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LETTER of the MONTH
Master of the small screen
With regard to your column on (November), among the most effective television themes must be Wilfred Josephs’s score for series, first broadcast by the BBC in 1964. The initial chords immediately define a sense of catastrophe, which we rapidly follow seemingly into hell itself, before the appearance of a sombre minor figure which is echoed throughout each episode. What made this music especially powerful was the way in which it was synchronised with the programme’s opening visuals, with an ascending musical figure being displayed across a descending visual, as if the viewer is being flung into a battlefield trench. These moments remain with me decades later. It is more than likely that this was the
