It's Monday and it's Mike, who has kindly provided a guest post, recalling a time when TV theme tunes were as trauma-inducing as the programme's content. This hard-hitting Monday night ITV classic was no exception. Over to you, Mike...
Every once in a while do you hear a bit of music and it takes you back to when you were a child? It may be comforting, it may be disconcerting but it gets a visceral response which really make you think.
One of the more obvious ones for me are TV themes. Many bloggers have covered this with more success but I wanted to share a TV theme which in the 1970’s represented a number of negatives reactions in me. It was quite a harsh piece of music which based on responses on YouTube gave people nightmares or at least made them switch over (and remember it was an effort then when you had to get out of your seat). It could be seen as scary (were there just more scary bits of music in the 70’s?) or just a bit unsettling.
The piece of music I am referring to is the World In Action theme music. For those of you who can’t remember World In Action (or simply weren’t born then) this was a programme than ran on ITV between 1963 and 1998. A quick look at Wiki says it could attract up to 23 million viewers and was seen as hard hitting journalism which saw the downfall of many a top ranked member of institutions in the UK.
Talking to others many have their own favourite WIA programme – it may be looking into the convictions of the Birmingham Six or exposing members of Combat 18 for example. But when I was very young it was the theme music that gave me the heebie-jeebies…
Browsing on Youtube recently I came across the ‘World In Action Theme – Recording Sessions’.
I listened to the music again although in the 7 minute 35 edition rather than the 30 second snippet you would get of an evening. The first thing that struck me is what a brilliant piece of music it is. Within the seven and a half minutes the music stops and starts but throughout you can see the clever interplay between keyboards and acoustic guitars. It really is worth checking out.
However what I found REALLY interesting was the back story about the composing and copyright of the music. It was only in the comments underneath I got a real feel for the animosity which has sprung up over the years for who was given the credit for the music. Certainly Shawn Phillips and Mick Weaver felt they were very harshly treated and I don’t think I have ever seen such a public spat covered in a comments section on you tube. When you think this music was put together in 1967 it really is a contentious issue that will follow all the participants to their grave.
Whatever the truth is – what a brilliant and evocative piece of music that takes me back to a time and place where if nothing else we had more belief in investigative news reporting then we do today.
Many thanks, Mike. I haven't had cause to think about World In Action for years, but a few seconds of the theme tune brought those childhood memories back to me. And the story of it's creation and use, in particular the poor practice around fair credit and payment for work, could itself have been a World In Action topic.
As Mike notes, after an edit of the theme tune was posted on YouTube in 2012, presumably at the time credited solely to Shawn Phillips, Mick Weaver was eventually moved to comment.
Oh, and for those of you who may have been expecting a post on DJ legend Mike Monday, here's a lovely song from his 2006 album Smorgasbord, topically on the nose following a weekend of Storm Bert in the UK.
No comments:
Post a Comment