Had to share this lovely item, depite it being over a week old now.
Chris De Burgh appeared on BBC Breakfast to sing a tribute to the families of the Hillsborough victims in their week of grief, happily coinciding with his new album release, Footsteps – which judging by the snippet we heard is, as expected, bloody awful. In the clip, De Burgh manages to soil the memory of Byrds classic, Turn Turn with that trademark yawning vocal.
From his feigning shock at the presence of a 12 string, his outright destruction of a Beatles classic, his bizarre acapella tribute to ther scousers and the fawning smiles of Silverton and Turnbull, everything about this seems designed to curl the toes and put the viewer off their tea and toast.
Or maybe it’s just me.
Enjoy – and see you on the new site – if I don’t click the wrong button and blow it up over the weekend…
Ever noticed how theme tunes are constructed so that you, the viewer, can sing along at home?
We have.
That’s why we bring you the first outing in a pointless series called Songs From The Shows, in which Napoleon and myself aim to illustrate how to join in when your favourite theme songs kick in.
First up – The Soaps. Here’s Coronation Street:
Can you see how it scans and marries into a thing of beauty?
If it was the Brits last week, it must be The Brats tonight, right? ‘The Brats’ being the name they used to call the NME Awards before they became so similar that the differentiation seemed a bit silly. They’d be better off calling it the NME Smash Hits Poll Winners’ Party, what with the awards having silly bozo-names like ‘Best Dancefloor Filler’. I sat through this one making notes, as I did with The Brits, in the name of balance. Here are my real-time mitherings.
First up, our hosts. Mark Watson is an affable comedian and will be hosting on the grown up stage. Taking care of the Fearne Cotton, backstage side of things, strictly for telly, is that bloke who did Big Brother’s Little Brother – the one with the self-consciously irritating hair. Jack Whitehall…
No?
Anyone?
Admittedly, I had to google him hard to get the name.
Is it possible for a person to have a ‘hateful face’? You hear the term bandied about a fair bit, and it seems to be a little unfair. You should judge someone on their actions and not the way their facial protrusions are arranged, no matter how runtish their upturned nose makes them seem and no matter how weak their chin. But if they top their noggin with an annoying, Mr Whippy, latterday-indie construction, the face beneath is always going to come off badly. Anyway – Jack Whitehall isn’t very good at his job.
In an echo of days gone by, Steve Lamacq is employed to take care of the voiceovers while Watson helms the stage, with jokes slagging off Johnny Borrell. It seems slightly hypocritical of the NME to have passed those gags, what with it being about 63% their fault that Razorlight got to the stage where they could release Slipway Fires on an unsuspecting audience unchallenged.
Grace Jones arrives to present Best Live Act! So we’ve kicked off, and the first award goes to the band which is considered best at grinding out music which is too bloody noisy and badly mixed whilst in front of a room full of teenage idiots, all of whom are clambering over each other to look the coolest, dropping beer in each others’ faces and singing along with the lines of the songs, obscuring the music in the process and allowing themselves to believe that they gain some measure of kudos from memorising badly-rendered poetry. Yay!
Muse beat Kings of Leon, Oasis, Radiohead and Killers. Their drummer accepts the award, which is the coward’s way out.
‘Still to come’ says Steve Lamacq – and some adverts come on.
Next up – Best DVD. This one throws me. Best DVD isn’t very rock n roll, is it? All the live DVDs I’ve seen have only ever served to demonstrate that gigs aren’t the revolutionary gatherings of energy they’re made out to be and shows them in the more realistic light of artists deluding themselves they’re gods while an audience deludes itself that it’s having fun.
Arctic Monkeys beat Foo Fighters, Kaiser Chiefs, Rolling Stones and Muse. Dean Learner accepts the award.
Here are the Skins – those children from the kid’s drama serial (for infants). The one that shouldn’t be watched by adults because it’s for kids. They’re here to present the Best New Band award. Up for the award are tedious Sting-thieves, Vampire Weekend, those Jesus & Mary Chains for losers, Glasvegas, the criminally insane Late of the Pier, offspring of the Flaming Lips – MGMT and a band called White Lies who I’ve never heard of.
MGMT win, predictably enough, and their self-consciously kooky acceptance speech (‘it’s a jelly spider!’) doesn’t do much for me.
