TV plays a minor role in my life where the ability to call up 24 hour news or watch catch-up programmes on mobile devices means that breaking news or not being at home when something crucial has been scheduled means I never miss anything I want to see. In reality, programmes I’m missing in real time are conveniently recorded on a TiVo box and despite a desire to keep abreast of current affairs, I get pretty tired of the 24 hour news cycle when an insignificant item seems to be ‘news’ for 72 hours, having to watch anchors attempt to ad-lib as some sort of live action reaches an impasse or the connection between the studio and a reporter fails. I get annoyed at the scrolling red ribbon with its headlines rendered ambiguous by editorial constraints and the uncorrected spelling errors, something which has become more frequent since the BBC decided to concentrate on news programming for the rest of the world, abandoning UK viewers and Licence payers to identical output on three different channels simultaneously, delivered by ‘talent’.
I think there are too many channels, most of which peddle meaningless nonsense, cheap programming and repeats. I may have watched a little too much TV in the 70s but at least broadcasting was restricted to three terrestrial channels where, despite the airing of tired, formulaic situation comedies and crass game shows, it appeared that there was some thought about what was broadcast.
One area where the BBC excelled was in its children’s programming. I fondly remember a drama series based on a trilogy of novels by Peter Dickinson and first broadcast in 1975 called The Changes. This near-apocalyptic vision was notable for its pro-integration message, being one of the first programmes to feature Sikhs, making it genuinely progressive. The excellent theme music was by the Radiophonic Workshop’s Paddy Kingsland which I thought was available as a 45rpm single at the time but is now available as a 2LP full series soundtrack album released in 2018.
The Changes DVD made available by the BFI
I first became aware of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the mid-60s when I was old enough to read the credits at the end of Doctor Who and though they’re probably most famous for recording Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme in 1963, the revolutionary sound effects unit was created in 1958, originally to provide sound effects for radio programmes. The creative team included trained musicians with an appreciation of musique concrète and tape manipulation and their rooms at Maida Vale are reported to have looked more like an electronics laboratory than a routine recording studio. The pioneering work was carried out by some memorable names including Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire. A synthesizer designed by Oram, where sounds and compositions were produced by drawings, featured as the centrepiece of a 2016 exhibition at the Science Museum in London, Oram to Electronica. The instrument was never completed during her lifetime but the mini-Oramics machine, based on her original plans, was constructed by a PhD student from Goldsmiths College and though there are now apps that mimic the principle behind her synthesizer, Oramics predated sequencing software and if the machine had been available in 1973, it could have changed the way music was taught and performed. Strange electronic noises are very suited to science fiction and the inception of the Radiophonic Workshop coincided with the rise in popularity of SF, from radio serials Quatermass and the Pit to Douglas Adams’ immensely popular Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, scored by Paddy Kingsland, which later translated to television, as well as shows like Doctor Who.
Peter Purves was a member of the Doctor Who cast from 1965-66 and then a presenter on the long-running BBC children’s classic Blue Peter from 1967-78. Although I was employed by Purves’ parents as a newspaper delivery boy for a couple of years in the 70s – they owned a newsagents on the corner of Oxford Street and Furness Park Road in Barrow – like many teenagers I preferred to watch ITV’s competing news magazine programme Magpie which seemed more everyday than Blue Peter and featured a theme song performed by the Spencer Davis Group. The original Blue Peter theme tune played by Sidney Torch & The New Century Orchestra ran from 1958 until January 1979 when it was replaced with an updated version from Mike Oldfield. This was available as a single, reaching no. 19 in the charts and raising money for the Blue Peter Cambodia appeal. Oldfield’s Blue Peter was used on the programme up to 1989 and would eventually appear on the 1985 compilation 2LP 'The Complete Mike Oldfield'. The single also predated his score for David Puttnam’s film The Killing Fields about the Cambodian genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge which instigated the Oxfam-Blue Peter fund raising appeal “to feed Kampuchea”.
