I see they've brought back Comedy Playhouse, complete with a quick snatch of the original theme music: Happy Joe by Ron Grainer. Which reminded me that I had put 'Gray vs Grainer' as a tag on this blog entry here. And seemed to tie in nicely with the fact that I bought a CD of Ron Grainer's music last week.
And all this confluence of nonsense reminded me of the time I was witness to the Grand Final of the Theme Tune Composer Deathmatch XXIII.
Everyone else had fallen by the wayside: Hawksworth, Hazelhurst, Goodall and the like. Only the two giants were still standing: Ron Grainer and Barry Gray.
Appreciation of the Thunderbirds theme has gone through a phase of kitsch appreciation, but lets not lose sight of the fact that it is just a blooming good tune. The crowd gasped as Gray played it as his opening gambit.
Grainer always had a sense of humour though, and so he ironically replied by saying he hadn't expected that.
Gray simply said that 'anything could happen in the next half hour'.
But Grainer just thought that was a load of old junk.
Grainer was getting cocky - he didn't even bother with Doctor Who, confident in the depth of his oeuvre. But then Gray punched hard with UFO.
Grainer was reeling. He knew he had to finish this fast. First he took the mickey, doing his version of one of Gray's themes.
And then, while The Ron Grainer Orchestra were on fire, they finished Gray off with their own interpretation of the theme from The Prisoner (which for some reason I can't embed from Youtube so I'll have to do a link instead. Here it is).
Kapow!
Grainer wins! Next he travels to New York for the international final against Mike Post.
(PS, as a bonus here are the Japanese opening titles to several Gerry Anderson series)
More soonliest.
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