The White Horses – Theme Tune – Title Sequence

I showed this clip to a female friend of mine and she started crying. It’s a lovely tune and I guess it took her back to a better time, a more hopeful and colourful time, when she had her whole life ahead of her, and the difference between then and now made her upset.

Strange isn’t it, how an innocent children’s TV theme tune can carry this resonance across time? You can hear it in your early years and it makes you happy – then you hear it later when the context of your life is different and those same notes and same lyrics can make you sad.

A theme tune, or a song, can be like a time machine. It’s like when you hear a song in the Top Twenty on the radio and without realising it, the music solidifies a particular point in time and space in your head, like concrete, and it’s there forever.

For example, Bryan Ferry and Roxy Music’s ‘Angel Eyes’ will always be associated in my head with me aged fifteen sitting outside a cafe in summer in Southport, with a bottle of lemonade and a packet of crisps, while the song played on the jukebox and wafted through the open doors.

I remember reading an interview with Billie Piper where she was talking about the making of the first season episode, ‘Dalek’. She said that when the Dalek was wheeled onto the set for the first time, some of the technicians’ eyes welled up with tears, despite being grown up burly men. I guess it’s because as they looked at the icon they were pleased on the one hand to see one in reality – this thing they’d grown up with, continually seeing it in the media – but on the other hand it may well have reminded them of how their childhood was a different place, a different time.

Change. Everything changes. Everything changes.

Television Heaven’s Entry on The White Horses

~ by Paul Badger on 24 June, 2008.