This sentimental morality tale has stuck in my head for nearly half a century and still exerts a powerful pull on my emotions.

By any objective criterion, it’s awful – cheesy, sentimental and trite.  I suppose it’s a sort of pacifist anthem, being about a girl who begs her boyfriend Billy not to be a hero by joining up to fight in a war, only to **spoiler alert!** lose him in battle, being a hero. In case anyone didn’t get that, they wore military uniforms on TOTP.

Formed as a covers band in the mid-Sixties, they never made it beyond the clubs around their native Nottingham until they appeared on the talent show Opportunity Knocks in 1973. Having applied three years earlier, when their name finally came up, they won it.

That earned them a record deal and the offer of this song from journeyman songwriters Mitch Murray and Peter Callendar. With the tragedies of the Vietnam War fresh in everyone’s minds, it went to number one.

Although this was their only Top 20 hit, they reappeared in 1978 backing the Nottingham Forest football team on a version of We’ve Got The Whole World In Our Hands.

It was the season Cloughie’s newly-promoted Forest won the League and League Cup double and while only a minor hit here, somewhat inexplicably it reached the Top 10 in the Netherlands.

Equally strangely for a band that is a one-hit (or one-and-a-half-hit) wonder, Paper Lace are still going strong – as two different bands, each with original members among them.

Duch is the song’s abiding appeal that the children’s author Dav Pilkey gave the name Billy to a character in his popular children’s book series Captain Underpants purely in order to pay homage to the song.