So it goes: Ronnie Hazlehurst dead at 79

There’s very little that can con­jure up a child­hood memory like famil­i­ar TV theme music (the smell of Play-Doh, per­haps) and the cre­at­or of the most famil­i­ar all those tune passed away yes­ter­day of a stroke.

Ronnie Hazlehurst wrote and con­duc­ted the sig­na­ture tunes for dozens of BBC shows in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s includ­ing “The Two Ronnies”, “Last of the Summer Wine”, “Parkinson” and “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em” and hear­ing any of them instantly pro­vokes waves of nos­tal­gia in this writer (except “Blankety Blank” which was truly awful though undeni­ably catchy):

From a very lovely Independent obit­u­ary:

One of Hazlehurst’s trade­marks was to make his themes fit the title of the pro­gramme. For example, for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em – the clas­sic com­edy star­ring Michael Crawford as the effete Frank Spencer – he used a pic­colo to play the let­ters of the title in Morse code.

For brave read­ers want­ing to share the memor­ies here are the themes to “Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em” (includ­ing Morse code), “The Two Ronnies” and the won­der­ful “The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin”.