(223) The Feed the Birds song from Mary Poppins. Charity... and Millionaire?

At about 2:25 p.m. on November 18th 2005 a bus passed by me at Camden Lock in North London. One side was covered in an ad for the stage musical Mary Poppins, listing some of the songs including Feed The Birds. I remembered singing this song at school in 1970, and half-remembering it as being from that musical. I imagined a question on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? about the musical which featured this song. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Poppins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHrRxQVUFN4&feature=related

I crossed the road and entered a café to make entries for a Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? show to be recorded on November 22nd. About 35 minutes later a group of about nine people came in and took over several of the computers around me. They clutched pieces of paper and seemed to be making some concerted effort to answer questions. I heard some on the theme of Lord Lucan being mentioned, including one about the make of car he drove.

Months or even years earlier I had imagined that a question about where his car had been found would also crop up on Millionaire?. I knew that it was at Weymouth, but also knew, unlike the group of people searching for the answer, and presumably also the question setter, that it had not been his car; it belonged to a friend of mine; Major Michael Stoop.

Then someone asked in which musical the song Feed The Birds had appeared.
I just had to butt in and say that I had just been thinking about that very question coming up on WWTBAM?, and now it was being posed by people adjacent to me as I made entries to the show. 

Their question was the fourth on a page where the question theme was St Pauls, and, after two about the Great Fire of London and a third asking who was the architect, came the fourth. The link was that in the film Mary Poppins the song is sung at St Pauls Cathedral, which I did not know.
Apparently this was a team-building exercise for a security company just up the road for which they all worked. Despite my pressing, none of them would tell me the name of their company.
... ... ...
At 6:10 p.m. on Easter Monday, April 9th 2007, I saw this question posed to a team called The Comanchees on the BBC TV Quiz show Eggheads -

"The song Feed The Birds is from which musical?"

The choices were Mary Poppins, Cats or The Wizard of Oz. The contestant chose the right one. One of the members of the resident All Star team of "Eggheads" was Judith Keppel, who was the first person to win the million on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

https://x.com/ramblingsloa/status/1723596665234301390?s=20
...   ...   ...
On April 10th 2007, when adding the above codicil, I was moved to learn more about ' Louise' , who has added what was the first comment at this Entry, but which now appears at Entry 197. So I followed the link to her name and discovered that she had three Blogs of her own.

At the first, on Recipes, I noted the latest recipe which she had added on April 6th 2007, Good Friday -http://louise-recipes.blogspot.com/ Millionair Shortbread...
http://louise-recipes.blogspot.com/2007/04/millionair-shortbread.html
Please note the comment which I left there.

The Wikipedia entry on this song http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_the_Birds_(Tuppence_a_Bag) states

Robert Sherman ... comments: ...
"Songs have been written about a myriad of subjects. 'Feed the Birds' is the first song written about the merits of giving charity."


But I had had no conscious realisation of that, and thought I was just thinking about a song from the film Mary Poppins. Although I had agreed with my wife that if I ever got into the hot seat I would give 10% of my winnings to charity. And even told Tarrant so when he asked, "What would you do with a million pounds?", after I had reached the 250K Question with all three lifelines intact.

On the show for which I was making entries when the group of people sought the answer to the question: "Which musical features the song Feed The Birds?"
















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