Presumably it’s not fashionable to refer to ‘singles’ any more, what with iTunes and the internets, so they appear to have replaced that category with ‘Dancefloor Filler’. It’s a silly name for an award for two reasons. Firstly, indie people can’t dance and, secondly, it precludes any release that has a slow tempo. It suggests frenetic indie pop, so anything vaguely leftfield or undanceable gets left on the sidelines like a fat kid at football.
Beating Crystal Castles, Friendly Fires, Bloc Party and Late of the Pier, Dizzee Rascal wins for the witless dirge he made with Calvin Harris that has the cheapest video in the history of hip hop.
Let’s have some music to cheer us up!
La Roux (me neither) and Franz Ferdinand pile onstage to kick the living shit out of Blondie’s Call Me. Jaime Winstone is dancing! Ooooh, I wanna dance with Jaime Winstone! Alex Kapranos does a grand job of flattening the entire vocal melody but blood isn’t truly drawn from the flailing carcass of the tune until La Roux pitches in with a whine last heard in a slaughterhouse. They create the second worst cover version of all time. Lucky for us, the first worst comes later on in the evening. At least Estelle and the Tings had the courtest to murder their own tunes at The Brits…
Best Album Award now – with everyone’s least favourite comedian Keith Lemon, presenter of ITV2’s woeful Celebrity Juice, actively molesting Alexa Chung as they present. Kings of Leon beat The Dancers, Glasvegas, Oasis and Bloc Party, with a recorded speech which appears to tell everyone in the audience that they hate them. Possibly the only rock n roll moment of the evening.
Friendly Fires play a song. It’s the first time I’ve seen this lot, and there won’t be a second. There are some terrible dance moves over a tune that sounds like, and forgive me for putting the idea in your mind, U2 crossed with The Klaxons, and then some Brazilian dancers come on for a booty-shake. This momentarily makes notions of suicide drift away with an idea clearly nicked off Basement Jaxx. Fill the stage with bright colours and dancing, and you might get away with it.
Best British Band! Kasabian present. The singer asks if everyone there is ‘c*nted’ – which I think is a bit rude. Cut to a shot of Muse who are visibly not c*nted, but might be very slightly stoned on crap hash. Oasis beat some other bands who have already appeared in other categories (it all begins to blur). The crowd begins to boo. It overwhelms Mark Watson. Strange, I think, that a band who kept the paper afloat whilst the (superior) likes of Melody Maker and Select magazine folded are now being booed by the crowd. The acceptance speech is amusing, pairing up Russell Brand and Gallagher, N for the first time since the former was rude on an old man’s phone.
It’s never going to end.
The child who partners Steve Coogan on Saxondale comes onstage with Steve Lamcq and they give the Outstanding Contribution award to Elbow, which seems startlingly pre-emptive. Are they writing them off the minute they hit their peak? That’s the NME all over, is that.
Best TV Show? Eh? This is a music paper!
Here’s Charlie Brooker, aka Preacherman, offering out a sitcom award at a music award show – which seems idiosyncratic to say the least. But then, when you think about it, indie kids generally spend their days sitting around at home recording sitcoms. I know I did.
Brooker says the word ‘c*nt’ and smashes the status quo. Boosh win.
We’re nearly there. Don’t fall asleep, because… …it’s time for the Worst Cover Version of All Time (see video link at the top of the age). Florence and the Who? work in unison with humourless Scotch combo Glasvegas to trample Elvis’s decomposing spine with a one chord rendering of Suspicious Minds. What results is so laughably awful, it looks like a sexual assault blooper. The Glasvegas singer begins to grope Florence with his face and soon, to distract from the musical mess they’ve made, they are hitting each other and running offstage.
We limp on to Best International Act, if anyone cares, and Killers win. Last Shadow Puppets win Best Video. The audience are now so drunk they don’t understand what’s happening and are talking amongst themselves. ‘Why are Girls Aloud here?’ they appear to be asking, quite reasonably.
Now for the promised big moment – Graham and Damon Blur reform to do a song together. With the best will in the world – it sounds a bloody mess. Albarn’s use of an out-of-tune foghorn-organ was possibly a mistake, as the one note he issues throughout three quarters of the song drowns Coxon’s guitar in a farty wash. A missed opportunity, perhaps.
Solo Artist – Pete Doherty. A token award, one feels, seeing as the man hasn’t released any solo material yet. Bridge-building from the kid from Saxondale, who clearly realises Petie D makes covers and sells papers.
At least we end on something of a high, with The Cure getting some late recognition. They play the oldies after receiving an award from Tim Burton and the audience, all far too good-looking and well-dressed to be what used to be the indie I knew, dance along.
