<Dl> <Dd> "The copyist arrived at the last minute with the parts and passed them out to the band...And there was no title on it, and there was no lyrics . And so they ran through it,' what a pleasant little waltz'...And the engineer said,"' Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,' take one," and the piano player said,' "What?"' and literally fell off the stool ." </Dd> </Dl> <Dd> "The copyist arrived at the last minute with the parts and passed them out to the band...And there was no title on it, and there was no lyrics . And so they ran through it,' what a pleasant little waltz'...And the engineer said,"' Poisoning Pigeons in the Park,' take one," and the piano player said,' "What?"' and literally fell off the stool ." </Dd> <P> Lehrer's major breakthrough in the United Kingdom came with the doctor of music honoris causa, which the University of London conferred to Princess Margaret on 4 December 1957 "in the full knowledge", as the public orator Professor J.R. Sutherland stated, "that the Princess is a connoisseur of music and a performer of skill and distinction, her taste being catholic, ranging from Mozart to the calypso and from opera to the songs of Miss Beatrice Lillie and Tom Lehrer. "This prompted significant interest in Lehrer's works and helped secure distributors for his material in the UK . It was there that his music achieved real popularity, as a result of the proliferation of university newspapers referring to the material, and the willingness of the BBC to play his songs on the radio (something that was a rarity in the United States). By the end of the 1950s, Lehrer had sold 370,000 records . </P> <P> In 1960, Lehrer essentially retired from touring in the US . In the early 1960s, he was employed as the resident songwriter for the U.S. edition of That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a satirical television show . An increased proportion of his output became overtly political, or at least topical, on subjects such as education ("New Math"), the Second Vatican Council ("The Vatican Rag", the tune which has been claimed to be based on the 1910 song the Spaghetti Rag), race relations ("National Brotherhood Week"), air and water pollution ("Pollution"), American militarism ("Send the Marines"), World War III "pre-nostalgia" ("So Long, Mom", premiered by Steve Allen), and nuclear proliferation ("Who's Next?" and "MLF Lullaby"). He also wrote a song that famously satirized the alleged amorality of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, who worked for Nazi Germany before working for the United States . ("' Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun .") Lehrer did not appear on the television show; his songs were performed by a female vocalist, Nancy Ames, and his lyrics were often altered by the network censors . Lehrer later performed the songs on the album That Was The Year That Was (1965), so that, in his words, people could hear the songs the way they were intended to be heard . In 1966, for David Frost's further BBC television programme The Frost Report Lehrer was invited to contribute some of his classic compositions . The Frost Report was transmitted live, and he pre-recorded all his segments at one performance . Though Lehrer was not featured in every edition, they were slotted in at an appropriate part of each show . At least two of his offerings were songs not included on any of his LPs: a reworking of Noël Coward's "That is the End of the News" (with some new lyrics) and a comic explanation of how Britain might adapt to the coming of decimal currency . </P>

Who said we don't write songs we write records