THE NEW MUSICAL BOX

Variations On A Theme (Part 1 of 3)

I was watching an old episode of The Saint the other night and a thought struck me.

The Saint Logo

Aside from the memorable "Saint" theme itself, why was the music so insipid in the rest of the show? Dashing Simon Templar would often drop by the latest *happening* night club, populated with bright young things and there, on the stage would be some sharp looking musicians playing the dullest lounge music imaginable. No wonder the groovy dancers on the sparsely populated dance-floor looked so bored. Worse still, when the band weren't strutting their stuff, the ambient music was jazz-lite, so *lite* in fact that I could almost imagine the whole lot just floating off into the ether. Why didn't the show makers just use some real, recognisable songs instead?

Another night of top
quality music awaits
Mr Simon Templar

And thus, it got me to thinking about the role of music in television and the cinema: not specially composed soundtrack pieces to accompany the action, but the use of existing recorded music. The Saint - like so many other 1960s British TV shows - took an easy, inexpensive route by using stock library music rather than songs from established bands and artists. It's a world away from today where one can hardly move for samples and extracts from all manner of well known acts. This week's New Musical Box blog is the the first of a two-parter that lifts the veil on this big change. We'll leave cinema until next week, so let's go back in time, back to small black- and- white TVs and the early days of competition for the BBC from ITV.

1 - Breaking The Mould

1960 in many respects was simply a continuation of the 1950s.

The UK singles charts was waiting for the next big thing, stuffed as it was with a curious mix of US artists and a sprinkling of diverse of British performers such as Russ Conway, The Shadows and Adam Faith. There isn't time or space to cover all the seeds that were sprouting the green shoots of change, but there was a TV show which in its own discreet way, sign-posted a way forward.

DVD release of The
Strange World Of
Gurney Slade

This was The Strange World Of Gurney Slade, a series of 6 half-hour episodes made by Lew Grade's ATV and starring Anthony Newley. The show was unusual: no audience, shot on film stock and quite surreal in its approach. The key, though, was Max Harris' creative theme music. Whilst it was recorded for the series, it had a cinematic feel to it and was later used as backing music in the BBC's ground-breaking children's show, Vision On. 

 Max Harris - Gurney Slade Theme  

It opened the door for creativity, despite being part of a show that was quickly shunted to late-night TV and rewarded with small audiences as a result. The BBC, already stung by the popularism of the new upstart ITV which by 1960 covered most of the nation, pumped more energy into the Radiophonic Workshop. This was an innovative unit set-up in 1958 to take sound effects and music creation for radio broadcasts to more professional levels. Most of us know it for its ground-breaking work on the Doctor Who theme, but its triumph was the use of electronics to generate music in a whole manner of ways. It has had so much influence across the years and is fully deserving of a lengthy piece of its own: fortunately, others more qualified than I have already done this very thing: 

BBC Radiophonic Workshop - History

Bob Dylan in the 1963 BBC play Madhouse On
Castle Street

However, our focus as noted is more devoted to outside music being used by the BBC and ITV to augment their programmes. In the same year - 1963 - that the Doctor Who theme hit the airwaves, a certain Bob Dylan was doing some work with the BBC. His self-titled debut album had been released the year before and his second, the highly influential The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, emerged in May. He'd already spent some time in the UK earlier that year and was asked by the BBC to take part in a television play, Madhouse On Castle Street. Set in a boarding house, it featured four Dylan numbers: Hang Me, Oh Hang Me; Cuckoo Bird; Ballad Of The Gilding Swan and Blowin' In The Wind which was used as the theme music. Sadly, the show no longer survives, but there are photographic stills and scripts which give some idea of what it must have looked like.

The broadcast was well received, but did not draw large viewing numbers. It's success, if not immediately apparent, was to pioneer the use of popular music on a TV soundtrack. 

The Doctor and companions
wonder who this smart-looking beat
group really is.

In the meantime, budget constraints continued to limit such opportunities.The impact of this is still felt today: where music was occasionally used, the musical rights were often limited to the initial broadcast - which is why DVD box-sets from the era often have pieces of music cut from their soundtrack. Not only that, but where such popular music was included in dramas and so forth, few of the broadcast tapes survive through to today. In 1965, both The Beatles and Doctor Who were at their apogee and it only seemed logical for the fab four to put in an appearance in the BBC's science fiction success. They performed Ticket To Ride, but the show was wiped in the early 1970s. It is believed that a clip of the performance still exists somewhere in the far reaches of You Tube: the only entry I could locate had been mysteriously "removed".  