Except, you can’t actually dance to indie. Its structure simply doesn’t allow it. They simply do that thing where you jiggle from side to side, pulling a poseur face and faking the sensation of being taken over by music. The credits roll as we watch people trying to dance to indie, safe in the knowledge that indie is best listened to on a walkman, uncelebrated at industry bashes, away from fashion victims and sponsored awards ceremonies. I’m not in love with the modern world.
It’s easy to mock Bono. Everybody’s at it. Whether it’s his hat’s journey by jet engine, his pious preaching at Labour party functions, his forcing African kids to sing With Or Without you in a PR piece to promote his band or just outright laughter at the lyrics to his latest single, Get On Your Boots – only the creepiest U2 obsessive could really object.
This very defensive interview piece was fully aware of the public profile of the band’s frontman and seemed, from the start, to be an attempt to redress the balance. A good angle to come from, but royally ballsed up by Bono himself in protracted, oblique soundbites that did little to dispel how much of an oaf the man is.
Geldof didn’t help. He opened proceedings by insisting that ‘they’re not wankers’ – which, coming from a wanker as monumentally self-pleasuring as Bob, didn’t really help the cause. Later, when talking about how prolific U2 are, he said that those outside the industry might not realise that ‘great bands have to work at it’ which carried the implication that he’d ever been in a great band. ‘I Don’t Like Mondays’ was alright, but don’t overdo it, Bob.
After an amusing clip of the fledgling band mucking about on Irish telly in the late 70s or early 80s, a parade of talking heads talked the band up, one of them asserting that ‘every band wants to be U2’. This statement is incorrect.
I’ve no problem with U2 the band – I like bits of Achtung Baby, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. But when Bono ever appears outside of his day job it’s impossible not to wince at the man’s nerve. One man’s arrogance is another man’s genius, but for me his pomp and self-belief reek of smugness. He’s unbearable when he starts talking and by the time he’s finished you’re surprised nobody’s ever set fire to him.
He was sitting next to Adam Clayton in his set of interviews, whilst Larry and The Edge were cross-examined separately. It’s easy to imagine that Adam’s the only one who can actually bear the frontman, what with him having had the mental strength to cope with being around Naomi Campbell. The man must be coated with asbestos when it comes to fiery egos. Where Bono dealt in pseudo-enigmatic rhetoric when answering questions, Clayton was gnomic and as bland as skimmed milk.
Bono’s interviewee style was to patronise Laverne whenever she asked a question. ‘You’re right to ask that’, he assured her. ‘Geez, this girl is good’ he proclaimed, as though she landed the job based on blackmail. He was remarkably restrained but still indulged himself in that special line of bollocks he specialises in – the self-aggrandizing statement disguised as humility. One choice anecdote concerned a non-fan of the band who happened to attend a gig saying that the hairs stood up on the back of his neck when they played. Bono, keen to ground himself whilst simultaneously and paradoxically raising himself to Christ level, replied: ‘you know what? That happens to us too’. Because he’s merely a prophet, see? And the music is the message. Man.
Later on, he said they continue doing what they’re doing because their job is to ‘derail the rock n’ roll mythology’ – referring to his belief that U2 are put on this planet to prove great artists don’t have to kill themselves and leave a romantic myth to truly be great. Considering the likes of Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Johnny Cash, Christ – even Paul McCartney have already sorted that one out, the statement falls redundant to the stadium floor.
To finish, Geldof explained to us thickies that people are wrong to think of Bono as cliched in his political dabblings. He said ‘expressions only become cliches because you have to repeat them again and again’. He’s right – but only if the expressions are valid in the first place. If they’re trite and simplistic then they’re cliches from the start. Real insight only needs mentioning once, and can be revealed at any time – even when a new release isn’t scheduled for months.
It’s a good cause, it uses fitting imagery and the theme is well executed. Just please, please, PLEASE take the song away from the mix because it’s driving me insane.
I watch The Wright Stuff every morning, for my sins, and the Great Ormond Street advert always manages to catch me off guard, despite the fact it’s on during every ad break, twice. And, for reasons only they could explain, the tune they employ is Athlete’s ‘Wires’ – which is one of those songs with one of those melodies that sounds pleasant enough the first time, but then, like any similar slice of poison by Coldplay or Snow Patrol, it burrows its way into your consciousness and installs itself, virus-like within your lobes and before you know it, it’s playing in your mind as you wash the dishes. It’s blaring behind your eyes as you try to take a dump. It’s following you to the chip shop. It’s round your Nan’s house. It’s IN YOUR BED.
