Opening of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, decoded by Jim at BBC 6 Music

WHO, WHAT, WHY?

The Magazine answers...



Mental images of the hapless Frank Spencer getting into another scrape are immediately conjured up when the piccolos open the theme tune to the classic BBC comedy Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em.

Its composer Ronnie Hazlehurst died this week and a story about a hidden meaning within that famous score, deciphered by Morse code, was mentioned in some obituaries.

To test the theory, the Magazine invited BBC 6 Music to produce a musical score of the first few bars and use the Morse code alphabet to link the notes to their corresponding letters of the alphabet.

THE ANSWER Yes, the opening bars spell the title, minus the apostrophes

It is a measure of the talents of Hazlehurst, also responsible for memorable theme tunes such as Last of the Summer Wine and Are You Being Served?, that he could compose a piece of music under this constraint.

'Shrill harmonies'

Alan JW Bell, a close friend of Hazlehurst and producer of Last of the Summer Wine, says the composer was a "musical genius and jester".

"He often played musical jokes. On one episode of the Last of the Summer Wine the storyline involved some oil being found so he composed the music in the style of Dallas.

I wouldn't prostitute a tune, to bend it every which way to fit the title, but if I can make it so, I do.

Ronnie Hazlehurst

BBC composer Hazlehurst dies

"We never heard anything else and used the tune Ronnie had composed. It worked beautifully."

Other pieces of famous music use the same Morse code trick.

Barrington Pheloung hid such messages in his music for, rather aptly, ITV's Inspector Morse. He included names that either revealed the killer or threw people off the scent. There are also theories about music by artists such as Rush and Roger Waters.

But setting aside Hazlehurst's code, what about the qualities of the Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em score itself?

WHO, WHAT, WHY? A regular part of the BBC News Magazine, Who, What, Why? aims to answer some of the questions behind the headlines

"A pair of piccolos pipe out foreshortened phrases with shrill harmonies: it is almost a picture in music of Michael Crawford's Frank Spencer, with his boyishness and inadequacy to every situation; though its brevity and austerity are at odds with the broadness of the gags."

For what Hanks describes as "a few seconds of genius", Hazlehurst was paid £30.