It's Starting:The Sound Of TV With Neil Brand.

"Television, the drug of the nation. Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation" - Television, The Drug Of The Nation, The Disposable Heroes Of Hip-Hoprisy

"So they want me to star in it, write the theme tune, sing the theme tune" - David Walliams as a very small Dennis Waterman in Little Britain.

Television may have been replaced as the drug of the nation and the breeder of ignorance by the Internet in recent years but television shows, and their theme tunes - even ones not written or sung by Dennis Waterman, have still played a very major role in the tumultuous year we're reaching the end of. I am almost certain I watched more television this year than I have done for decades, or even since I was a child glued to "the box", and much of it has been very good indeed.

A lot of what makes our enjoyment of television programmes comes from, says the affable and knowledgeable Neil Brand, comes from the music in those shows and in his recent three part series, The Sound Of TV With Neil Brand (BBC4/iPlayer), he set out on a quest to learn a little more about the history of the theme tune, the jingle, and the ident.

Predictably, it was a very enjoyable journey through several decades of TV classics he took us on. With guests of the calibre of Matt Groening, Jeff Wayne, Bob Stanley, David Arnold, Simon May, Miranda Sawyer, Jonny Trunk, Simon Rattle, Segun Akinola, Ramon Djawidi, and Bagpuss folkies Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner to guide us on our journey it could hardly not be.

There was even space to hear from a Goldsmiths neuroscientist and the voice of Quintin Hogg, the second Baron Hailsham of St Marylebone. Brand told how he was initially drawn to the power of television theme tunes by first hearing John Barry's The Persuaders and then playing it at school. The first time he ever drew an audience.

For him a life changing, career defining, moment. Four years before Neil Brand was born, 1954, Britain's first soap opera, the short lived The Grove Family was set in Hendon of all places, launched with a jaunty theme provided by Eric Spear. When ITV launched their own soap in 1960, three years after The Grove Family, they chose Spear to write the theme tune too.

He was paid £6 for writing the theme tune to Coronation Street, a show that was planned to run for just a few weeks but has now lasted for over ten thousand episodes - some of them brilliant, some of them utter dogshit. Eastenders has got some work to do before it overhauls that total but its theme tune, too, is instantly recognisable.

Simon May explains to Brand how he based the tune on a cockney joanna music hall idea (the influence of which is all over the world of tv theme tunes) but it's the "cliffhanger pow wow drums" at the end that everyone impersonates it when they do the tune (Rainbow also had a great little drum fill if I remember correctly) and this took us into the idea of the hook, or the earworm. The piece of music that captures the nation's attention as surely as a mum calling her child in for their tea.

"It's on" and "it's starting" were regularly heard in my childhood home when Grange Hill, Harold Lloyd, Screen Test, Dr Who, or Roobarb were on and it seems like a pattern that was repeated, with regional variations, up and down the country. Examples chosen by Brand included The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (Robert Mellin and Gian-Piero Reverberi), The Magic Roundabout (Alain Legrand), the aforementioned Bagpuss and, for American viewers presumably, The Heck Harper Show.

He talks learnedly but conversationally about "autobiographical memory", "deep nostalgia", and "aural wallpaper" and tells how Dixon of Dock Green, which used Maybe It's Because I'm A Londoner as its theme in early shows, was knocked into a cocked hat by the more explosive Liverpool based police drama Z Cars. A show whose theme, by husband and wife team Bridget Fry and Fritz Spiegl, supercharged the Liverpool trad folk song Johnny Todd into an anthem that screamed action and car chases and within a year was adopted as the music for Everton FC to walk out to.

 A tradition that continues to this day. Where Z Cars screamed out grit other themes were more exotic and sophisticated. Edwin Astley was the go to man if you wanted to conjure up images of international men of mystery driving sports cars, sipping Campari, and sleeping with beautiful foreign women in hotel rooms that faced out over Monte Carlo.

Department S, The Saint (later covered by Orbital, and the excellent Danger Man were all Astley's work but perhaps he's best remembered for a theme tune he turned down. Patrick McGoohan's influential and confusing avant-garde sci-fi series The Prisoner aired first in 1967 and, Astley having turned down the chance to write the music, the gig went to the Australian Ron Grainer - also responsible for Steptoe And Son, Maigret, Tales Of The Unexpected, and, with the help of Delia Derbyshire, Dick Mills, and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the legendary Dr Who theme.  

Brand even gets to visit Portmeirion which, of course, looks fantastic (though, at the moment - while we can't travel, most destinations do). Jonny Trunk describes the "euphoric oddness" of Syd Dale's Screen Test theme tune (which I once described as sounding like a thousand Russian schoolboys marching with xylophones and fuelled on vodka and speed) and him and Brand talk of how composers like Keith Mansfield (Grandstand, the music for the Wimbledon Tennis Championships) and Alan Hawkshaw (Grange Hill (or Give Us A Clue if you prefer), Channel 4 News, Countdown and the funktastic Dave Allen At Large) have become minor celebrities in recent years.

