TV Cream

Podcasts

TV Cream’s Music Scene

TV Cream’s first stab at a podcast is now available. And you can listen to it here…

[podcast]http://tv.cream.org/spodcast/musicscene.mp3[/podcast].

Or download from here. It’s 75MB and, once saved to your own computer, will sit snugly in any media-playing device and run for about 54 minutes.

54 minutes of what, you may be wondering, before venturing to cock an ear, or even two.

Well, it’s a journey into stereophonic sound of all forms. Over 100 pieces of music turn up, some in unusual contexts, some in surprising hybrids, some written and performed by our own hand, some with annoying talking and shouting over the top.

But it’s not merely a glorified playlist of TV Cream favourites.

For starters, there’s a very special guest, who performs live in the studio. There are a few of what we’re calling theme sandwiches, delectable helpings of aural sustenance served in unlikely and, as it turns out, controversial taste sensations. There’s also a bit where two themes go head-to-head in what we’re not calling theme wars, the war of the themes.

The bulk of the podcast, however, is taken up with four exciting features. Here are some liner notes for anyone interested in lines:

Scene-setters

This is a complicated item that listeners may find hard to understand, so let’s see if it can be made simpler. There have been examples of music used on TV programmes that act not merely to compound title sequences with clusters of melodic and harmonic notation but contextualise and to an extent hypertextualise the subsequent transmission to a degree that prepares the viewer in both a moral and mental capacity for what they are about to ingest and thereby heightens those physiological sensations nurtured by latent synaptic pulses charged by the notion of cause and effect. These pieces of music are called scene-setters in that they cultivate and orientate our expectations around a particular manifestation of emotion thereby setting us up for an eventuality or scene that is shortly indeed almost immediately to unfold.

It’s also got loads of good TV themes in.

A Stack of Macca

The 10 best songs by Paul McCartney.

You’ve Made Your Musical Bed, Now You’ve Got To Lie In It

A guide to those ubiquitous tunes and samples that crop up as incidental music on innumerable documentaries and reality shows.

Riddle-me-Ron Grainer

Thrill to the sound of one man presenting another man with some Facts Amazing about the bloke who did the theme to Dr Who and challenging him to say whether they are true or false.

And that’s it. You can tell us what you think about the whole roustabout by emailing scene@tvcreamtest.co.uk.

11 Comments

11 Comments

  1. Chris O

    November 1, 2008 at 1:27 pm

    …and very good it is too. Well done to all concerned!

  2. Andy Elms

    November 1, 2008 at 4:04 pm

    The “Sound of Science” seuqence is superb – very much the sort of thing Adam Buxton would do for “Time Trumpet”. Especially the “BBC Trumpet”

    Any chance of providing visuals to match for the TV Cream youtube channel? Please?

  3. Chris Orton

    November 3, 2008 at 1:32 pm

    Superb stuff. I want more! Do another one now!

    Loved the bit when the Please Sir theme tune merged with the Blankety Blank one! How did I never spot this obvious link before you pointed it out?

    The analytical study of the Tomorrow’s World themes was quite marvellous too.

  4. Jason Carter

    November 3, 2008 at 9:40 pm

    Congratulations and thank you for a brilliant podcast. I was going to wonder why it wasn’t available, but the liberal use of licensed music – flying in the face of the cease-and-desist theme tune farrago – rather answers that.

    However, I must raise an issue with Scene-setters. Where was Jim’ll Fix It? Yes, Chain Letters gives you the rules of the game in rhyme, but it’s nothing compared to the ‘Your letter was only the start of it’ tension builder that kickstarts the wish-fulfillment epic. It even goes on to suggest potential fix its that people might want to request with their one letter (and note how it cunningly nudges you towards restraint and just the one letter, thus saving the back of the BBC TV Centre postie and making life easier for the production team.)

    If this were Points Of View, Barry Took would say something pithy now, apologise for the oversight, and you’d play out with it.

    (And I would have used the email address but I didn’t quite grab it…)

  5. Chris Hughes

    November 4, 2008 at 10:03 am

    I’m in agreement with Jason, although to be pedantic, “your letter was only the start of it” was actually the first line of the closing theme (ah, shows with different opening and closing themes, there’s another can of worms).

    The opening theme was the pure “If you wanna do a dance with Bucks Fizz”-style list of previous suggestions.

    Obviously, the genius of Jim’ll Fix It was that inevitably someone would write in asking to “fix it for me” to sing the closing theme, and did.

  6. ExtremelyCreamy

    November 4, 2008 at 2:34 pm

    I’m sure Chris Evans (and his mate Danny) will be interested to see that you nicked his Please Sir, Blankety Blank sound the same don’t they bit. Did Frankensteins Monster really have a name?

  7. Jack Kibble-White

    November 5, 2008 at 10:35 am

    I can’t believe no one has yet mentioned the fabulous jingles – consummate work, and really liftst the whole thing.

  8. David McNay

    November 5, 2008 at 11:38 pm

    Lovely stuff. Do another one immediately!

  9. TV Cream

    November 7, 2008 at 4:50 pm

    Cheers for all the comments folks.

  10. ExtremelyCreamy

    November 7, 2008 at 8:13 pm

    Theme sandwich / music buffet……………Banana Splits Theme / Buffalo Soldier; Did Bob Marley rip “The Splits” off? I think we should know for sure.

  11. RossMc

    November 12, 2008 at 2:28 pm

    Great stuff – look forward to the next one.

Leave a Reply

Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

To Top