2 - BBC: In Colour!

The advent of colour TV in the UK provided a catalyst for further changes. It first appeared in 1967 and although its spread was limited by firstly, the availabilty and cost of colour TV sets and secondly, the expense of colour broadcast cameras, the corporation pressed ahead and in 1969, their first colour drama series Take Three Girls was shown on BBC2.

The three stars of the series -
Liza Goddard, Susan Jameson,
Angela Down

Our interest in the 24 episodes is that the music was provided by folk-rock band, Pentangle.

They were a veritable folk supergroup containing Bert Jansch, John Renbourne, Danny Thompson, Terry Cox and on vocals, the sublime sound of Jacqui McShee. The band had been feted all around the UK on tour and had sold out large venues such as The Royal Albert Hall. The theme music, Light Flight, was a chart hit for them and they also contributed other pieces of music to the two seasons of the series.

Take Three Girls - Light Flight

An altogether different approach was taken by another BBC show of the era, a show that ran from 1969 to 1977 and is still frequently repeated today - Dad's Army. Set in wartime Britain, the theme song was recorded especially for the show by Bud Flanagan, one of his final pieces of work before he died. In the show itself, much use was made of original wartime songs to bridge the gap between scenes. This was judicious use of recorded music since copyright and royalties didn't break the budgets in the same way that modern music in other shows would have done.

Dennis Potter's "Pennies From Heaven"

A landmark series also took this approach, but much more comprehensively - and as it turned out, successfully. This was Dennis Potter's 1978 drama, Pennies From Heaven. It was set in the 1930s and featured Bob Hoskins as a sheet-music salesman and its conceit was that he'd break into song at critical moments of the story. The music, though, came from popular 1930s recordings with Hoskins simply miming along: this fantastical element really lifted the drama into new realms altogether. Potter went on to develop this method to even greater acclaim with his 1986 drama, The Singing Detective.

Landmark Potter series,
The Singing Detective

This took music from the 1940s and was developed on a much greater scale: the fantasy elements at times were the story and many of the characters mimed along to songs from artists such as Bing Crosby, The Andrew Sisters and The Mills Brothers. It was a real tour de force, and although at times difficult viewing for some, it was well regarded and still stands up well today.

Dry Bones - The Singing Detective (Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians) 

ITV was not to be outdone and 1987 saw the Alan Plater classic, The Beidebecke Tapes starring James Bolam and Barbara Flynn as Yorkshire-based school teachers. Bolam's character was a great jazz lover and the music of Bix Beiderbecke in particular. This was the first in a three series sequence and had a clever plot-line based around the possibility that there was a rare set of tape recordings of unreleased Beidebecke songs. Needless to say, the search for this musical treasure trove didn't turn out quite as expected.  

3 - The Musicians Come To TV

A big change earlier in the 1980s was something of a television revolution. To us looking back with the benefit of hindsight, we could be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss was about - but in 1982, a fourth national TV channel arrived, Channel 4. Together with breakfast television and all-day broadcasting, there was a greater opportunity for recorded music to be used in shows. The days of library music were being counted down and two distinctive developments occurred: the use of recorded music in documentaries and factual shows as well as drama.

Pink Floyd - with Syd Barrett

Keen viewers could identify (for example) such bands as The Moody Blues (The Voyage) and Pink Floyd (Astonomy Domine) being used as "bed" (backing) music for instalments of the popular science series Horizon.

Pink Floyd - Astronomy Domine

Alongside this, drama shows also started making greater use of contemporary artists for theme music and dramatic moments within productions. It was still all quite limited, but the barricades were starting to come down. Two notable examples come from 1986 - Elkie Brooks' theme music to the BBC's comedy drama A Very Peculiar Practice and Ian Dury's "Profoundly In Love With Pandora" for Thames TV's The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole. 

