Tony Orlando and Dawn sang the biggest hit of 1973 with this sentimental slice of cheese, Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Ole Oak Tree.

When I started working on the Evening Standard in the late Eighties the TV reviews were written by Victor Lewis-Smith, a satirist who once did a BBC radio sketch complaining that he had an annoying song running round his head.

“It goes: ‘Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree,'” he remembered. “But… WHAT’S IT CALLED?”

Long before it was a hit for Dawn, the songwriters (Irwin Levine and L Russell Brown) offered it to Ringo Starr to sing. Al Klein at Apple Records told them they should be ashamed of themselves, dismissing the song as “ridiculous”.

It became the biggest-selling single of 1973 (three million copies in three weeks in the US alone; and a million in the UK).

The idea behind the song comes from a 19th century US tradition of wives and girlfriends wearing yellow ribbons in their hair while their soldier husbands were away at war. Brown’s version is rather more prosaic – he says he read a story about the practice in Reader’s Digest.

In later years he said he had read a different story, about a soldier returning from the Civil War who had asked his beloved to tie a handkerchief around a certain tree if he was still welcome (changing the lyric to a yellow ribbon, and the soldier to a newly released prisoner).

It got a new lease of life in 1981 when, at the behest of US president Jimmy Carter, Americans decked out oak trees with yellow ribbons to celebrate the release of the 52 captives in the Iran hostage crisis.

It’ll be stuck in your head for weeks if you listen. And Tony Orlando still looks like the lovechild of Freddie Mercury and Ron Jeremy.