They’re the items of music, miniature mandalas of reminiscence and that means, that we’ve all heard as a lot as any sounds in our lives. They make existential bridges between an actual world of grinding mundanity to locations of drama, fantasy and escapism.
I imply, after all, TV themes: essentially the most acquainted, nostalgic and taken- for-granted – and now dangerously uncared for – type of compositional creativity within the musical world.
Their taken-for-granted standing is a situation of their success. If the reveals they body are actually fashionable, TV themes are hardly heard as music in any respect: in cleaning soap operas, they’re immediate sonic portals to Ramsay Avenue, the Queen Vic or the Rovers Return.
Eric Spear’s music for Coronation Avenue is the only most-played theme tune on terrestrial telly. Its 22 seconds of exquisitely distilled nostalgia lead us gently into the drama of Corrie’s characters in 10,000-and-counting episodes since 1960.
Spear remembered that his temporary for the tune was a mass of competing concepts: ‘They needed one thing melodic, however not an excessive amount of so. They needed one thing rhythmic, nevertheless it mustn’t be jazz. They needed one thing thrilling, nevertheless it mustn’t be too thrilling.’
Someway, Spear fulfilled that impossible-sounding fee in music that’s each upbeat and melancholic, with that cornet languidly soloing over a laid-back jazz band. For these of us who grew up with it, Spear’s music is the sound of a nation gathering around the communal tellybox.
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Spear’s pioneering artform has had any variety of virtuosic successors in British TV, from Denis King’s suavely seductive Lovejoy to Simon Could’s once- heard, never-forgotten tune for Howards’ Means, and Carl Davis’s cod-classical concerto for Delight and Prejudice.
The taken-for-granted standing of TV themes is a situation of their success.
My favorite is Anne Dudley’s music for ITV’s Jeeves and Wooster, wherein the unforgettable artwork deco dance-band earworm she composed for the theme tune is used all through the reveals as a leitmotif, turning into every thing from a parody of Wagner to Vaughan Williams.
And within the streaming period, TV themes have entered one other golden age, from the epically critical medievaliana of Ramin Djawadi’s Sport of Thrones to the sounds of narcissistic dissolution that Nicholas Britell created for the fetid household drama of Succession.
However there’s a menace to this ever- creating artform: the ‘Skip Intro’ button on streaming providers like Netflix. It’s estimated that 136 million intros are skipped every single day all over the world. For Britell, that’s a TV-theme tragedy, since these thousands and thousands of intro-skippers are lacking out on the important atmosphere-creation of theme tunes and their title sequences.
I believe Britell is correct: let’s all do our bit to recognise the creativity of TV composers and permit the brilliance of their theme tunes to burrow into our consciousnesses. Don’t skip the intros!
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm on BBC Radio 3.