And the worst of it is, it’s there for life. Even if you only hear that first minor chord bashed accidentally on a detuned piano, your memory crank will turn and fire a synapse playing the whole, turgid symphony back, strings and all in the back of your brain as you claw at your own face, bleeding from nostrils and tear ducts as you whimper along to the tune, helpless and dribbling.
The last thing I need is a respectable charity triggering this kind of psychological damage, so please, Great Ormond Street, for the love of God, STOP!
Last night’s Brits then, presented by James ‘why?’ Corden, the bloke off Catherine Tate and, for some reason, Kylie Minogue – when she wasn’t stage-right, getting changed into another unremarkable frock.
I watched it whilst taking notes, drinking tea and twittering. The twittering was more fun than the show – and when talking in less than 140 characters to strangers on a computer is more entertaining than a massive showbiz event, you know you’ve got problems.
Here then, are my notes, twitterings and musings, in REAL TIME!
The night opens with a Johnny Vegas voiceover which, from hereon in, kicks in every time a new award’s being dished out, prompting the audience to ponder how much they paid him to rattle off a few intros. Then – BANG! – we’re straight into a live performance from… some old men.
It’s U2, and Bono really ain’t getting any younger or any more original – demonstrated by the fact their new single sounds exactly like six other U2 singles. Adam Clayton is increasingly starting to look like Homer Simpson’s dad and the Edge still needs to lose the hat. To make things worse, the huge video screen behind him displays Bono’s lyrics as the frail frontman postures like a man half his age in front of them, showcasing his lack of writing talent in bold, illuminated words as he jiggles like a berk in front of them. Their big moment – and every Brit performance needs one, even though they usually fall further flat than a glass of cola left out overnight – is Bono taking off his spectacles to reveal an ageing idiot in eyeliner.
Greetings from our hosts! The three of them shuffle on with some dancers and they do the routine for Kylie’s 2001 single, Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. Corden is a fat man, but he done did dancing!
The use of such an old Kylie hit can be seen as either the provision an eight year vintage or an irrelevance from ages ago – you can make your own mind up on that.
The finishing posture leaves Kylie cradling the boys’ groins, in the first of many misguided sauce-based gags that unearth nowt but tumbleweed from the audience both at home and in the auditorium. Corden even feels the need to apologise for his first joke as he absorbs the silence that follows his every utterance.
Simon Pegg arrives, on his own (I thought they presented in pairs?) to announce Best Female and, in the event, Duffy beats Adele, MIA, Beth (who?) Rowley and that mardy-arse Estelle. You can feel the oxigen in the nation’s atmosphere lessen as the audience yawns collectively.
Next up, Best International Female goes to Katie Perry – a fact I enjoy because my other half hates her, causing me much amusement. She won a Brit and she liked it! She’s here even though she’s ill, she says. In fact, all she does is complain that she’s sick when she takes the podium, implying that she only turned up because her record company made her. That’s gratitude.
And then… Girls Aloud! Can it get any more miserable?
Yes!
The ladies essentially do a striptease to the song they did that sounds like the sort of tune ABBA might shit out whilst paralytic. Their clothes removal is sexy! (If you read Nuts and get turned on by the thought of a moronic, untalented dance troupe fronted by a Geordie automaton).
Suddenly The Brits goes weird. We’re, inexplicably backstage with Fearne Cotton who’s standing beside a caravan. I check my remote control, but no, I’m not jammed on ITV2 by mistake. What the hell’s going on?
Fearne asks us to vote for something or other and, breaking up the party vibe, reads out the Ts and Cs for the phone vote at length, before the ads come on. It’s like being accosted by a drunk accountant at the worst party in the world, dragged outside and then being subjected to her rattling off her month end breakdown. Even any slight semblance of a reckless, party atmosphere is dropped to the shits.
After the break, it’s back to the front desk, and I become confused by who’s presenting what, why and how? Horne and Corden are now doing the work, looking like ITV’s version of Shirl and ‘Evver off ‘stenders. The trio of Horne, Corden and Minogue keeps merging, resynthesising and redistributing. That fact alongside Fearne’s droned phone numbers leaves me dribbling with shellshock.
