The unforgettable TV theme songs of the fifties

Songs (and musical pieces), as the theme – opening or closing – of a television programme, are no longer used much, or at least they are no longer used in the same way. But at the beginning of the history of Italian television there were many songs which, from being proposed as the opening or closing themes of a program, became great popular successes. I’m happy to bring some of them back to you.

However, I will start with the “institutional” acronyms. That of the opening of the RAI programs: the music is “Tutto cangia, il ciel s’abbella”, from “Gugliemo Tell” by Gioacchino Rossini.

And that of the closing of the RAI programs (the music is “Armonie del planet Saturno”, musical composition for oboe or trumpet, harp and strings by Roberto Lupi)

Intermission – aired between broadcasts when necessary. The music is by Pietro Domenico Paradisi (1707 – 1791): “Toccata from the Sonata in A major, P 893.06” (1754), performed by the harpist Anna Palomba Contadino.

The Eurovision theme song is the prelude from “Te Deum” by Marc Antonie Charpentier (1643 – 1704)

1955 – Cugat House

It was one of the very first variety shows on state television, and it was also the first to provoke the intervention of the censors. “Casa Cugat” began to be broadcast on Sunday evenings from 4 December 1955, and was a classic show with music, songs and ballets, whose protagonists were a friendly conductor, Xavier Cugat – the title of the program derives from his surname – Spanish by birth, Cuban by adoption, who had the funny habit of directing his musicians while holding a miniature Chiwawa dog in his arms, and his young American wife, Abbe Lane. It was she, very sensual, provocative and often abundantly low-cut, who aroused on the one hand the enthusiasm of the male television audience, on the other the irritation of the wives and the intervention of the shrewd censors of the time, who first claimed to cover the singer and dancer’s generous necklines with improbable fabric roses, then – failing to prevent her from swaying in her cha cha cha – decided to definitively cut it off the program, which was closed at the end of March 1956.

The theme song of the show was entitled “Pan, amor y cha cha cha”

1955 – Leave or double

“Fold or double?” it was a quiz, the Italian version of French Quitte or double?in turn derived from the American The $64,000 Question.

The first and most famous edition of the program, hosted by Mike Bongiorno, aired starting from November 26, 1955 every Saturday evening, at 9:00 pm, until February 11, 1956 and every Thursday evening from February 16, 1956 to July 16, 1959, the date of suspension of the program.

The contestants who participated in the game (one at a time) presented themselves as experts on a particular topic. During the first evening the competitor had to answer eight questions, within a maximum of thirty seconds for each.

The initial prize money was 2,500 lire (about 50 euros today) and with each correct answer the prize money doubled; at the first wrong answer the competitor was eliminated and in this case, if he had answered at least the first five questions correctly, he took home a consolation token worth 40,000 lire (about 700 euros today). By answering the eight questions in total, reaching the amount of 320,000 lire (just over 5,000 euros today), the competitor acquired the right to return the following week.

Upon the contestant’s return to the broadcast, accompanied by the hostess, the host began by asking him the fateful question: “Do you leave or double?”: if he “quit” he pocketed the sum he had won up to that moment, otherwise he was isolated acoustically (to avoid suggestions from the audience in the room) by inviting him to enter a booth and wear headphones, through which he could only hear the voice of the host speaking to him from a special microphone connected with a wire to the headphones themselves; subsequently a single question was asked.

The competitor had one minute to respond (in subsequent editions, a minute and a half), marked by a special mechanical clock and by background music, which underlined the suspense, performed by strings; if the answer was correct his prize money doubled and he returned the following week to repeat the procedure described here, while in case of a wrong answer he lost all his prize money, was eliminated from the game and won, as a consolation prize, a Fiat 600.

From doubling to doubling (the competitor could appear on a maximum of five consecutive bets), the maximum prize that the competitor could win was 5,120,000 lire (around 90,000 euros today), the equivalent of 128 gold tokens.

The success of “Leave or double?” not only did it consecrate Mike Bongiorno as a “symbol” of Italian television, but it also gave a quarter of an hour of fame to some of the competitors. The most unpredictable of the participants was the American composer John Cage, who introduced himself as an expert in mycology.

The opening theme, “Cominciamo”, was an original composition by Giampiero Boneschi.

