CHAPTER 25

 

 

#76: MATT BERRY

"Are You Being Served?"

from the album Television Themes

Released: October 2018

This is a substitute track, substituting for a time when I prefer to imagine I was properly and completely looked after with nothing to fear, isn't that a tautological cliché, shut up and get on with it. The real work was co-composed and directed by Ronnie Hazlehurst and to me it still sounds like a snatched-away future, an awkward twelve-bar cha-cha with a cash register for percussion, a comforting pair of slippers of a unison horn section (closely-voiced flügelhorn and alto sax), and a jet stream of a Korg string synthesiser indicating another and hopefully better century.

 

 

Over the flight path spires of tomorrow, or was it 1963, we hear a happy female voice engaged in subtle harmonic Sprechgesang, reading out all the departments on each floor of the store. There are only three stories - no basement? - but the ludicrous optimism of the music suggests there might be three thousand. Going up, and never looking down.

That was the future once upon a time and that dreamable feature was half a century ago. Of all the leading actors and actresses who appeared in the series over its thirteen years, only one - the former pre-Beatles sixties pop star Mike Berry - now survives. Everybody else got old and/or ill and died. That future was snatched from us. Snatched.

I don't suppose Matt Berry (not, I think, a relation)'s rendition of the show's theme was ever intended to be more than an amusing variant, but it is in circulation, unlike the Hazlehurst (and David Croft) original which remains under BBC lock and key in all its forty-five perfect seconds. Matt Berry's version extends to two minutes and twenty-two seconds and there is some extemporising (mainly with the bass guitar). It is in a different key to the original and the voice which reads out the information doesn't quite gel with the music. In addition the rhythm underlines the original cash register undertow a little too squarely.

 

Yet there remains this dim light of the future, perhaps related to one of the many lucid dreams which I experienced while a long-term hospital inpatient during the spring and summer of 2018. I was on this huge aeroplane. It was 1963. We were slowly coming in to land. Brisk, bright light orchestral music issued from the speakers. Placid stewardess announcements, the wording of which I cannot now precisely recall.

It looked as though we were actually flying in from space. We permeated the Earth's atmosphere. So many houses, built so high up, higher than Everest but it was only Birmingham. Art deco blocks of flats so high above the ground that they were permanently snowed in. I wondered how the Earth could possibly support so much elevated architecture.

We moved closer towards a recognisable city, or at least airport (perhaps Heathrow). The sun was rising, the sky was pink and hopeful, the view beneath me clear and invigorating. Everything was attainable, let alone possible. All the passengers looked forward to the prospect of forward.

 

 

I looked up the composers of the airborne music on a database provided with the DVD box set*. Two women, born in 1910 and 1913 respectively, both apparently still alive in 2018.

I will be getting back to those pellucid dreams.

 

 

*What DVD box set? Oh, the one of the imaginary film for television that I dreamed in 2018...