Remixing the news

I had the house to myself last Friday night. Like all normal men, I went wild and spent the evening listening to remixes and different versions of the BBC News 24 music on Youtube.

That isn’t normal? Ah. Well, maybe not for you, but that beep beep beep rhythmic music, slowly building to its higher-pitched ten second crescendo is the reason I’m in front of the TV at two minutes to ten every night, in the hope of catching it in all its stirring glory. I’m reasonably distraught if they only get time for the last twenty seconds, or they commit the ultimate sin and fade it, right before Huw Edwards stares intently at you for a few seconds, whilst sporting another natty tie and that slightly sinister sneer.

Imagine my shock when I tuned in the other night... and they’d changed it. I don’t remember receiving a letter asking for my permission. The very least they could have done was give me a bit of warning, so I had time to prepare myself. Suddenly, it’s got synth-string bits going on. It’s going to take me a fair while to recover, but at least I’ve been able to find a high quality MP3 of it to use as my ringtone.

There are a surprising number of variants of the music that prepares us for deaths, financial meltdowns, smowmaggedon reports, and all the other depressing stuff that kicks off the news on the BBC. Bar the Olympics, it’s very rare that anything cheery pops up at the front of the bulletins, so a bit of serious, dynamic music is only appropriate.

Apart from all the home-remixed versions out there (and lest we forget, Bill Bailey included his own interpretation in his live shows), there are numerous variants for local, and worldwide, versions of all things news/depressing supplied by the Beeb.

David Lowe is the man who came up with original (and subsequent remixes and variants), way back in 1999. Yes, this music has preceded the news since the last century, and is probably older than a lot of your kids. Lowe is the TV-themes go-to-guy, having also sound-tracked the likes of The One Show, Countryfile, Panorama, Cash In The Attic, Wildlife On One and Grand Designs. I’m hoping he’ll keep on getting asked to tweak his masterpiece of news precedence too. Whilst the Doctor Who theme occasionally gets a regeneration to accompany its character, the news is an ever changing beast, but one we can never grow out of (although fancying the lead and co-stars is optional).

Youtube has a clip of the Holy Grail of the recently deposed version of the intro – a full ninety second countdown. If you’re a news-theme nerd, it’s one and half minutes of bleepy brilliance. If you’re not, then, much like Mrs G, you’d have looked equal parts puzzled and perplexed when I got inexplicably agitated by the recent change. Or you might have said “Has it changed?”

MIGHT have changed?! What’s wrong with you! They just painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

This article first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column in the North West Evening Mail on Friday the 28th March 2013. You can view and comment on it on their website here.

The NWEM retitled it 'Hard to adjust to remixed news', which seems fair enough to me. They also removed the 9 words in brackets about fancying lead and co stars. Which seems... odd.

In case you were thinking that my love of the news theme is wildly exaggerated in this article, allow me to illustrate my devotion with the following...

First up, we have the aforementioned pinnacle of News Nerdery - the full 90 seconds of the theme that we now know as 'the previous one'... (sound of gentle sobbing being stifled.)

And now, an interesting super-wide stereo split of the new version, allowing you to hear all the orchestral stuff going on in pant-moistening clarity. Mmmmm.....

And, as a special treat, a superb mash-up by DJ Nite - It's time to "Turn On The News". Woo! Yeah!

And if you want the pure, uncut stuff, head on over to David Lowe's website and see the incredible amount of stuff this chap has been up to... plus the full, HQ version of the new theme. Yum.

Blimey, is that the time? It's nearly 10'o'clock....

(Listening to BBC News themes, of course. Duh.)

Making an exhibition of yourself

Now and again, it’s good to reaffirm that you’re a (relatively) normal human being. One excellent way of doing this is to go to a business exhibition. Despite what you might have surmised from reading my previous columns, I am employable, and even capable of acting like a regular person most of the time, even joining in the Monday morning conversation about the weather over the weekend, and why (insert name of footyballs manager here) should be fired immediately. The mug! True, there are times, often involving a caffeine deficiency, where it is like having the distilled essence of ten moody teenagers in the room, but I try and get that out of the way when people I genuinely like aren’t around to see it. As part of my ongoing experiment with what others call ‘working’, my ‘job’ involves me occasionally needing to go and see what some of my colleagues get up to outside the office, and what our competitors do to try and make sure that they do whatever my colleagues do better than ...

"It's all gone quiet..." said Roobarb

If, like me, you grew up (and I’m aware of the irony in that) in the ‘70s, February was a tough month, with the sad news that Richard Briers and Bob Godfrey had died. Briers had a distinguished acting career and is, quite rightly, fondly remembered most for his character in ‘The Good Life’. Amongst his many roles, both serious and comedic, he also lent his voice to a startling bit of animation that burst it’s wobbly way on to our wooden-box-surrounded screens in 1974. The 1970s seemed to be largely hued in varying shades of beige, with hints of mustard yellow and burnt orange, and colour TV was a relatively new experience still, so the animated adventures of a daft dog and caustic cat who were the shades of dayglo green and pink normally reserved for highlighter pens, must have been a bit of a shock to the eyes at the time. It caused mine to open very wide indeed. Roobarb was written by Grange Calveley, and brought vividly into life by Godfrey, whose strange, shaky-looking sty...

Suffering from natural obsolescence

You know you’re getting old when it dawns on you that you’re outliving technological breakthroughs. You know the sort of thing – something revolutionary, that heralds a seismic shift it the way the modern world operates. Clever, time-saving, breathtaking and life-changing (and featuring a circuit board). It’s the future, baby! Until it isn’t any more. I got to pondering this when we laughed heartily in the office about someone asking if our camcorder used “tape”. Tape? Get with the times, Daddy-o! If it ain’t digital then for-get-it! I then attempted to explain to an impossibly young colleague that video tape in a camcorder was indeed once a “thing”, requiring the carrying of something the size of a briefcase around on your shoulder, containing batteries normally reserved for a bus, and a start-up time from pressing ‘Record’ so lengthy, couples were already getting divorced by the time it was ready to record them saying “I do”. After explaining what tape was, I realised I’d ...

grumpyf1

Search This Blog