Gilmore Girls (plus assorted theme tunes)

I'm guessing that you have never seen Gilmore Girls, if you're a UK reader anyway. From what I understand, they put it out on the Hallmark channel, which I didn't even know existed, at lunchtime, which is surely when any sane person is watching Neighbours (or Home and Away, depends what time you have lunch). I would never have heard of it myself if I hadn't had it recommended to me, and the recommendation came from someone I barely knew, online, so I was very suspicious of it. And at first my suspicions appeared to be confirmed. Check out the opening credits, with travesty of a song by the once divine, here irredeemably slushy Carole King:



I know. You want to vomit now, don't you? Quite aside from anything, it reminds me of the Golden Girls opening credits, and nothing should, really, nothing should:



I'll be singing that for days now. Incidentally, I got confused, because I thought that song was in the opening credits for Blossom, but when I YouTubed it it turned out that it was the yet more irritating:



Sorry. I didn't mean to ruin your day.

Anyway, in this case my first impressions were utterly wrong, because Gilmore Girls is brilliant. You'd never guess it. I suspect it has ambitions to be a less edgy Northern Exposure, mixed with Mystic Pizza, with a single parenting twist, and all of the ingredients point to horror on a massive scale: it's set in ultra-quirky small town America, it's about a single woman in her early thirties and her teenage daughter, it's a crossover comedy drama with elements of soap, and it is definitely "heart-warming". YUK. However, and it's a *huge* however, it is brilliantly scripted. Very very fast, very funny, very clever, full of both popular and high culture allusions, and mostly delivered by the rather beautiful and extremely likable Lauren Graham, who I spend a considerable amount of trying to figure out how to become. Additionally to this, the two female leads spend a large proportion of the programme reading high quality literature and eating vast quantities of delicious but fattening food, which is roundly to be encouraged. When was the last time you saw beautiful women permitted to eat on TV? (Nigella excluding.) As for reading, that's unheard of. Plus, as an extra bonus, from season two you can enjoy the presence of a young Milo Ventimiglia, aka Peter Petrelli from Heroes, as a taciturn teen rebel who also reads a lot. Hours of fun to be had figuring out if he's had a nose job, deciding which era hair suits him best, and waiting to see if he will go invisible, fly, or burst into flames.

You will have to take it all with a ladleful of syrup, don't say I didn't warn you. But at least if you get the DVD you can flick past the opening credits.

Oh sorry, did you want me to leave you with a decent theme tune, just to clear the palate? OK then. Never say I'm indifferent to your needs.

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.