Ian Dury - New Boots &
Panties era

Dury was an interesting choice, an artist who had ridden the coat-tails of pub-rock and punk, but was quite possible one of the best lyricists this country has produced. Singing was not his thing, but by the late 80s, his cheeky-chappy persona had enable him to do some acting and provide this sweet song for Sue Townsend's spotty creation.

The occasional one-off drama also appeared which made use of contemporary music: an unusual case was a BBC film made in 1985 by Ray Davies of The Kinks. This was Return To Waterloo. He wrote the script - which involved a surreal commuter train journey from leafy Surrey up to London -  acted in it and produced several new songs too. The Kinks' album of the same name was released in 1985.  

For the next developments, we need to understand what was happening  in the ever-expanding world of TV. Music Television (MTV) had launched in the USA in 1981 and arrived in the UK in 1987: for those with cable TV or, from 1989, access to the newly launched satellite TV network, Sky, this meant multiple channels and much American programming. Although outside our scope, this led the way for music videos to become ubiquitous and soon, a number of terrestrial shows were using them whenever they could. Music programmes in general started to become more widespread and it was only a matter of time before drama and factual shows cottoned on.

The Simpsons pay their dues to The Beatles
on that infamous zebra crossing outside
Abbey Road studios in North London

When Sky TV and British Satellite Broadcasting merged in 1990 as British Sky Broadcasting, the advertising campaign made much use of a new prime-time show developed by the Fox network in the USA. It had been spun out of The Tracey Ullman show and was of course, The Simpsons. Created by music fans from the baby boomer generation, it soon added a host of guest musicians as cartoon characters in the shows: suddenly, recorded music was being put centre-stage as part of the story line. The UK had long had a tradition of bands and groups starring in a show, but it had always been as a self-contained performance, even in the anarchic BBC comedy The Young Ones. This was new - and it was fun, particularly with the bands doing their own voice overs.   

Heartbeat - North Yorkshire
60s nostalgia - including
Record Shops.

In a parallel development,  1992 saw Yorkshire TV hit on a new way of using recorded music in their programming. That year saw the start of Heartbeat, a police procedural series set in rural North Yorkshire in the early 1960s. The soundtrack was peppered with chart hits from that decade, all designed to complement the rich colours of the countryside and the continuity of the era being brought to life. It did sometimes err and, for example, a Hollies track from the 1970s (The Air That I Breathe) would be used in a sequence set in 1964. But it had established a precedent, a desire for rose-tinted nostalgia and a number of record labels enterprisingly issued 60s compilations to cash in on the show's ratings. We'll return to this "nostalgia" phenomenon later on.    

4 - A New Century

With the 21st century firmly in our sights, it's a Sisyphean task to be able to discuss all the interesting uses of recorded music in UK TV programming. And as I'm not too good at pushing boulders uphill, I won't even try. However, there have been some great examples of contemporary music adding that extra degree of interest to our TV lives.

Sigur Ros - Hoppipolla

The BBC increased its use of bed music for continuity links and programme promotions. One of the most memorable pieces was taken from Icelandic ambient pop band, Sigur Ros. They'd already had some of their soundscapes used by Hollywood in films such as Vanilla Sky, but in 2006, their 1997 song Hoppipolla was used to promote David Attenborough's Planet Earth series and that year's F A Cup Final. It got into the public consciousness so much that it was used again by ITV for their coverage of the 2006 World Cup. 

BBC Planet Earth - Hoppipolla (Sigur Ros)    

Denis Sings

There were still occasional issues with music rights and budgets. Another long-running BBC drama, New Tricks, started life with a pilot in 2003. The theme song was sung by one of the show's stars, Denis Waterman and in that very first pilot, he sang The Travelling Wilburys' number End Of The Line. When the show was commissioned, it had turned into a newly written song, It's Alright.

Another BBC drama, Inspector George Gently, borrowed not just the era but also north-east England locations from Heartbeat which we highlighted earlier. Altogether a grittier show, more in-depth and featuring one-time Professional Martin Shaw as the eponymous lead, it has used a great range of 60s music - as well as tacking the music scene as the setting for two memorable episodes, Gently Northern Soul and Gently Upside Down. The latter took a sideways swipe at both Top Of The Pops and its erstwhile rival, Ready Steady Go. In view of the recent scandal involving former BBC presenter Jimmy Savile, this is an episode worth watching as it hints at the sort of things that might have been going on in the hinterlands of the television and music industry. 