And then – Oh God. Here’s Alex bloody James to present Best British Breakthrough from a list including Adele, Scouting for Girls, Duffy, Ting Tings and The Last Shadow Puppets – and Duffy wins again, which feels, frankly, like a direct insult.
Coldplay then take the stage, dressed like disco revolutionaries in pink, lime and purple Spanish civil war outfits – which would be fine if they made new-sounding, vital pop like, say, MGMT or Empire of the Sun – but they don’t. They make watery, bland, executive bum. They’re about as revolutionary as Norman Tebbit. Their presence makes the list of appearances, winners and performers sound like it was discovered, discarded, scrawled on a soggy piece of cardboard and found in the middle of the road.
Back to the caravan! With Jamie Cullum and Jamie Oliver, both looking like they’re having a strand-off at the stupid haircut festival. To distract us from their wacky barnets, we hear more phone votes from Fearne. Halfway in to the two hours and literally nothing of any note has happened. Bring back Brandon Block! All is forgiven!
Here’s Natalie Imbruglia, who must have died since her Torn single came out in the nineties, as she staggers on looking like a reanimated corpse dug up from the grounds of a derelict botox farm. She’s here to announce British Male Solo Artist from a pick of James Morrison, Paul Weller, Ian Brown, Will Young and The Streets. Weller wins, and his acceptance speech is a video of Adele giggling.
We’re past halfway – and it’s time for a Duffy performance, or time for a kitchen break and tea-making, as I bypass the vapid motown-theft she passes off as music. As I return with an enormous cup of the brown stuff, Corden bellows a query:
ARE WE HAVING FUN PEOPLE?
More tumbleweed.
So – who will win Best International Album? Fleet Foxes, The Killers, MGMT, Kings of Leon or someone else I can’t remember?
Kings of Leon, in the event, and they take the stage resembling what you might imagine the Managing Directors of Beebo to look like. ‘If it weren’t for England we wouldn’t exist’, the singer says, forgetting he’s at the Brits. One in the eye for Duffy! Good lads.
Take That mime for a bit, handily wasting some time. The Robbie reunion thankfully remains an unfulfilled rumour and Nick Frost ambles on to present best live act. Nick Frost on his own. Without Simon Pegg. Who also presented on his own. Are we running low on guests?
Beating The Verve, Coldplay, Scouting For Girls and Elbow, Iron Maiden win this. A demonstration of people-power and only the hardest heart could begrudge them. Nicko McBrain still looks exactly like he did in the 80s. And they even wheel out Eddie, which probably confuses anyone under the age of 28.
Here comes David Hasslehoff to present something (I think Best British Band). Elbow beat Radiohead, Girls Aloud, Take That and Coldplay. Elbow – the band everyone’s too lazy to diss. I haven’t got anything against them, they just feel like a slow episode of Coronation Street set to 90s indie.
Then Kings of Leon play their big single with an ill-advised bass breakdown that makes the song sound like it’s going to shrivel up and die before Horne reappears to make his second Craig David joke of the night. We’re then on to the Critics Choice award which goes to indie types Florence and the Machine.
Florence and the Who?
Clear off!
Gok Wan wanders on smiling like a man possessed, waving and screeching ‘HIYA!’ like an oriental Wavey Davey. He presents the International Male gong which goes to Kanye West who, inevitably couldn’t make it to the evening and is filmed standing in a utility room in an anonymous building, looking sheepish.
And now for the real lowpoint. A modern mash-up of two of the year’s worst singles – Estelle and Ting Tings working to combine their awful songs in what is truly the most godawful dirge I’ve heard in years. The less about that, the better.
The end is in sight! It’s time for the best British Single and Alan Carr presents it to Girls Aloud for that ABBA-stealing pile of shit that accompanied their striptease earlier. ‘About time!’ screams the tall blonde one. ‘I wet meself!’ she continues, before being dragged off. And that’s as close as we get to controversy all night.
Tom Jones, looking like an overweight Rolf Harris, presents Best British Album and ruins the fact it’s bound to be Duffy, what with her also being from Wales and all. She gets her trio of meaningless statues and another Brit Awards gathers its crutches for the weary trudge to 2010. But first, the Pet Shop Boys Achievement award.
Hard to begrudge them their gong, but their stage show was such an unrelenting slaughter of flashing lights and dancing personnel, I had to read Twitter to work out what was going on. When Lady Gaga appeared to sing one line of a song dressed like a willow-patterned teapot, I thought I was hallucinating – compounded by the ostrich feathers on Brandon Flowers shoulders which made him look like a Flash Gordon birdman.
