Ski Sunday evokes the golden era of sporting jingles
TV show returns for 40th season with a theme tune that puts modern shows to shame, writes Daniel Schofield
The comic funk interlude brings to mind all the crashes you secretly pine to see
Ski Sunday returns this weekend for its 40th season, which, if we categorise A Question of Sport as a game show, call Wimbledon a live broadcast and discount Match of the Day for the ITV years of Premier League highlights, makes it Britain’s longest running sports show.
It has survived numerous revamps, whether through a focus on the more extreme spectrum of winter sports, or the dalliance with celebrity guests. Even more impressive than Ski Sunday’s longevity is its theme music, which has long surpassed the show itself in popularity.
Instantly recognisable and the most infectious of earworms, it was composed by Sam Fonteyn with the corny title, Pop Looks Bach (there’s a great video of comedian Bill Bailey demonstrating its similarities to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor). Fonteyn started out doing the rounds of London’s jazz clubs during the 1950s and died in 1991, aged 66. He was quite the character and his son, Nicholas, previously told The Daily Telegraph: “On the night he died, he was taken into hospital and when the doctor found out he was a musician, he asked, ‘What sort of music?’ My dad looked him in the face and said, ‘the best’.”
Pop Looks Bach is now synonymous with cold, dark, Sunday nights. The jaunty string opening is the ideal accompaniment to a skier slaloming their way down a piste at great speed before it gives way to a brief interlude of comic funk that brings to mind all the crashes you secretly pine to see, and then back to the strings again.
As a composition, it is the perfect soundtrack for Ski Sunday and so it comes as a surprise that it was not commissioned for the show. Instead, Fonteyn wrote it for Boosey & Hawkes music library in 1970, where it lay unhummed and unnoticed until the BBC picked it up in 1977.
A quick investigation reveals that many of Britain’s best-loved sporting jingles came into being via the same process. The theme for Wimbledon, which also celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, and the sadly departed Grandstand theme, were composed around the same period by Keith Mansfield for the KPM library. It makes you think of all the other potential treasures that were never picked up or heard, secretly stored in an archive somewhere.
It is a disappointment to hear that many of these works that have spanned generations were knocked out in an afternoon. Mansfield estimates he wrote the tune to Wimbledon in less than an hour and then spent another four hours arranging it.
Mansfield never had any idea of where his work would end up. It could just as easily have become the soundtrack for an insurance advert or be used as lift music as the theme to a programme watched by millions. “There was no pressure to have a hit record,” Mansfield told The Guardian last year. “We were making music that people might find useful, and some of that would be unusual music – strange time signatures or key changes. If it got picked up, well, that was a bonus. And if it lasted 35 years? Wonderful! Who could have ever expected that?”
The reason all these themes have endured so long is because they are clever compositions relying upon multiple styles and instruments. Anachronistic? Perhaps. Catchy? Undoubtedly. Contrast this with modern producers’ obsession with using whichever the band of the month is, music that goes in one ear and out the other. Ski Sunday can keep shuffling around its format and presenters, but if it dares interfere with Pop Goes Bach then there will be hell to pay.