Nominated for its brevity, its simplicity, its expressiveness, and its sonic shape:
Google confirms the phrase as original.
Update, May 17, 2006. A reader writes:
The phrase itself appears to be new, but the concept isn’t. Check this from http://www.rockingvicar.com. It concerns King George’s Hall, a concert venue in Blackburn, Lancashire (4,000 holes in … ), widely regarded in the 1970s as the worst place in England to play a gig.
“But when that ’70s article – which filled me with a mixture of deep shame and inverted pride – was written, it re-cycled the old Blackburn joke that if the very Beatles themselves had reformed for a one-off at KGH and ticket-buyers had been promised a free meat-and-potato pie on entry, the suspicious reaction would have been: ‘That’s fair enough, but whose pies are they?'”