Roll credits!
Writing down every detail seemed like a good idea at the time. I hope reliving the experience with me hasn’t been too damaging for you – for me, at least, it was therapeutic.
Apparently this has been running for weeks – another talent search exploitfest looking for this year’s Eurovision entry, but I barely knew anything about it. I’d seen adverts featuring the atrocity that is Norton towering over us on a huge plasma screen but I assumed it was just another trailer for his barrel-scraping innuendo fuckparty. I was wrong.
It turns out that smug horseface Lloyd Webber, having run out of musicals to promote with stunt-casting, has turned his hand to Eurovision – penning a potential winner and launching a nationwide search for someone unjaded enough to still think that talent shows might actually bring them a career instead of making them a figure for destruction by the popular press.
Every Saturday, nestled against the spangled ITV has-beens on ice, the BBC have been ‘creating stars’ and ‘discovering talent’ whilst providing the serial musical-rapist as much free publicity for his particular brand of cereal-advert-jingle stage nonsense as he can swallow.
Accompanied by the increasingly desperate Lulu and judge-of-such-questionable-pedigree-that-he-makes-Amanda-Holden-seem-over-qualified, Duncan James, they’ve been slowly picking off the dreams of desperate children with the effectiveness of a sniper perched atop a university tower.
Saturday gone was the live final in which the three identikit panto cast-offs (actually four, as the show featured a set of twins) were whittled down to one nondescript winner and Lloyd Webber unveiled his masterpiece of a song, written especially to be an all conquering Eurovision classic. Norton buzzed with pretend excitement, plastering on an expression of delight that even the hardiest of twee pop fans couldn’t mistake as being botox induced – Christ, he looks terrible these days.
After much sub-X-Factor posturing and editing techniques stolen wholesale from that terrible Peter Kay pastiche thing that even less people watched, we were forced to endure not one version of Lloyd Webber’s single but three – three – as each Rorschached performing arts failure murdered their way through it, all preceding to proclaim it a masterpiece that spoke directly to them.
Even within the frame of Eurovision this is a terrible song – fuck it, even within the frame of Lloyd-Webbers-music-being-so-fucking-terrible-that-if-all-theatres-carrying-his-work-were-firebombed-simultaneously-we-would-lose-nothing-from-our-culture it is still the worst thing he has ever written. And we had to sit through it three times, three fucking times as the horse-kicked nostrils of that musical theatre shitheel sat lording over us with the arrogant self pomposity to assume the gifting of the population his talent…
What is truly remarkable is that the inclusion of Lloyd Webber makes Eurovision even more intolerable. Before it was a shameful and embarrassing stain on a culture that has given the world Bucks Fizz, now it is a mutant afterbirth of disgrace as the man responsible for some of the greatest musical crimes of all time drags it further and further down until the only option is to nuke the site from space and hope we wipe every trace of it from the Earth.
Your country needs you? To do what, exactly? Continue the trend for fuck-awful music? To keep employing a self-hating host who wallows in outdated stereotypes and childish cock obsessions? To further plump the ego of one of the most hateful and untalented songwriters in history? Or to pad out the schedules of a broadcaster who looks increasingly like a shoeless hobo dancing for pennies?
A show’s theme tune often defines it. Eastenders wouldn’t be what it is without that striking piece of synth magic, latterly recorded as ‘Anyone Can Fall In Love’ by Anita Dobson, because it scanned. Similarly, Coronation Street relies on the moaning horns it opens with, instilling warmth in the pensioners and students who watch it. Emmerdale probably also has a theme tune, but I can’t be sure as I never watch it. Because it’s rubbish.
Sitcoms also have had some crackers. I’m thinking of Dexy’s singing ‘Because of You’ at the start of the generally awful Brush Strokes, or the wailing jazz mess that sees Bottom in.
Then you’ve got drama – Minder with Dennis Waterman singing the feem toon, B-B-Bread, that intensely unfunny bittersweet scouse comedy-soap, with the lyrics everybody inexplicably remembers.
In my startlingly attractive eyes, the best ever theme tune featured on Dear John, the barely remembered sitcom in which a divorcee struggled to find love among a cast of stereotypes.
What about you? Does the rousing, clattering orchestra of Black Beauty get you going? Maybe it’s the ominous computer purr of the Crimewatch jingle that sets you off? Or you might be the type who gets off on the hard-rocking music that accompanies the snooker…
Watch With Mothers 
