FORGET about what happens to the commentary teams as cricket switches channels.
The big question is what happens to that “Wide World of Sports cricket theme” which became as synonymous with cricket in Australia as the voice of the late Richie Benaud.
For years, the opening bars of the music literally trumpeting the start of the cricket coverage music have elicited an almost Pavlovian response in many Australians.
It’s been the soundtrack to summer.
For some, the opening strains of “the cricket music” — which is actually a work called New Horizons, by Brian Bennett — have been the trigger to assume prime Test cricket-watching position, remote in hand, on the couch.
Doze off at lunch, and that familiar trumpeting fanfare would prod you from your slumber in time to switch ends on the lounge, ready for the afternoon session.
For cricket haters, the music was the equivalent of an emergency siren, prompting them to flee the room, resigned to the fact that nothing major was getting done outside or inside by some residents of the house for the next four days. Except maybe in the lunch or tea breaks.
New Horizons may now be consigned to television history following Friday’s landmark deal that will mean cricket coverage switches from its longtime home of Channel Nine to Channel Seven and Foxtel.
It’s a fair bet Nine wouldn’t like to see the catchy composition, secured to launch World Series Cricket four decades ago, used elsewhere.
As for how New Horizons gained its cult following in Australian sport, word is the irascible late Kerry Packer had heard it as the theme song for a 1970s police show called Bluey, featuring the late comedian Lucky Grills in the titular role of heavy-drinking, chain-smoking Detective Sergeant Bluey Hills.
“GET THAT MUSIC FROM BLUEY”
In the late 1970s, as Packer engineered his controversial breakaway competition World Series Cricket, taking on a horrified cricket establishment in a bitter battle for control of the game, among his many demands were “that music from Bluey” be secured as the theme song for his audacious new TV spectacle.
What Packer wanted, Packer always got.
On November 24, 1977, World Series Cricket launched on Nine, with the New Horizons “cricket theme” heralding its arrival.
The network could never have known that it would become one of Australia’s most recognised television theme songs.
Australian cricket’s most visible supporters — The Richies — who in 2010 started dressing as Richie Benaud in tribute to the cult commentator — adopted the song as well.
They delivered a memorable performance of it at the Sydney Cricket Ground as a tribute when Benaud died in 2015.
In an interview with Channel Nine’s Mark Nicholas in 2010, Bennett, then 70 and on a tour of Australia with legendary British singer Cliff Richard, revealed he’d written the piece in 1974.
He said he’d written New Horizons for KPM, a music library company in Europe “to be just used as a theme for anything. We didn’t know what it was going to be when we wrote it.”
“And then something like this happens. I didn’t realise it would be this long.”
As Nine commentator Mark Nicholls observed, “when Bluey finished, Nine nicked it for the cricket”.
Bennett presented a framed score of New Horizons to Nine in recognition or what they had made with his creation.
For the record, Bennett, a drummer, pianist, composer and music producer was no one-hit wonder.
In addition to his work with Cliff Richard and the Shadows, composing BBC sport themes including Rugby Special (Holy Mackerel) and BBC Golf (Chase Side Shoot Up), and a number of sitcom themes, he has also written scores for movies.
Among his biggest hits?
He penned the 1963 Cliff Richard hit, Summer Holiday.
Only fitting for a man who would go on to give Australia the sound of its sporting summer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63PKROJ5Aohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zuf-nm7xD7Y
– Foxtel is majority owned by News Corp, publisher of news.com.au
