I’m sure you know the Big Tune of the “March to the Scaffold” in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. Don’t you. Here’s S-Simon again, with the LSO in 2019:

Anyway, among all the spoof lyrics concocted by musicians to fit symphonic melodies, this is my favourite:

What makes it still more delightful (for the ethnographer, ahem) is that one can more or less date it to London in the late 1960s—the thrill of the new… *

For a datable viola joke about the Beatles, see here; for Berlioz on oriental music, here; and for a complete performance of the symphony, here.

Brits were still seduced by the allure of exotic cuisine in the 1990s, as parodied in the classic Goodness gracious me sketch (“What’s the blandest thing on the menu?'”).

* “Curry” appeared on the menu of a coffee house in the Haymarket as early as 1773. By the 1930s one could buy curry powder, poppadoms, and mango chutney in Portobello, and several Indian restaurants opened in Soho, as well as in Glasgow and Cambridge. By 1970 there were 2,000 Indian restaurants in Britain. See under Bloody foreigners.