I could not have been more than five years’ old. My two sisters and brother were at school all
day and I was left alone at home with my mother. I probably played around for most of the day,
but the high point always came just after lunch when Mum and I would sit down
together by the wireless and listen to the gentle strains of Fauré’s Dolly Suite and the soothing, silken
voice of (I think) Daphne Oxenforde, who uttered those magic words; “Are you
sitting comfortably? [pause] Then I’ll begin”.
Does the BBC know how powerful a bonding tool it had with its daily Listen With Mother, a moment when (I imagined)
children everywhere were sitting with their Mums avidly lapping up whatever
story the delightful Daphne told us? I
can’t remember a single one of the stories, but the Dolly Suite does it for me every time; flooding back happy memories
of a long-lost childhood and a precious moment with a loving mother whose love
I probably never adequately repaid in either word or deed.
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"Aye, Janet". The rare smile prompted, surely, by the thought of the music about to come. |
Then there was Doctor
Finlay’s Casebook, the television highlight of the week when the crusty
Andrew Cruickshank uttered his immortal catchphrase “Aye, Janet” and another
half hour or so of grim and gloomy goings-on in the life of country doctors in
the Scottish village of Tanochbrae (which, with Drs Cameron, Finlay and Snoddy,
had at least one doctor per non-doctoral resident – how the NHS has changed in
Scotland!) held me in thrall. The
stories were grim and forgettable, but I wouldn’t miss a moment in case,
somewhere between the opening and closing statements of what remains for me one
of the great TV signature tunes of all time, there was a chance we might have a
tiny snatch of some other part of this glorious musical score. For years I sought the music, eventually
learning it was the March from Trevor Duncan’s Little Suite. It was my
prized LP until Naxos gave us the whole Suite on CD. Trevor Duncan may have been a BBC staffer
whose real name was Leonard Trebilco, but for my money he was one of the truly
top notch British light music composers of the age. How wonderful it was to discover
BBC Alba, the Gaelic Television station, re-running the old series again, and,
despite having easy access to the music on CD, I still watched avidly with that
same anticipation, aching for the end when the lovely music would fade in once
more and transport me back to those days huddled with a warm family around our
tiny black-and-white television.
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Not here... |
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...but here |
When Panorama took
on a new and spine-tingling theme tune, I asked everyone I could think of – the
music staff at school, musical friends, my piano teacher – what it was. Nobody knew, and for years it ran around my
head as a perpetual irritant, driving me mad with the need to know what it
was. A chance accident solved the
mystery. Having fallen in love with
Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, I bought an ancient Supraphon LP of it
(Mirka Pokorna with the Brno State Philharmonic under Jiri Waldhans). Heavily
edited and subjected to the most astonishing performing liberties (many of
which I still hanker after when I hear it properly correctly in a live
concert), it left enough room for the whole of the first of Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances. It took a bit of time for me to get round
to listening to this, so entranced was I by the Concerto, but when I did I was
amazed to hear, at the very end, a very much calmed-down version of the Panorama signature tune. I bought the whole set of Symphony Dances but the original was not
there. I used up all my pocket money of
just about every Rachmaninov LP I could find, and then, on the most expensive
(Decca SXL6583) I struck gold. It was
from the final movement of the First Symphony, and there was Walter Weller and
the Orchestra of the Suisse Romande playing that glorious moment from Panorama, a programme which did not then
interest me in the slightest, but which I never missed just because of the
music.
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His Dad may have been lost at the South Pole, but he was lost when it came to music. |
I am not fanatic about wild birds, but I do love them and
when my sister gave me, as a recent birthday present, a trip to a puffin colony
in the Firth of Forth, I was thrilled to bits; the chance of seeing wild birds
in their natural habitat always excites me.
That love of birds, perhaps unexpected in one born and brought up in the
middle of London where pigeons, sparrows and the odd crow were the totality of
our aviaratical experience, also owes its origins to a television programme
which I would never miss, not because of the content but because of the glorious
theme music that book-ended it. How I
yearned each week for Peter Scott’s Look!
and it’s evocative, soaring, expansive theme music. But in this case, I remain beaten. Not a week of my life has passed without its
haunting theme coming to mind, yet despite every effort I have made to find it,
the music remains unknown. As a
precocious 12-year-old I once met the great Peter Scott himself (he came to an
association to which my parents belonged to give a talk on his work at with the
Wild Fowl Trust at Slimbridge) and asked him what the music was. To my horror, he neither knew nor seemed to
care. Did he not know that he was my
hero solely because he was associated with some of the most wonderful music I
had ever heard? He suggested that it was “probably written just for the
programme”, but I doubt that; it was too elevated to be a short jingle by a
house composer. Yet I can get no clues
from the music, and I fear my memory has adapted and modified it beyond its
original dimensions. Yet the theme is as
vivid as ever (in C major; G up the octave to G, down to E-F-E-D-C lower
G-A). Even the internet, a source some
misguided people claim to be the nearest thing to flawless, offers no help
whatsoever, and I remain in agonising ignorance of one of the most persistent
musical memories I have.
I recall an interview with a member of the production team
on Woman’s Hour explaining the pains
she took to find the right music to suit the story with which each programme
ended. She told how she would avidly
listen to every record she could lay her hands on and make notes for future
reference of particular moods or pictures it created in her mind. Years later, often, she would need to find
music to go with, say, a story about a woman in a wheelchair who lived in a
lighthouse and, hey presto, there in her card index was just the perfect
musical match! (I started doing this in
the hope that, one day, it would come in useful. It never has, and my huge database of “potential
signature tunes and mood music” is now inaccessible, having been finally
transferred to a 3 inch floppy disc on my first Amstrad computer – and thereby
totally inaccessible today). Among the
real finds she came up with was Richard Adler’s Wilderness Suite (a title which prompted me to hope – in vain as it
transpired – it might also have provided the music for Look!) which so perfectly suited a story about American settlers that
it was hard not to imagine it having been written especially for it. Such work is no longer done or valued in the
broadcast media as a rule; with music cheaply and painlessly created by dull
and unimaginative computer programmers, is there a single theme tune out there
which would drive anyone to listen or watch the programme regardless of
content, or which will last in the memory over a half a century later?
The power of this music on an impressionable youngster has
been irrefutable. Would I have felt such
a powerful bond with my mother without Fauré prompting me to Listen With Mother, would Scotland have
become such a significant place in my life without Trevor Duncan introducing me
so sublimely to Dr Finlay’s Casebook, would
I have had a deep and passionate fascination with politics and world affairs
without Rachmaninov’s urging me to watch Panorama,
and would my fascination with wild birds and open spaces ever have been
fired without Look! and its, as yet,
anonymous musical superstar? I do not
know, but I do know that the music drove me into the arms of these programmes,
all of which ended up affecting my life in a lasting and beneficial way, and
that without that music, my life would have been immeasurably the poorer.
So I ask, with all sincerity; kill off the computer music programmers and
the dull kids who dutifully churn out 30 seconds of “title music”, the inept
and unimaginative producers who see their work as “creative” rather than inspirational,
and tell me, for God’s sake, who wrote the music for Look!
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