Y’know how you can get the feeling you’re the only one who remembers a certain thing from the past? It happened again today when Mr Marriott played the end sting from John Craven’s Newsround of the seventies and eighties. Six plus six notes on some electronic keyboard instrument of the time.

Most of us recognise it as exactly that — the Newsround sting. However, before the TV prog existed the music was used as the theme to something on BBC World Service radio. But which programme? Was it English By Radio? Or the weekly feature about new British inventions? Every week we got to hear a sizeable portion of the complete tune, not just its own final twelve notes.

I don’t remember the prog any more but I hope someone among the Serenade listeners can recall it.

Info for the fuller anorak experience: I have a feeling the music was one of Paddy Kingsland’s compositions made at the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale. So there wouldn’t have been a fee to pay for its use on BBCWS. Radio Netherlands on shortwave also used the sting for their Media Network outro. I’ve no idea if they paid a fee for that!

Dear Roger,
I think it was Elvis who said that if you mention politics in conversation then you immediately divide people. I listen to music in the evenings to take my mind off the fact that the England I knew and loved has changed beyond recognition. There are many issues I wish singers would protest about such as women’s rights on the trans issue, rampant antisemitism or the cover-up over the grooming gangs but what does Jez Lowe choose to get political about in a song you featured? Trump and Boris Johnson. How brave, how fearless, to put your career on the line as everyone claps along. Then we had Marina Florance in a song called Courage calling me an ‘anti-migrant thug’ for expressing concern about undocumented males from less-developed countries being allowed to live here unchecked.
I was an immigrant abroad for a decade and had to jump through hoops to extend my working visa. I’d love to beach up in Cape Cod and start anew but it doesn’t work like that. I look around at the state of my country and think of that chap at the end of Bridge on the River Kwai: “Madness! Madness…”
Have there been any musicians, anywhere, prepared to stand up and tell it like it is?
(Sorry, Roger. I didn’t mean to go off on one…)

The Northern dance orchestra is now 75 years old, and excellent recordings are still surfacing. Nice to hear that serenade regard them so highly, with tracks appearing regularly – they really had the ability to cheer up a grey day.
Fabulous musicians, and unlike many modern bands they played together for around 25 years, with mostly the same musicians they started with !

I was so fortunate to work at Radio 2 back in the day, but when it started to go down the drain after Tel… David Jacobs..Ray Moore..Gloria and JY..were gone….I never thought there would be such great radio ever again. Then of course Serenade arrived….the rest as they say is history. No filler..no waffle..no endless traffic and travel. Just plain brilliant music..production and presentation. Thanks guys..I know the aforementioned would have loved it…especially Tel and DJ..oh and of course Gloria who I’m sure does so now!!

I was vaguely aware of an entertainer named Hildegarde from ancient times and in my mind’s eye had imagined a haughty harridan-type like Aunt Agatha or Lady Bracknell bellowing out Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar or some such. Maybe I confused the name with Brunhilde. It was such a sweet surprise when Mark Steyn played Hildegarde singing April In Paris. Delightful to the ear. Unfortunately, Vernon Duke was doing his best to imitate Ernest Borgnine playing the piano in From Here to Eternity.