MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES!

NUMBER 1: WHITE HORSES
When I began to make this list, I had to winnow the tunes chosen down to fifty and kept changing my mind. These top three were easy to decide though. Any one of them could have been my Number 1.
This deserves the top spot because it’s a wonderful piece of music that instantly lifts my mood. It makes me feel it’s a Saturday morning and the day is full of youthful hope and possibility! The good associations have been cemented by the times the fabulous Readers Wifes have played this at Duckie. The show was one of those foreign children’s programmes that seemed to crop up all the time on British kids’ TV, badly dubbed and bearing a patina of the glamour of ‘Abroad’. How they made me itch to go there. Probably largely responsible for me studying modern languages at high school and at university.
This theme was written by Michael Carr (who also wrote ‘South of the Border, Down Mexico Way’) with Ben Nisbet and sung by ‘Jacky’ (Jackie Lee). It was a top ten hit in 1968, the year the USSR invaded Czechoslovakia and I started High School. Jackie Lee had another hit with the theme tune to ‘Rupert the Bear’ and sang backing vocals on Tom Jones’ ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’ and Engelbert Humperdick’s ‘Please, release Me’.








Number 2: Robinson Crusoe
I have loved Robert Mellin’s haunting music for this show all through the years since I first saw the show in the sixties and still listen often to the whole suite (ici) on the iPod.
It was another one of those badly dubbed European shows that seemed to me to have added exoticism. The idea of being marooned on a desert island held immense allure for me as a teenager. It would be an understatement to say that I enjoy my own company. I’d be a better Friday than a Crusoe though and the real island that Alexander Selkirk, the model for Defoe’s hero, was stranded upon was not in any way the tropical idyll you see here. It was a happy thing when I finally found the music on a CD back in the 90s because, until then, I used to drive friends mad trying to get them to hum the tune for me when I was drunk.













Number 3: The Avengers
It is barely possible to put a cigarette paper between My Top Three. This is a brilliant, brilliant theme tune and it was a marvellous show. It’s one of the late Sir Johnny Dankworth’s, his second appearance in this list of mine.
I can’t remember the very early shows when Patrick MacNee had a male sidekick but I can remember when the stalwart John Steed was accompanied by Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman) and then by Emma Peel (Diana Rigg). My father used to get very worked up over Mrs Peel. I used to think that I must be heterosexual after all because she got me steamed up too but then I discovered that was just the kinky leather gear she wore. This show foregrounded a lot of transgressive imagery that struck a chord with even a much younger me. I saw Dame Diana on stage at the Old Vic a couple of years ago and she was electrifying.









Number 4: Doctor Who
I loved this show as a child (and I remember watching the very first episode) and I love it still.
This is one of the most instantly recognizable theme tunes ever, composed by Ron Grainer and a brilliant woman called Delia Derbyshire, mainstay of the ‘BBC Radiophonic Workshop’ realised the piece. Without benefit of synthesiser, she used found sounds on tape that she cut up, distorted, and spliced together. Bloody clever, hugely creative, and the result was a theme tune that was startlingly new and appropriately ethereal.






Number 5: The Addams Family
"Their house is a muse-um
Where people come to se-um
They really are a scre-um
The Addams Family..."
It was written and arranged by Vic Mizzy, featuring harpsichord, and finger-snaps as percussion. Lurch the butler (Ted Cassidy) growled individual words: ‘neat’, ‘sweet’ and ‘petite’.
My dad would allow us to sit up and watch this at 11.04 on a Friday night. Was it really 11.04 and why does that number stick in my head after nearly half a century? It was scary when I was a child but I adored it nevertheless or perhaps precisely because of the gothic horror tradition their comedy pastiched. I liked Gomez and Uncle Fester, but Morticia I adored. My baby sister had very long hair as a kid and my dad called her Cousin Itt for years.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #22

Number 22: Cilla Black Show
This Paul McCartney song opened both of Cilla’s first two series of Saturday night shows. The third and fourth series opened with Something Tells Me (Something’s Gonna Happen Tonight) which was a bigger hit. I liked Cilla a lot way back then. I think she passed her sell-by date sometime in the 60s though.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #43

