THE SIMON PARK ORCHESTRA - “Eye Level”
How to evaluate a theme tune from a TV programme I’ve never seen? All I have is the name and this track. I asked my Dad if he remembered a show called Van Der Valk, which would have been popular around when I was born. “Yes!” I felt hopeful. “It had a very good theme song.” Ah. He told me it was about a Dutch detective and returned to his chess problem.
It is a good theme song, stately in general and rousing in particular (is that a zither I hear, busying itself in the background?). It doesn’t sing to me of Holland, or puzzles of detection – in fact there’s something oddly generic about its themeyness. It might as happily sit behind the credits to a wistful sitcom of middle age, or a bumptious country house drama, as behind a policier. Perhaps that’s why it got to number one.
Off to YouTube! The credit sequence helps a bit - van der Valk is steely-eyed under a shock of blonde hair, observing the goings-on of Amsterdam (LOOK VIEWERS IT’S AMSTERDAM) with a hard-won detachment. The flourish mid-way works well too, the self-satisfied beauty of old Europe hiding (no doubt) a weekly cesspit of corruption. Well, now I have a profile to fit the suspect’s name though I’m little closer to establishing a motive (for purchase).
(I started listening to the charts just as the era when TV themes got singles releases was ending - I can just about remember The Life And Times Of David Lloyd George and one of my first 7″ singles was the 1980 re-recording of the Dr Who theme (did not chart). Themes in the Top 40 feels like quite a likeable element in the popscape, especially given my romantic view of the charts as a kind of bazaar for pop culture concerns, but then I didn’t have to live with them.)
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Tom • 4,038 views •
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“Abel and his brother/Fightin’ one another”…another good ‘un from the Mitch Murray/Peter Callendar team. Surprised that it only got to #37 (though it did make #26 when it was re-released after, erm, another Tony Christie re-release). Also not disgracefully rendered karaoke-style by Jude Law in that otherwise ghastly improv gangster film with Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke etc. whose title I can’t recall offhand but it was something like Dodgy Geezers Only Killing Their Own.
Actually it was called Love, Honour And Obey. And a right royal load of rope it was too. Sort of Carry On Goodfellas.
Try as I might, I can’t make the Zaccheus stuff (#71) fit with the tune to “Eye Level”. Or rather, I can manage the first verse, but not the second.
Youtube has a clip from the 1973 TOTP Christmas Special, in which the tune has been re-scored to last for not much more than 90 seconds. Which scarcely seems worth the effort of forking out on matching orange polo-neck sweaters for the orchestra…
Peter Snow there on second violin…
…and is that Bob Wellings from Nationwide, doing a spot of moonlighting?
More theme tunes - Wings’ “Zoo Gang”, but this was only a B-sider. And then there was Mrs Brian May…
Not for another thirteen years there wasn’t, unless she sang on the Play Away theme with Brian Cant, Toni Arthur, Jeremy Irons and the rest.
And we were still a couple of years away from Wings’ re-working of the Crossroads theme. (”Crossroads must move with the times, says TV’s “Nolly” Gordon.”)
I nurse great affection for “Sleepy Shores”, “Galloping Home” and the theme from The Onedin Line.
I get quite emotional when I listen to “Sleepy Shores” and not just because it reminds me of being a kid; it’s the same feeling of knowing cosiness as protection - the world is burning but here you’re safe and all is peaceful - that I discern in “Moulin Rouge,” one of the very early number ones; a lullaby for those who knew what true horror was only a handful of years before.
On another tangent, there was a discussion programme on BBC 4 last Saturday with Andrew Marr and a panel ranging from Andrew Roberts to Polly Toynbee ranking the 20th century Prime Ministers. Each PM was covered in a short profile featuring incidental music, the most notable of which was the Theme from “A Summer Place” for Macmillan, again the cosiness of the “never had it so good” era but this time with the dramatic irony of knowing what was around the corner for him and us.
I think that was another record which topped every chart except the official one, but yes it’s the same thing - Percy Faith (yay Canada!), even though I associate him more directly with the theme tune to The Virginian since it was on every Friday at 6:45 in my youth.
Prime Ministers - I bet you they forgot Sir Alec Douglas Home. Everybody does.
I read Pearson’s substantial biography on this most unexpected of Premiers and Home himself recounted a tale about travelling back up to Berwick (and from there on to his estate in Coldstream) by rail and talking to an elderly lady, who remembered Alec as Heath’s Foreign Secretary. They spoke pleasantly until the lady alighted at Newcastle. As she got off she smiled at Home and said:
“It’s been lovely to talk to you. It’s a shame you were never Prime Minister.”
“Well actually I was,” smiled back Home. “But only for a short while!”
No, they remembered everyone including Bonar Law. Who can forget the Beatles’ press conference in the US when they were asked if they had a message for the Prime Minister, and Lennon said “Hello, Alec”?
I’ll have to hear that documentary, not least to hear what song each PM gets.
Alec Douglas Home spoke at my school in 1986, and I can remember being quite impressed - he seemed quite sensible and fair-minded. My 13 year old self wasn’t chosen to ask a question, which probably just as well (would have asked him what he thought of his representation by satirists). One pupil asked him if he thought that Hitler (who Home had met in the thirties) had had a bad press, which gives you an impression of just how right-wing public schoolboys were in the eighties!
Soon afterwards, Harold Wilson gave a talk and was obviously completely senile, which was just depressing. The look of devoted suffering on Mary Wilson’s face I don’t think I will ever forget.
