So, twenty-five years of Channel 4, eh? Didn't they do well! Here are four (count 'em!) pieces of nostalgia from the channel's formative years.
First, the channel's theme music, Fourscore
, composed by David Dundas. Four little notes set the composer up for life - he was on a royalty, and by the time Channel 4 stopped using the theme in 1996, he'd been paid £20 on over a hundred thousand occasions. This is the full-length version, 3 minutes 20 of it, first heard after Paul Coia's opening announcement, and over a montage of the channel's coming attractions.
The first of them: Countdown
. The first of 4473 programmes, the first of 50,242 startings of the clock, and the first of a million bad puns. What can you do with this 30-second piece of music? Re-orchestrate it, as they have done every few years since, most notably with the addition of the ping at the end, and another one in 1996, but that was a disaster that we don't like to talk about.
We'll move on to Channel 4 News
. The theme here has not changed at all, it's a piece of library music by Alan Hawkshaw. Best endeavours
has cropped up in adverts and documentaries, but will always be remembered here for Jon Snow's remarkable ties.
Fast forward to 1987 for our third selection, The journey
by James Aldenham. When schools programmes transferred from ITV to Channel 4 that year, there needed to be a piece of music that would cover the longest possible gap between programmes. Though junctions were usually about two minutes, allowing teachers to start the videos or settle their class down, there were three slots per week so that different programmes could air in Scotland. To get everyone back for the next show, there needed to be a six-minute piece before the one-minute countdown (appropriately, Just a minute
, another Aldenham composition.) Viewers of a certain age will remember the rotating ITV logo.
