Thanks to the latest Something for the Weekend e-mail, I have been 'enjoying' this deeply-unsettling-in-a-David-Lynch-kind-of-way video:

Apparently though, as this site points out, this style of singing was not intended to be funny like Les Dawson's intentionally bad piano playing, but was part of a long tradition called the Vokaliz style:

There is indeed something uncanny about a lip-synch to a song with no words, and his waxed face and hair helmet certainly do not carry over well. But once one does a bit of research, one learns that the number was not conceived out of some desire to cater to the so-bad-it's-good tastes of the Western YouTube generation, but in fact was meant to please --to genuinely please-- Soviet audiences who were capable of placing this routine, this man, and this song into a familiar context.

This version may serve as something of a palate cleanser. Worked for me anyway: