Ronnie Hazlehurst RIP, and other thoughts on theme tunes

While most of my friends have been mourning the loss of Ned Sherrin, the humour broadcaster who I only know about in theory rather than practice because I find Radio 4 a bit intimidating, I have been busy saying goodbye to Ronnie Hazlehurst, TV theme tune composer extraordinaire. If you watched TV in the seventies and eighties (and all the repeats in the nineties and noughties) you will be familiar with his work on Yes Minister, The Two Ronnies, Are You Being Served (my own particular favourite - going up!), Last of the Summer Wine etc. Aside from being a genius - and if that list doesn't convince you, probably you should be listening to Radio 4 with the other highbrow people - he was also geniusly named, evoking, quite correctly, a cross between Ronnie Barker (comic actor of note) and Lee Hazlewood (the musical brains behind Nancy Sinatra's boots.) In fact he had the second best name in the history of TV theme tune composition, after WG Snuffy Walden (The West Wing, My So-Called Life, Thirtysomething etc.) (WG Snuffy Walden lags far behind in the history of actual names, where my personal favourite is the hard-to-beat American financier colleague of a friend of mine, Randy Bumgardner. More proof, as if it were needed, that Americans should not be allowed to name their own children.)

Ronnie Hazlehurst's skill was in writing TV themes that matched the content of their respective programmes to perfection. In one of his obituaries I read that his theme for Some Mothers Do Have Em contained the title of the programme played in Morse code on the piccolo. As it happens, just the day before he died, I was thinking about theme tune suitability, on the bus, when the theme for the Bond movie 'The Living Daylights', performed by A-ha, came onto my iPod. A-ha were my first ever favourite band, not because I liked them particularly, but because my cousin liked them and I had to do everything that my cousin did. There were three members of A-ha, so my cousin, my sister and I could have one each. We picked in order of age which is obviously the same as importance, so my cousin chose first, picking Mags, controversially, the curly-haired one who looked a bit like Craig McLachlan, which left my sister very happily with chiselled-cheekboned ice god Morten Haarket, and me slightly less happily with Pal, also known (to us at least) as weasel-features. As it happened, A-ha do have some great songs - I draw your attention to 'Take On Me' - so they weren't too bad a favourite band to have imposed upon you. 'The Living Daylights', however, is not one of those great songs. It's weak and slightly nonsensical, unless you think a chorus that goes 'Oh, oh, oh, oh, the living daylights' makes sense. Personally I don't think they knew what living daylights are, and actually neither do I. Once they've been scared out of you, what do they look like and where do they go? Anyway, you could call 'The Living Daylights' a poorly-chosen Bond theme, but actually the film is also weak and slightly nonsensical (cf Maryam D'Abo sledging down a mountain using a cello as a steering pole.) So it is a perfect match of film and theme, just as perfect as the glorious, iconic 'Goldfinger' with its glorious, iconic Shirley Bassey opening song, or the silly, sexist 'The Man with the Golden Gun' with its silly, sexist Lulu-voiced lyrics ("He's got a powerful weapon!" etc). Downbeat but memorable 'Casino Royale' did however bugger up by going for the downbeat but entirely unmemorable 'You Know My Name' by someone whose name, with beautiful irony, I don't know.

I have digressed, but nevertheless, farewell then, Ronnie Hazlehurst. Your work will live on, and I will smile, and possibly sing along, each time I hear it.