31 March 1984
Has any other well-known song ever been so fatally undermined by its own promo video as Lionel Richie’s ‘Hello’? If you’ve not yet had the pleasure—and it awaits you at the end of these few lines—it features Lionel as a drama teacher who has fallen for a student who is blind. Poor old Lionel pines for her, with no thought for this being wildly inappropriate and certainly creepy. But one day another student runs to find him, breathlessly telling him that “there’s something going on in the sculpture class”. Who should Lionel find there but his beloved? And what’s this she’s working on? Why, it’s…
I say ‘undermined’ but the song itself really isn’t that much better. ‘Hello’ is pure schmaltz-by-numbers and you’d really need to be on a hair-trigger of teariness to fall for it, though maybe I just have a heart of stone and a head of clay. But hey, it gave us this video!
