OK, so my planned Summer hiatus really didn’t work. To be fair, would you rather have a nice walk outdoors enjoying the sunshine, or spend your free time working out what is showing on Onslow’s television in every single episode of Keeping Up Appearances?
As ever, this project has become a complete nightmare, and I quickly realised why nobody else has ever bothered doing it before. Let’s take an example. Watch this scene from Series 3 Episode 4, commonly known as “How to Go on Holiday Without Really Trying”, broadcast on the 27th September 1992:
I am amused that Mary Millar gets a bit of an American sitcom-style reaction when she enters in that get-up.
But onto important matters: what music is playing there on Onslow’s telly? The production paperwork should reveal all. They list it as “Street Action”, Track 1 of the Chappell library album American Drama. Well for a start, “Street Action” is on the album American Drama 2, but the catalogue number matches up: Chap 142. Let’s give it a listen.
I’ve learnt enough to not entirely trust this kind of thing by now. It took a fair few listens – damn Keeping Up Appearances and its funny dialogue, when I’m trying to figure out a library track – but after a while I was convinced. This isn’t the track used in the episode after all.
Well, fair enough, maybe the paperwork is just confused. Perhaps they meant Track 1 of American Drama 1 from Chappell instead? That would be “New York City”:
Nope, that ain’t it either.
At this point, I tried listening to every single track on both American Drama 1 and American Drama 2. After admittedly skimming through both albums, I was increasingly convinced that the music used in Keeping Up Appearances wasn’t actually on either of them. What to do? Much as I’d like to dedicate the rest of my life listening to every single bit of library music ever recorded, that wouldn’t be especially practical. For all I knew, it wasn’t even a track from the same label.
So I did what all the best archive TV researchers do. I cheated.
One genuine, unalloyed benefit of all the latest AI/machine learning/call-it-what-you-like stuff has been an explosion of tools for isolating vocals from music tracks. With a bit of clever tweaking, you can get some extremely good results. I didn’t need to do any clever tweaking, though. This was strictly quick-and-dirty.
I clipped up an MP3 of the Keeping Up Appearances scene which opens this article, and uploaded it to vocalremover.org. That gave me the following muffled piece of nonsense, fit for nothing:
Fit for nothing, that is… apart from Shazam. It took a couple of goes – the track is more distinctive towards the end – but suddenly, up popped:
Amazing. “Approaching Evil”, from the Carlin album Drama/Vocal/Horror/Romance (CAR 181). And if you listen to it, it quickly becomes clear that this really is the track playing on Onslow’s telly. He’s clearly watching a cheap, straight-to-video rip-off of The Omen:
These really are tools that researchers would have died for in years past. The bane of this kind of research is contemporary paperwork written by someone who was a) very rushed, b) didn’t have all the facts, or c) both. The fact that decades on, I can use these kind of tools to correct such nonsense, without an encyclopaedic knowledge of all library music ever, fair blows my mind. It’s incredible. Even if I am putting it to thoroughly ludicrous uses.
As for Onslow’s telly… well, there’s far more to that story than just a few pieces of library music. But all in good time.