Cultural historians may have you believe Kurtis Blow gave birth to the hip hop genre in 1979 with Christmas Rappin’. But I put it to you, ladies and gentlemen of the musical jury, that rapping began five years before that.

Revisionists have written this landmark moment out of the music history books. But it’s there to see – and hear – in this clip as the emcee ‘spits’ his improvised rhymes, and in the unmistakeable ‘flow’ as the three rappers interweave their ‘bars’ over ‘phat beats’.

Conclusive proof that, while rap would go on to flourish in the African-American ghettoes of inner cities across the USA, and current critical thinking imagines it to have been born there, hip hop’s roots lie not in New York, Chicago or Detroit – but amid the dreaming spires of Cambridge.

When it comes to rhyming words, and setting them to popular music, it’s an inescapable fact that African-Americans have historically followed in their white middle-class forefathers’ footsteps. That this is not widely accepted remains a mystery that one can only attribute to the malign influence of ‘political correctness’. We’ve been written out of music history.

A generation of ‘woke warriors’ is also reluctant to accept that good old rock’n’roll music is the original ‘pop’ and that those other oft-cited genres such as blues, jazz and soul are merely pale (or, rather, not-so-pale) imitations of the real roots music being made years before by white pioneers.

Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and Buddy Holly were all making ground-breaking ‘pop’ long before a new wave of coloured copycats came along to claim credit for themselves, just as the heartfelt love songs of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin had been adapted by friends of their coloured colleague Sammy Davis ‘Junior’ and rebranded as ‘soul’.

In the Sixties, bands such as The Beatles, The Kinks and The Rolling Stones continued that tradition, these underappreciated architects of pop showing off not only the sounds, but also the styles and the ‘groovy’ dance moves that would influence their black brethren for future generations – once they had assimilated the complex rhythms passed down from generation to generation in musical melting pots like Liverpool and Manchester.

Typically, this seminal trio – Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie – were too modest to take the credit for their innovation, adopting alter egos (‘The Goodies’) to disguise their identities.

Their characteristically modest reluctance to stand in the limelight would be turned into a braggardly display of bravado (‘braggadocio’) by men they influenced: ‘Grandmaster Flash’ (no affinity for chess or even draughts – ‘checkers’ as he would know it), ‘Dr Dre’ (not a qualified medical practitioner) and ‘Professor Griff’ (neither an academic nor even a graduate from any sort of Ivy League institution).

The Goodies had no need for false titles. All three were already highly respected graduates from Cambridge University (Law, Medicine and English respectively), where they had been contemporaries of another seminal trio of the era, Monty Python’s John Cleese, Eric Idle and Graham Chapman.

In what would become an established custom within the rap ‘community’, the two groups worked together, first in the Footlights Club (everyone says they were there now, but in truth there were only a handful of undergraduates at their breakout performances), and a landmark underground spoken-word event that would go on to inspire slam poetry, called I’m Sorry, I’ll Rap That Again (If You Don’t Mind).

Trouble began when the Pythons brought in two members of the Oxford Revue (Michael Palin and Terry Jones), bitter rivals on the embryonic hip hop circuit, sparking the infamous Oxbridge Rap Wars – later mirrored by East-West conflicts in America – when they broke away to collaborate on the televised Do Not Adjust Your Set (Motherfucker).

After graduating to television themselves, The Goodies were persuaded to ‘elevate their game’ by diversifying into recorded music and Funky Gibbon would become their biggest hit, reaching no.4 in the charts in March 1975.

But while it had yet to acquire the name hip hop, the genre’s controversial reputation had already made headlines, with the tragic news that on 24 March that year Alex Mitchell, a 50-year-old bricklayer from King’s Lynn, literally died laughing while watching an episode of The Goodies.

It would not be the first death to be attributed to the influence of hip hop. But the music survives in this rare clip. Be warned: it may trigger unpleasant memories for those who remember the Seventies.

• DISCLAIMER:  In the unlikely event that anyone reading this takes it as a serious thesis… it’s not. It’s a joke.