Ray wrote weekly songs for the BBC variety series At the Eleventh Hour between 30December and 2March. 1968 March–April The Kinks began recording Village Green in earnest in March1968. Most of the album was recorded in Pye Studio 2, the smaller of two basement studios at Pye's London offices. The band recorded any time they were able to obtain studio time, generally in the late afternoon or in the middle of the night. While Ray produced, Pye's in-house engineers operated the four-track mixing console; the band's longtime engineer Alan "Mac" MacKenzie worked on the album until departing from Pye in early1968. Brian Humphries engineered from May onward, beginning with the recording of "Days". The band's initial March1968 sessions produced numerous recordings, only some of which ended up on the final album, including "Animal Farm" and "Johnny Thunder". Other tracks like "Berkeley Mews", "Did You See His Name" and "Rosemary Rose" went unreleased for years. The band also recorded two songs for Dave's next solo single, "Lincoln County" backed with "There Is No Life Without Love". Pye planned to issue Dave's single in the second week of April at the same time as the Kinks' next single, but the band negotiated with the label to delay the release of Dave's until August. After being quickly written and recorded earlier in March, "Wonderboy" was selected by Pye from the available recordings to be the band's next single. Despite Ray's protestations that the song was insufficiently commercial for release as a single, Pye rush-released it in the UK on 5 April. Its B-side "Polly", also recorded in March, indicated Ray's continued interested in Under Milk Wood by directly referencing a character in the drama, Polly Garter. Though it was moderately advertised and was well-received by music critics, "Wonderboy" flopped in the UK and was the band's worst performing British single since 1964. The failure ended the band's streak of twelve consecutive top twenty hits, the last five of which had made it into the top five. It sold 26,000 copies in the UK, roughly one-tenth of each of the band's two most recent singles, "Waterloo Sunset" (May 1967) and "Autumn Almanac" (October 1967). Recording for the album paused from 6 to 28 April 1968 as the Kinks toured cinemas across the UK. Further indicating their diminishing status, the band were unable to support themselves as the headlining act but instead shared the bill