Number 43: The High Chaparral
Written by David Rose, an incredibly prolific TV theme composer, born in London, and also Judy Garland’s first husband (from 1941 to 1945). His most famous composition was perhaps The Stripper.
They used music well on the show and I watched it avidly as a youngster because it was all very homosocial, all about the men in the Cannon and Montoya families: Big John, Uncle Buck, Blue Boy, and Manolito. Only years later did I find out that “Chaparral” is a woody shrub that grows in those desert lands. I had thought it was Spanish for Chapel.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #44

Number 44: Danger Mouse
Myfanwy Talog sang this and it was her partner, David Jason’s most memorable role, giving the voice to Danger Mouse. I don’t much like Jason, frankly, so I pretend not to know it’s his voice.
I was in my twenties when this was on, so it’s probably quite shameful that I was such a fan. It was a triumph of surreal humour masquerading as a kids’ cartoon show and I loved the braggadocio of the theme tune, written by comedian Mike Harding.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #45

Number 45: Wagon Train
I chose this theme tune because it was the first and, to this day, only thing I ever learned to play on the piano. Taught myself, all on the black keys. It’s the first season theme (there were several others) and was written by Henri René and Bob Russell. I don’t remember much about the series and I don’t know much about René and Russell, although Wikipedia tells me the former made an album called “Music for Bachelors” and the latter later wrote the lyric to “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” for The Hollies (a song I have never liked).

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #46

Number 46: The Monkees
I was a little Monkee fanboy and the first albums I owned were the Monkees’ “The Monkees” and “More of the Monkees”. I was still at Primary School and had no idea and couldn't have cared less that none of the boys was actually playing their instruments. I saw Davey Jones once on Princes Street, nearly three decades later. He was tiny. I still felt the tug of puppy love though!
Written by professional songwriters Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart, as was Last Train to Clarksville. They also performed all of the backing tracks and vocals for the songs on the first few albums, with the Monkees adding lead vocals. In the 70s, Boyce and Hart teamed up with Davey Jones and Mickey Dolenz and toured a 'Golden Greats of the Monkees' show. Boyce moved to England for a while before returning to the US, where he killed himself in 1994.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #47

Number 47: Flintstones
"When you're with the Flintstones
Have a yabba dabba doo time
A dabba doo time
We'll have a gay old time..."
Thanks to this Flintstones FAQ, I now know that Hoyt S. Curtin wrote the music and William Hanna and Joseph Barbera wrote the lyrics. When I was a little boy, I thought a woman called Hanna Barbera made the cartoon. And that she couldn't spell her own name correctly.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #48

Number 48: Crossroads
Meg Richardson, Sandy, Jill, Miss Diane, Benny, Amy Turtle, the shadow of the Droitwich...
For so many years, ‘Crossroads’ and this tune accompanied our dinner, always served at 5.15, just as Dad got home from work. Macca reworked it with Wings but I liked this version best.
Written by Tony Hatch, a man with his finger in many musical pies. He wrote for and produced Petula Clark and even worked on Bowie’s juvenilia. With his wife, Jackie Trent, he wrote lots of other TV theme tunes, including ‘Neighbours’.
Hatch’s zenith, however, imo was when he composed Downtown and gave it to Pet Clark. How do I love that song! Forever associated now in my mind with the Police Raid at Gross Indecency last year.

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #49

Number 49: Tomorrow's World
This programme ran for an eternity and there were other theme tunes in different epochs but this was the best, by the late Johnny Dankworth who produced several other classic tv theme tunes too (that may yet appear in this list).

MY 50 TOP TV THEME TUNES! #50

Going to resurrect my blog. This is a list of my top fifty favourite TV theme tunes that I created to amuse my Facebook friends. Not the best shows, nor necessarily the best music on TV, but they are my favourite TV theme tunes.



Number 50: The Persuaders
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t99QQIXez4M
John Barry's theme to The Persuaders. Never much liked the show but I liked the tune and I love the late, very great John Barry's work. I have come to like Roger Moore over the years but, for some reason, I couldn't abide him when I was younger. Always thought Tony Curtis was a shag though. Particularly when he played Houdini. And, obviously, when he wore a frock.