a slightly surreal fashion from his computerised bed.
Costa was a disc jockey on British radio, having made his name as a crooner, then a comedian on radio with the hit Much Binding in the Marsh (an early Kenneth Horne show), and by this time was introducing tunes over the airwaves, eventually settling on BBC Radio 2. He had a humorous delivery which brightened up this, and if he is mostly forgotten nowadays then so are many of the acts which were making up much of the hour-long entertainment, yet he was not in every incarnation of the movie. If you had seen the 1966 American version of this, it would have been renamed Disk-O-Tek Holiday and featured a different set of linking sequences, along with a few selected U.S. performers like The Chiffons and Freddy Cannon.
In the British original, the most famous band to be seen was Freddie & the Dreamers who had two songs here, their biggest hit to date You Were Made For Me and the title track, typically energetic and featuring Freddie Garrity dressed up as a court jester for the second, surely his most apt costume considering his wacky persona. Elsewhere was an early sighting of future prog rocker and Yes frontman Jon Anderson with his band The Warriors, Jackie Lee with her backing band the Raindrops covering The Locomotion, this before she recorded two unforgettable TV theme tunes in Rupert the Bear and White Horses, and Millie Small attempting to continue her success with My Boy Lollipop with a similarly sugar-themed song, pitched at such a high register you can hardly believe a human voice was capable of it.
Of even cultier interest were The Orchids, not the Scottish band but an earlier trio of English schoolgirls who offer a hymn to Charles Dickens' Ebeneezer Scrooge, almost defiantly unglamorous and looking more 1964 than any of the others to be seen here. Less esoteric were The Bachelors, then favourites of middle aged ladies everywhere, who delivered a couple of tunes, one around a snooker table, and Peter and Gordon whose sensitive balladry also had a couple of outings here, though neither were of their biggest success. Crooners Mark Wynter and a cheery Al Saxon went through the motions, though the extremely obscure pianist Johnny B. Great (not his given name, one assumes) made a fair go of If I Had a Hammer as trendy couples grooved with wild abandon around him. In the meantime Costa provided various computer-based shtick involving haggis (which makes bagpipe sounds), a big, pink vitamin pill, his socks and eventually the dancer we saw at the beginning. It's easy to call this sort of thing a time capsule, since that's what this is.
[Network have released Just For You on DVD as part of their British Film collection, and it looks and sounds better than it has in years. There are a trailer and a gallery as extras.]
