Tom Dunne's Music & Me: Ted Lasso joins Onedin Line on my list of classic TV tunes
The Sopranos, The Onedin Line and Ted Lasso feature in Tom Dunne's all-time favourite TV tunes.
As a child, special in many ways, my favourite TV shows were Batman, Mission Impossible, Star Trek and Bewitched. The arrival of each on our little screen would be heralded by their equally brilliant theme tunes. Each one was a call to action: “Sit down now!” they said. To my parents delight this left me instantly becalmed.
But in the 1970s something changed. A program called Van der Valk arrived. It was a crime drama, not that that mattered, but its theme tune was a piece called Eye Level. My reaction to it was completely different. I was no longer becalmed, I was mesmerised, led away, Pied Piper like, every time it played.
Its world of Dutch drugs deals, killers and ‘ladies of the night’ (my da’s phrase) went over my head, out the door and down the street... but the music, wow! When it played the world around me seemed to disappear, my parent’s voices, my siblings rows, everything.
It was soon joined by Tales of the Unexpected and then a Sunday night seafaring drama called The Onedin Line. Again I had no idea what was happening but its theme was the most uplifting, inspiring, passionate thing I’d ever heard. It left me, every Monday morning, ready to take on a Double Irish class like it had never been taken on before.
This time capsule quality of TV themes came back to me this week as I watched Ted Lasso on Apple TV. Like many people I have slowly fallen in love with this show, but this week, as Ted settled into his seat in the stand and the theme tune started I felt that familiar warm glow again. The world melted away, it was just me, Ted and the inevitable couch.
This ability of TV theme tunes to both take you out of this world and back to another is uncanny and the couch you are on when it happens is part of the deal. On this couch, a Covid 19 panic buy, I realised that like Songs of Love before it, the Ted Lasso Theme ‘had me'. From now on it would take me, at will, from the future to this time and place, forever.
A neat trick for a band I wasn’t fond of. I knew the theme to be the work of Marcus Mumford and Tom Howe. And yes, he is that Marcus Mumford of Mumford and Sons. This was hard for me. I have long since declared their music to be as edgy as a child’s soother, as dangerous as a gummy dog, and yet here I was, seduced!
It joins a rich pantheon of song in my life. As a wide eyed teen the theme to The World at War had held me in its palm. As a more morose teen M.A.S.H was my go-to show . As a ‘musically aware teen’ the use of Elvis Costello’s Turning the Town Red in Scully was all I needed to know.
By the time Hill Street Blues ‘took me’ I had progressed to a very grotty couch in rented accommodation. Life was more chaotic then, but not when the Hill Street Blues music started. Then it was once again a world of calm, inner thought and couches.
This era, coincided with some of the best TV themes of all time. TV theme tunes were growing up at this point. Out went the heady euphoria of Kojak, Magnum P.I. and The Rockford Files and in came the sultry malevolence of The Sopranos, The Wire and Peaky Blinders.
The emphasis shifted from stirring pieces of music to the use of impeccably well-chosen songs from bands like Alabama Three and Nick Cave. Such song choices enabled shows like True Detective to immediately establish a dark, threatening other worldly atmosphere. You knew what you were getting from the opening bars.
Instrumentals hadn’t gone away though. The music in Game of Thrones and The Queens Gambit was integral. Downton Abbey’s too is superb and clever. It moves forward with purpose and confidence while soundtracking scenes from a world – the British gentry in the early 20th century - that can only be doomed. It’s very forward motion only seeming to hasten that world’s demise.
So now the Ted Lasso theme has me as Eye Level did all those years ago. I will never warm to this couch but as that theme kicks in each week and that warm familiar glow starts again, well, as Metallica might say, Nothing Else Matters.