Alec of course was the last member of the House of Lords to become Prime Minister, as after Macmillan resigned, he sent for by Brenda whilst still The Earl of Home. He had to win a by-election in Kinross and West Perthshire subsequent to entering Number Ten, an astonishing fact. What if he had lost?
He was also the only PM to play first class cricket and was also PM here when Kennedy got stoked. Years later, “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in” had an item suggesting that Elvis Presley could have been the assassin - “The King of Rock and Roll on the Grassy Knoll”!
Also worthy of mention - in the charts at the same time as this and missing out narrowly on at least a number 2 slot the debut of one David Essex with the mighty dubtastic ‘Rock On’ which IIRC featured on the soundtrack LP of ‘That’ll Be The Day’ without actually featuring in the excellent film of the same name.
Number three for two weeks, firstly behind Donny and Wizzard, and secondly behind Wizzard and the rudely gatecrashing Sweet.
If any Popular readers are feeling rich at the moment and are fired with unquenchable curiosity about the show, I see that Network release an 11 DVD box set - ‘The Complete Van Der Valk’ (”features all 5 series plus specials”) - next month. It retails at £99.99.
That’s “unquenchable tragedy” I think, Billy, my boy…
That documentary ranking the 20th century PMs was repeated on BBC4 last night, and I managed to note most of the music used. In some cases I didn’t recognise it, so maybe someone who’s less of an ignoramus than me on classical music can help out – it’s on again in the wee small hours of Friday morning if you want to record it!
Salisbury: Men of Harlech, played by a Boer War-style military band
Balfour: Karelia Suite – Sibelius
Campbell-Bannerman: didn’t recognise it at all!
Asquith: ditto
Lloyd George: ditto
Bonar Law: ditto
Baldwin: Rhapsody in Blue – Gershwin
MacDonald: Song of the Dawn – Paul Whiteman
Chamberlain: God Bless You Mr Chamberlain (can’t identify the singer - an unironic music-hall tribute from the time of the Munich agreement)
Churchill: Jupiter, from the Planets Suite – Holst
Attlee: see Campbell-Bannerman
Eden: ?? - a sax-based instrumental, like a less demented Lord Rockingham’s XI
Macmillan: Theme from “A Summer Place” – Percy Faith
Douglas-Home: You Really Got Me – The Kinks
Wilson: Reflections Of My Life – Marmalade
Heath: ?? - a piano piece played by Heath himself.
Callaghan: Let’s Stick Together – Roxy Music
Thatcher: She’s Got Balls – AC/DC (!!)
Major: Things Can Only Get Better – D:Ream (!)
Blair: Roll With It (and Supersonic) – Oasis
They didn’t cover Brown, since it’s too soon to rank him and they were concentrating on the 20th century anyway, but after the events of last weekend I had Roy Orbison’s “Running Scared” going through my head…
“Let Me Think About It,” surely?
i think the sibelius deserves a bit of a (!) also — exactly how active was balfour in finnish agitation for independence?
It would take some researching ability to come up with a suitable tune for Bonar Law - six months in 1923!
Last year’s much-delayed ITV Harold Wilson documentary used ‘The Rise & Fall of Flingel Bunt’ by The Shadows as ‘Harold’s Theme’, which worked really well.
For Bonar Law they could have used “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down And Out” - Bessie Smith’s recording came out in 1923.
“Nobody Knows You When You’re Bonar Law”
I could be embarrassingly wrong about the Sibelius – it was a classical piece that was used as a TV current affairs theme, and it wasn’t Nantucket Sleighride!
My colleague who’s a 60s radio comedy fan tells me Bona Law was a legal practice featured in “Round the Horne”.
And another thread crashes through the 100-posts barrier!
HORNE: Will you take my case?
JULIAN: Well, it depends on what it is. We’ve got a criminal practice that takes up most of our time.
HORNE: Yes, but apart from that - I need lega1 advice.
SANDY: Ooh - isn’t he bold?
It wouldn’t count as his theme, being from 1969, but Alexandria Good Time by Robin Gibb mentions Bonar Law - Robin being something of a history buff. Sadly for BL, it was on the flip of the exceedingly rare withdrawn version of Saved By The Bell. So instead of being tagged to a pan-European number one, no one’s ever heard the forgotten PM’s only mention in pop. Apart from the ‘lucky’ fellow who paid something daft like 500 quid for it on ebay.
Marcello @ 99 xpost - Bit late for a correction, but Bessie Smith’s NLYWYDAO was recorded in ‘29. (Wikipedia is wrong.) The song appears to have been written in ‘23, which may be the source of the confusion.
Ah!
Wikipedia USELESSpedia morelike!
In his entry for The Shadows’ “Wonderful Land”, Tom pegs the number as evoking “a Sixties that ended up…not happening”. It’s a claim one might make for “Eye Level”, with reference to Europe in the Seventies. A calm, prosperous, European future beckoned. From this distance (middle-age now, mid-teens then), it evokes more the end of an era.
I wonder if anyone can help? I have christmas lyrics in my head whenever I hear ‘Eye Level’ and I hope to god I heard them and didn’t make them up… does anyone else recognise these lyrics that go along with the main theme of Eye Level? If so, please let me know where they came from…
“Ring a bell, bang a drum,
Sing Happy Christmas Day
For the Lord Jesus Christ is born
Ring a bell, bang a drum,
Sing happy, happy blessed morn”