The Complete Mike Oldfield - back cover
Another BBC children’s programme was Horses Galore, presented by Susan King which had a relatively short run, from 1977 to 1979. I’ve got no idea why I would watch a programme about horses, not being interested in equine pursuits but the theme music was Pulstar by Vangelis from Albedo 0.39 (1976). I’ve only ever ridden a horse once, on a free afternoon during a trek in Peru in 2016 when I could have passed as one of the horsemen on the front cover of Foxtrot and I was once been bitten on the shoulder by a horse owned by a friend, Nicola Richardson, while minding my own business.
Horses Galore and Pulstar from Albedo 0.39
The inclusion of lengthy instrumental passages meant progressive rock could easily be incorporated as the soundtrack to documentary pieces on TV. In 1973 Jacob Bronowski included a short section of Echoes in the Generation Upon Generation episode of his seminal series The Ascent of Man accompanying a clip of two stags fighting for the right to mate with a female, which seemed to me to be a fitting piece of music for the subject. Pink Floyd were actually credited at the end of the programme and Will Romano has subsequently suggested that Echoes is as much as song about Darwinism and instinctual knowledge as about human connectedness. In 2010, Bronowski’s daughter Lisa Jardine presented a television programme entitled My Father, The Bomb and Me in which she explored aspects of his life that she knew little of. She had discovered that he worked in operations research during WWII, designing more effective bombs, and wondered how she could reconcile this piece of information with the loving father that she remembered. Whether by accident or design, she used Pink Floyd as incidental music. In December 1976, prompted by the book of Bronowski’s series and imagining that I knew it all, I wrote to the editor of the daily television news programme Nationwide, suggesting a number of pieces of instrumental music by progressive rock bands that could be used as music for documentary features. I was a little disappointed to get a post card in reply with the stock phrase “Thank you for your recent letter to NATIONWIDE. The Team are always interested to hear from individual viewers in this way and are grateful to you for taking the trouble to write.” I don’t recall ever hearing any of my suggestions being played but I was reminded of this when I read Rick Wakeman’s programme notes for his appearance at the Stone Free Festival; the Arthur theme was used by the BBC for Election Night specials from 1979 - 2005 with an updated version used for the General Elections in 2019 and 2024. Perhaps someone did take notice of my letter but in any case, it seemed a very fitting use of the music.
BBC TV news magazine Nationwide replies to ProgBlog
Yorkshire TV, one of the Independent Television company franchise holders, ran a science-based show called Don’t Ask Me from 1974 to 1978 which used House of the King by Focus as a theme tune. It was presented by Derek Griffiths and exposed panellists David Bellamy (botany), Miriam Stoppard (medicine) and Magnus Pyke (natural sciences) to a wide audience. Pyke came across as the archetypal mad scientist and it was his unforgettable manner that was largely responsible for the success of the series, such that a large proportion of my generation will think of Don’t Ask Me rather than Focus when they hear the song.
Focus 3? House of the King? Don't Ask Me!
Holiday was a long-running BBC programme that began in 1969, featuring reports from holiday destinations around the world. During the years I happened to be in the room when it was shown the broadcast was on a Sunday in the early evening and it was therefore something that could be watched while eating an informal Sunday tea. I’d bought Gordon Giltrap’s Visionary shortly after it was released in 1976 and bought the subsequent album, Perilous Journey when that came out in 1977. It was a bit of a surprise to hear Heartsong used as the theme tune for Holiday ’78 and it continued to be used until replaced by an unpopular piece by Simon May in 1985 which itself was replaced by different Giltrap pieces Breaking Free from the 1984 album In At The Deep End (Holiday ’87) and Holiday Romance for four seasons between 1988 and 1991. Interestingly, the ITV holiday reviews show Wish You Were Here…?, which was essentially a rip-off of Holiday, commissioned Giltrap to write a theme tune, which was called The Carnival.
Holiday '78 used Gordon Giltrap's Heartsong from Perilous Journey
One of the best original theme tunes was by Greenslade for the gritty BBC crime drama Gangsters (appearing on Time and Tide, 1975.) I think I saw the programme before hearing the album, immediately recognising the twin keyboard work of Daves Greenslade and Lawson. Set around Birmingham and originally a one-off Play for Today in 1975, this was the most lifelike screen violence I’d seen and was genuinely gripping. Like The Changes, it’s a lost gem with excellent title music.