The crack cop team 1973 style 

But the two dramas, again BBC-funded productions, that really brought a sharp focus onto the music-as-nostalgia were Life On Mars (two seasons) and its follow-up, Ashes To Ashes (three seasons). Life On Mars plunged a 21st century detective back into the un-PC world of 1973: you were never quite sure whether it was some odd quirk of time travel or just a dream induced by a car accident that befell the unfortunate DC Sam Tyler. With the title being lifted from David Bowie, the episodes featured such bands as The Blue Oyster Cult, The Move, Atomic Rooster, Free, Thin Lizzy and artists like Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong. Clearly rights and royalties issues were a thing of the past and the tracks used, together with snatches of broadcast dialogue, became the subject of several best-selling CDs.

Ashes To Ashes - In Love With A German Film Star (The Passions)

The crack cop team 1980s style

The formula was repeated between 2008 and 2010 with Ashes To Ashes, another Bowie tribute, only this time, the action was the 1980s. A host of diverse 80s acts featured - The Passions, Stranglers, Joe Jackson, The Human League - and with more big-selling soundtrack CDs, it was clear that the 80s had become the new 60s. The baby boomers had been left behind by those born in the swinging 60s . This new band of influencers and creators in usurping their forebears conspired to make music-content in TV production a touchstone like never before.

5 - Today

From the wilderness of 1960 when popular music barely featured on the radio, let alone within a TV drama series, we are now in the land of plenty. Some might say that there's too much music acting as convenient cultural references in drama programming. Others have said that factual shows and documentaries are so cluttered with visuals and music that the narrative drive is often lost. Other critics say it's symptomatic of our decreasing attention spans that we need musical "interludes" and is bound to lead to ever diminishing quality on TV.

Hollywood - The Talkies

There is another view that as music plays a large part in our day-to-day lives, there's no reason why that shouldn't be reflected in what we watch on TV, however we watch now - live, time-shifted, on laptop or tablet. Just as Hollywood producers discovered in the 1930s with talkies, there's nothing like a judicious slice of music to underpin the action. Being a music fan, I'd like to think that this is broadly true, but as we also know from our own interests, there is good music and bad music. Some of this is down to a listener's opinion, but a lot has to depend on the skill of musicians, producers, editors and those who commission television shows to ensure that music does its job. I do fear that there's a danger we are already generating musical overkill - and we need to be vigilant and provide feedback should that happen.

I remain optimistic though.

Elbow - Wrote 2012 Olympic
Theme 

2012 has seen the greatest musical contribution that I've yet seen, and that of course was Danny Boyle's supreme Olympic Opening Ceremony. If ever there was an opportunity to fail on such an international stage, that was it - but with wit and musical nouse, the soundscape was all it needed to be. It not only showed us the rich diversity of music has come from these islands but also just how influential our music has become across the world. Colleagues in the USA commented that it was amazing to see the rosta of British bands, one or two even admitting that they hadn't appreciated that Band A or Band B "wasn't American".  For me and millions of other TV viewers, it was the perfect mix of Sound and Vision.

David Bowie - Sound & Vision

And there we are, mentioning David Bowie once again, an artist who has changed and developed his career as much as music did in TV programming. Change is always the big catalyst with musical fads and fashion all playing their part in shaping the future. 

What can we expect to see in the next few years?

Over in the USA, the use of recorded music in TV shows has far eclipsed our approach: so much so, that there's an active industry in touting "the next big band" to television producers in the hope that at least one of their songs will be included in an appropriate show. Whether that will happen here, it's hard to say - but there's no doubt that pluggers, managers and promoters are already familiar with trying to get their acts onto music programmes such as Later With Jools Holland. It may very well extend to drama and documentaries before too long.

And as for music itself, the BBC has been doing an admirable job with its specials and Britannia-themed strands on BBC4. Perhaps these regular reminders of our musical heritage will act as a spur to programmemakers - and who knows what that might produce.

It's going to be a fascinating journey.   

Next time,  in Part 2 of Variations On A Theme, we'll look at the world of cinema and particularly, existing songs being incorporated into soundtracks.

See you then.

Alan