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. 

 

Kakistocracy VI:How The Grinch Saved Christmas.

"The Grinch loved Christmas! The whole Christmas season! Now, please don't ask why. No-one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small".

It's six days now until many of us celebrate a Christmas like no other we've ever celebrated. There will be no big Xmas meals with colleagues and friends and there will be no boozy nights down the pub (for most of the country, those parts still in tiers two and one can enjoy them as long as they include a Scotch egg) but there will be a five day window in which three different households can mix together.

The decision to cancel Christmas is not one any Prime Minister would want to take but a Prime Minister who has already presided over the globe's sixth highest Covid death toll (Italy have briefly pulled ahead of us in that grisly league but their strictly enforced and widely observed national Christmas lockdown should ensure we soon retake them) and has sewn confusion, division, and hatred in the country he's supposed to be in charge of?

Well, what do you think? Instead of ordering an unpopular lockdown (populists don't get where they are by making unpopular decisions) he has, instead, suggested we use good old fashioned common sense when visiting relations and try not to spread the virus. Which surely almost everybody was doing anyway and what they intended to continue doing?

A plea for common sense to the citizens of a country that voted for Brexit and returned Boris Johnson to Number Ten with an eighty seat majority! If enough British people had common sense these events wouldn't have happened. Regarding Christmas, I appreciate the confusion but with 489 extra Covid deaths yesterday (and a yearly total, so far, of 66,541) I'd have erred on the side of caution.

With Rishi Sunak extending the furlough scheme until April, it doesn't sound like the few brighter minds in this administration think this virus is going away anytime soon despite the wonderful news of people receiving the Pfizer vaccine and the Oxford vaccine looking very likely to be given a green light in the next few weeks.

Confusion was inevitable in such unusual circumstances but this government thrives on confusion. The tier system is patently not working in preventing the spread of the virus (pubs and restaurants closed makes sense but why are gyms, schools, and shops open? Why is professional sport being played?) but it is working very well in shifting the blame from the government to the people. 

It's doing a great job of getting us to argue with each other. Either behind the back gossip ("you'll never guess how many people Lisa's having round for Christmas?"), online bitching ("look at these morons. You'd think the virus had gone away"), or the outright hostility of people shouting at each other for breaches or perceived breaches of Covid etiquette.

I choose the word 'etiquette' because it's no longer about rules and, to be honest, it hasn't been for a very long time. There are certain things you're not allowed to do but, mostly, the police and the authorities will turn a blind eye and, anyway, what if you really want to do those things? You can't simply not do something you really want to do? 

Whether it's having a birthday party in a Notting Hill restaurant when you're supposed to be self-isolating (Rita Ora), going on a restaurant crawl (Kay Burley), or driving to Barnard Castle with your child in the back of your car to test your eyesight. Which I'm sure I heard about somebody doing.

While endless Tory cruelties are enacted (Jacob Rees-Mogg admonishing UNICEF for feeding children that were going without food due to his own governement's policies is a predictably nasty example) and Brexit uncertainty goes down to the wire (while all the time informing the populace we should get ready for Brexit - we will do when you tell us what it is) I'm not going to do their dirty work for them.

I'm not going to call out friends or family members who are making different decisions about the festive season to me. I'm just going to do what I think is right and leave others to make their own decisions. All the blame, for me, will lay at the foot of a government who have encouraged people not to trust experts, not to believe facts, and to break the law when and if it suits them.

Normally on Xmas Eve I take the train from London to Basingstoke and then get a bus, or a lift, to Tadley where I spend the Christmas period (normally until the 27th) with my parents. On Christmas Day I'll go round my brother and sister-in-law's house (she does a great veggie Xmas dinner) and celebrate with them, my parents, and my nephews Daniel and Alex.

 

On Boxing Day I'll usually meet with Shep and Adam in The Fox and Hounds in Tadley. The likes of Ian, Mike, and Tina have joined us on multiple occasions over the years and, until his untimely passing last year, Bugsy was a regular fixture at Foxing Day.

They sometimes got messy. This year the only thing that will get messy is my flat (which, to most people's eyes, already is - perhaps I'll tidy it). On Xmas Eve my journey will take me in the opposite direction. From Tadley to Basingstoke to London. Where I will spend Christmas, for the first time ever in my life, completely alone.

Don't feel sorry for me. I'm quite happy about it. I've always wanted to try it one year and this accursed Covid year seems like the perfect opportunity. I could stay in Tadley with my brother and his family, the invite is an open and eternal one it seems, but my parents have already decided to self-isolate (Dad is 80 on 2nd January and is, presumably, near the front of the queue for the vaccine, Mum's not far behind, why take precautions all year and then risk it when the end may be in sight?) and that, in part, spurred my decision to do so.

At least I'll avoid any uncomfortable discussions about Brexit and Boris Johnson and being away from Tadley should mean I won't get to hear such old fashioned racist epithets as chink, wop, jigaboo, paki, and nigger. All of which I've heard casually bandied around in the last few weeks I've spent working back in the area.

It reminds me, in absolute certainty, why I moved away and why I intend to never move back. I like being in a multicultural city with curious, artistic, creative people and I like being part of a global, or European, mindset and many in Tadley, and similar places, don't share that feeling or hold that belief. Sadly.

So, as I wrote in my most recent Kakistocracy blog, Christmas this year will be spent at home, listening to music, watching television, having a beer or three (San Miguel has been the biggest riser in sales in Britain this year and I'm hoping I'm not personally responsible for that - I have bought rather a lot of it) and maybe a bottle of wine as a special treat (I've hardly touched the stuff this year), eating some nice comforting food, and maybe having a Zoom or two.

