Matt Berry – Take My Hand
2009
14K Likes
Best comments
1.“This video always makes me a bit weepy... I wish I had a better relationship with my robot son.”
More comments
- 2.“Matt Berry, national fucking treasure. There's nothing I wouldn't watch him in. Even my wife!”
- 3.“When I first heard this, I thought it must be a classic from the 1970s. It's astonishing to find it's a wonderful, wistful original.”
The story
Matt Berry is the BAFTA-winning comic actor who plays Steven Toast, the eccentric stage actor at the center of Channel 4's Toast of London, which he co-wrote with Arthur Mathews. He also makes records and plays virtually everything on them himself. Take My Hand is the show's opening theme, and it plays completely straight: no gag, no wink, just a groovy slab of Motown-in-London soul that The Believer said sits closer to the Four Tops than to the seventies prog-folk Berry usually loves.
The song comes from Witchazel, an album he recorded in 2008, gave away as a free download in 2009 and released properly on Acid Jazz Records in 2011, the year this video went up. An instrumental version had already drifted through his dark sketch show Snuff Box back in 2006. In December 2015 Berry and his folk band The Maypoles played it live from a Channel 4 studio while a Toast episode's end credits rolled, which the network billed as a world broadcasting first. His own pitch beforehand: it could be a disaster, so let's do it. Then in 2025 a Netflix true-crime series used it over its closing credits and US streams jumped 1,505% in two weeks. Not bad for a freebie.