Greenslade enter the world of Gangsters
Arena is a BBC arts programme first broadcast in 1975 but still running sporadically, taking the form of short documentaries. This was another series that the Pages tended to watch as a family and my mother later admitted to liking the theme tune, Another Green World, the title track from Eno’s 1975 album, possibly the only time our musical tastes have converged. In 2010 Brian Eno was the subject of an Arena film, subtitled Another Green World.
Art documentaries meet art rock
I liked Arena because of its intelligent coverage of both popular and high culture, though I was more interested in the documentaries on music and visual arts than the material on the cinema and theatre and began to watch ITV’s The South Bank Show when it was first broadcast in 1978, an arts programme produced in London Weekend Television’s South Bank Television Centre hosted by Melvyn Bragg which seemed to feature more music than its BBC counterpart. I’m certainly not an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan but the show’s theme music, a fusion of classical and rock, fits into the definition of prog. It was taken from his 1978 album of variations on Paganini’s 24th Caprice Variations and was performed by Colosseum II (Jon Hiseman, Gary Moore, Don Airey and John Mole) supplemented with Barbara Thompson, Rod Argent and Lloyd Webber’s brother Julian, a classical cellist. The musicians themselves featured in the second episode Paganini Superstar aired on 21st January 1978.
Andrew Lloyd Webber goes prog - on one album - for The South Bank Show
The 2024 Porto Antico Prog Fest with its ‘horror soundtrack’ leitmotif proved that there is a similar nostalgia for the music of 70’s TV programmes in Italy. In 2012 the members of La Maschera di Cera released a self-titled album under the pseudonym L’Ombra della Sera – and adopted pseudonyms for themselves - interpreting and extending the music to five of Italy’s popular TV shows identified by the track titles: Gamma, a 1975 Italian science fiction miniseries with original music by Enrico Simonetti, father of Goblin’s Claudio Simonetti; Ritratto di Donna Velato (Portrait of a Veiled Woman), a 1975 giallo miniseries with a soundtrack by Riz Ortolani, taking its name from a painting by Raphael; La Traccia Verde (The Green Trail), a science fiction/giallo miniseries based on the novel Giungla Domestica by Gilda Musa with music by Umberto Pisano and Antonino Riccardo Luciani;
Il Segno del Comando - Cento Campane (The Sign of Command – One Hundred Bells), a famous episode of the five-part miniseries shown in 1971 with music for the series written by Romolo Grano and which, when originally shown, attracted almost 15 million viewers; and the four-part Ho Incontrato Un’Ombra (I Met a Shadow) from 1974 where the music was provided by Romolo Grano and Umberto Pisano and which reached an average of around 19 million viewers. L’Ombra della Sera’s performance was very well received; I was totally enthralled by the film clips projected behind the band which added an appropriate atmosphere to the soundtracks, even though I was totally unable to deduce the plot!
Andrea Orlando, Martin Grice and Agostino Macor of L'Ombra della Sera
Porto Antico Prog Fest 2024
I’m grateful I grew up at a time when progressive rock was a successful artistic form and when, even amongst the stale TV fare, there was some thought-provoking programme making suitable for my teenage self. There are probably more proggy theme tunes I’m unaware of because I’ve not been a great TV watcher for a very long time. Is it surprising that 70’s progressive rock was used in this way when the genre was undeniably popular during that period and where lengthy instrumental sections, a defining feature of prog, could easily be trimmed according to requirement? I don’t think so. I also suspect that in today’s small screen-saturated world there are some televisual gems with appropriate prog title tunes which could be worth watching but I’ll not be seeing them. However, I might get round to listening to the music.
This blog first appeared under the same title on 3rd July 2016 but has not been accessible since 2021. References to specific events such as a visit to the BFI in the original post have been removed and other content has been expanded and updated
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