It's no sacrifice for me whatsoever to do that but even if it was a sacrifice it'd be one I'd make without complaining. Those that are meeting in groups of two or three households this Christmas, I wish them the compliments of the season. Those that are not, I extend the exact same courtesy. I don't want to spend Christmas arguing although, depressingly, I think that's exactly what this government want us to do this year.

"Welcome, welcome, fahoo ramus. Welcome, welcome, dahoo damus. Christmas Day is in our grasp so long as we have hands to clasp".

Crushed By The Wheels Of:Industry.

There are very few work environments that seem as toxic, as competitive, as unpleasant, and as prone to bullying as investment banking so do we, as a society, do anything to try and end that unpleasantness, that bullying, or that toxicity? Of course we don't. We make all the right noises, send people on the right courses, talk about corporate responsibility, and brandish our Investors in People mugs as if they hold totemic powers but, behind all that, we do absolutely nothing.

In fact, we celebrate the culture of the city by making the people who work there, often pushing abstracted sums of money around on computer screens while wearing identikit suits in mostly identikit offices furnished in chrome and glass, some of the very richest people in the world. They bring nothing to society, they improve no lives, and often they make some lives a misery. So, yes, of course they are celebrated.

We live in a capitalist society and investment banking is capitalism writ large. With that in mind the recent eight part series Industry (BBC2/iPlayer), set in London's square mile and in a resolutely pre-Covid environment - social distancing is not a phrase you'll hear, could have been as depressing, as soulless, and as unedifying as a two hour business meeting with people you'd happily never speak to once again in your life.

The fact it was anything but that was down to the fantastic writing of Mickey Down and Konrad Kay and the terrific performances of all the leading players in a drama that simply can't be described without the word ensemble in front of it. The premise of the series is that five young graduates have arrived at Pierpoint & Co and that they are competing for an unspecified number of permanent positions within this supposedly respected firm.

Harper (Myha'la Harold), a young black woman from New York, seems cool under pressure but also appears to hide a secret and one that may be far more devastating for her career than any revelation that she enjoys Zoom sex with an on/off boyfriend over the Atlantic. She's made friends with Yasmin (Marisa Abela), a beautiful Arabic and Spanish speaking lady whose relationship with the hapless hippy Seb (Jonathan Barnwell) seems to be floundering as their lives take different directions and their moral curves bend away from each other.

Robert (Harry Lawtey) isn't the type to let morality hinder his progress. Decked out like an aggressive Foxtons estate agent his penchant for late nights, booze, bugle, and shagging seems far more likely to be his downfall while his friend and flatmate Gus (David Jonsson) seems to be moving in the right direction by impressing his colleagues with his ability and quiet confidence. The fact that he regularly fellates Pierpoint's research analyst Will (Theo Tuck) doesn't look likely to hold him back either.

The fifth of these Apprentice like contestants is the bodywarmer clad, sleeping in the office, Pro-Plus popping Hari (Nabhaan Rizwan) who immediately struggles with the environment and soon finds himself in a very bad way indeed. How Pierpoint handle Hari's situation is predictable - arse covering essentially - but how Harper, Yasmin, Robert, and, most of all, Gus handle it feeds into the very heart of the drama. 

In liminal spaces like corridors, lifts, and, most of all, spotlessly bland toilets we see these five young graduates interact with older hands like Daria (Freya Greenock), Sara (Priyanga Burford), Rishi (Sagar Radia), and Greg (Ben Lloyd-Hughes, a cross between Roger Federer and Ezra Koenig). The older hands, variously, mentor the young starters. They flirt with them, they date them, they take credit for their work, and in the case of Kenny (Conor MacNeill) they do all of that and more.

Kenny's the Vice President of Foreign Exchange Sales and he's an easily loathed pint sized pot of insecurity, resentment, and frustration. The way he treats Yasmin leads him ever closer to a disciplinary but he always manages to save face by trotting out the old excuses that he's just having a laugh and it's just good old fashioned office banter.

Conor MacNeill's brilliantly realised Kenny is, sadly, an all too believable character to anyone who has worked in any office job at any level anywhere. Derek Riddell's Clement Cowan, on the other hand, is trickier to get your head round. An old school banker who still reads the newspaper in print form, refuses to speak to new starters until they've been there for a year or two, and pisses with his pants round his ankles like Pepe the fucking Frog or something.

Clement, however, is not all he seems and neither is Eric (Ken Leung). Eric's a big manager at Pierpoint and it's constantly suggested and tacitly stated, though never really explained why, he has the power to make and break a career. He takes Harper under his wing but an incident when he locks her in an office during a meeting causes ructions within the working environment and Eric's true character, or so we think, comes to the surface.

The dynamics between the new breed and the old guard create interesting moral dilemmas and more than a few tricky situations at the parties and drinks evenings that soon become the social life of a young investment banker. But it's the dynamics between the younger players, and the sex between some of them too, that's had the programme compared, not unreasonably, to nineties sensation This Life.

Much like This Life, Industry will probably look dated very quickly and most of the main characters are morally reprehensible personality vacuums who'd sell their grandmother for an office on a higher floor and a bag of Bolivian marching powder. Yet, that aside, you can't help rooting for them. Or at least some of them. I hope it just wasn't her looks that swayed it for me but I found myself on the side of Yasmin even when she treated her, admittedly dopey, boyfriend Seb abysmally.

As with The Apprentice (a programme, let's not forget, that launched the media career of Katie Hopkins and helped propel Donald Trump into the White House) I couldn't care less which of the graduates got jobs in the end and I didn't even care who got sucked off or licked out by who but I did, for some reason, care about what happened in the drama.

That can only be testament to great writing and great acting. I'm glad I watched this series. I really enjoyed it. I'm even more glad that I don't live in the same world as these people. I'd fucking hate it.