Hawkshaw is far more famous for his theme tunes than his work with David Bowie or The Shadows. Sometimes the whirlwind tour through the world of theme tunes was almost too fast. Mastermind (Neil Richardson), Farmhouse Kitchen (Reg Wale), Thunderbirds (Barry Gray), and The Young Ones' adoption of a Cliff Richard classic, I could barely take them all in.

But it seems like Matt Groening had no problem processing all the various TV themes he'd been subjected to in his youth. When The Simpsons first aired back in 1989 Danny Elfman's opening music borrowed and paid tribute to the themes from The Jetsons, The Honeymooners, and various Hanna-Barbera cartoons. 

Though sadly not The Hair Bear Bunch. That's my favourite. If television theme tunes needed to be short and hooky to work then music for adverts needed to be even shorter - and even hookier. An enjoyable trip down memory lane took in the infamous adverts for Shake'n'Vac ("it's all you have to do"), Smash ("with mash get Smash") and of course Coca-Cola's Benettonesque I'd Like To Teach The World To Sing advert.

Meow Mix ("I like beef and I like liver, I like kidney for my dinner"), Club biscuits ("if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit join our club"), R Whites lemonade ("I'm a secret lemonade drinker sang a man in pyjamas said to be Elvis Costello's dad), and Ridley Scott's famous Hovis "'boy on bike" ad that was filmed in Shaftesbury, Dorset and made use of Dvorak's Symphony No 9.

There was an interview with Linda November, the Brooklyn singer who has recorded over 23,000 jingles for the likes of Sprite and Diet Coke, there were nods to Gnarls Barkley, Capone'n'Noreaga, and Kanye West, and there was even a look at the test card in a show which certainly brought together some very unlikely bedfellows.

We didn't just get to enjoy old theme tunes but we also saw how they improved television programmes. We saw a clip from an episode of the sixties series The Forsyte Saga that had no music and how that lacked thrust and a sense of the dynamic in comparison with widescreen epics like Lawrence of Arabia. It wasn't long before television producers saw how music could vastly improve the dramatic potential of their programmes but some feel that, in some instances, it's gone too far.

While I was never a huge fan of dramas like Brideshead Revisited (Geoffrey Burgon) and The Jewel In The Crown (George Fenton, who'd already done the music for Gandhi, soaked that one in cor anglais) we can see how these composers brought symphonic composition into the world of sepia tinted prime time historical drama. Where, thanks to the phenomenon of Netflix and of shows like Game of Thrones (Ramin Djawadi), it remains to the present day.

Carl Davis' music for the brilliant World At War was seen as being "classic and dignified and devoid of triumphalism" and thus suitable for telling the story of the most horrific events of the 20th century but did wildlife dramas like Blue Planet, Life On Earth, and Living Planet really need to sound like they were trying to outdo Ben Hur?

Following on from the success of The Undersea World Of Jacques Cousteau there was a huge appetite for learning about the creatures we share our planet with and in David Attenborough we undoubtedly had a capable hand at the tiller but when a 'lobster march' was given the full militaristic treatment musically in one episode the BBC received several complaints about poor old Elizabeth Parker and our old friends, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop!

 

Some were annoyed that lobsters were being portrayed negatively and incorrectly but others felt that the music was now doing too much of the heavy lifting in wildlife documentaries. It's a difficult balance and, for me, it's an area I'd rather have seen Brand explore further as opposed to, on a slightly disappointing third episode, ending on a coda that took in Rock Follies (Roxy Music's Andy Mackay), Stranger Things (Michael Stein, Kyle Dixon), The Real Housewives Of Bevery Hills (Alan Lazar) and lots of other shows that I've not watched.

So a bit of a personal gripe really. I was glad Brand covered Waad Al-Kateeb's powerful Syrian uprising documentary For Sama (music:Nainita Desai) and I really enjoyed a section about Dennis Potter's 1986 The Singing Detective and its use of old songs from Vera Lynn, Bing Crosby, Duke Ellington, and The Ink Spots to evoke a strange and surreal world of nostalgia and hospitals. I was also rather taken by the revelation that an episode of The Sopranos had used John Cooper Clark's poem Evidently Chicken Town as its theme.

I thought Alabama 3 were a strange enough choice (I went into their tour van once at Womad and it smelt like somebody had died in there). Of course it would have been impossible for Brand to simply list all my favourite TV themes (there's too many) but the ones he picked were mostly pretty ace and the narrative he constructed to lead us through them was adroitly handled. It was both an education and entertainment - like so much of the best television. If only he'd got Dennis Waterman to star in it, write the theme tune, and sing the theme tune.