1957 – “Telematch”

Broadcast on the National Program from the evening of Sunday 6 January 1957, directed by the famous Piero Turchetti, “Telematch” was a quiz game with three hosts (Silvio Noto, Enzo Tortora, Renato Tagliani) modeled on a similar French programme, “Vous êtes formidable”, from three years earlier. Structured in four different phases, corresponding to four different games (“”I Pass and See”, “The Soulmates”, “The Arm and the Mind” and “The Mysterious Object”, it was the first broadcast in which the action moved from the studio to outside through live connections with various Italian locations, and was a notable success.

Curious to note that the theme song had been “stolen” from another programme, this one from the BBC – it was titled “Top of the form”, and it was a competition between middle school students, just like our “Who knows who knows”. It’s called “Marching Strings”, it was composed by Marshall Ross (aka Ray Martin), an Austrian emigrant to England who was born Kurt Kohn. You can listen to it below:

1957 – The Musician

Il Musichiere was a musical quiz game, inspired by the American “Name that tune!”; it aired from 7 December 1957 to 7 May 1960. It was hosted by the Roman actor Mario Riva. The competitors, sitting on a rocking chair, had to listen to the start of a piece of music and, after recognizing it, run to ring a bell ten meters away to be entitled to give their answer, accumulating gold tokens for the final prize pool. The jackpot was won by guessing the “masked pattern”, performed when opening a safe containing the winnings.

The musical motifs were performed by the Gorni Kramer orchestra, assisted by a young Gianni Ferrio and two singers: Nuccia Bongiovanni and Johnny Dorelli (later replaced by Paolo Bacilieri). Among the famous guests of the show, the most famous is Mina, who made her TV debut at the Musichiere.

The theme song of the program was “Sunday is always Sunday”, a song that Garinei, Giovannini and Kramer had composed for the musical comedy “A couple of wings”, but which became famous thanks to this programme.

1957 – Carousel

“Carosello” was a RAI advertising television programme, a collection of short films made by companies to advertise their products: born on 3 February 1957, it aired until 1 January 1977, daily after the evening news, for a total of 7,261 episodes, all in black and white.

It consisted of a series of films (often comic skits in the style of light theater or musical interludes) followed by advertising messages. Among the directors who directed films for Carosello there are also Pupi Avati, Federico Fellini, Sergio Leone, Ermanno Olmi, Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The main rule of the Carousel was that the part of the show (the “piece”, lasting 1 minute and 45 seconds), had to be strictly separated and distinguishable from the purely advertising part (the “tail”, lasting 30 seconds). The transition from the piece to the pigtail occurred with a key phrase pronounced by the protagonist; only in the final part could the product be named. Some advertising slogans launched by Carosello became real catchphrases, almost proverbial (“A good look? Excellent, I’d say!”, “With that mouth he can say what he wants”, “The word is enough”, “It seems easy…”).

The soundtrack remained unchanged, with different arrangements, for the entire twenty years: it is the instrumental version of a Neapolitan tarantella dating back to around 1825 and collected by the musician Vincenzo De Meglio (1825-1883), entitled “Pagliaccio”.

1958 – “Happy Holidays”

On air from Saturday 4 July 1959, “Buone Holiday” was a television variety show created by the conductor Gorni Kramer and directed by Antonello Falqui, which had the peculiarity of not being entrusted to a presenter; it was the guest singers of the program who announced each other. The cast of regular performers featured Johnny Dorelli, Gino Corcelli, Wilma De Angelis, Betty Curtis and Jula De Palma, as well as two special guests for each episode. The program also included a ballet (curated by Gino Landi), the performance of a pianist (Paolo Cavazzini), a moment dedicated to jazz, curated by Gorni Kramer, and a fixed space for the Cetra Quartet, to which Kramer entrusted the interpretation of the theme song, which he wrote with Garinei and Giovannini, which was entitled “Concertino” and became one of the strong points of the repertoire of the popular ensemble vocal.

1958 – Perry Como Show

Born in the United States in 1950 on CBS, but becoming a successful program in 1955 with the move to NBC, the “Perry Como Show” was a typically American variety show, with guests of all kinds – singers, dancers, comedians, illusionists, contortionists, a bit like the more famous “Ed Sullivan Show – welcomed by recorded applause and laughter. Perry Como, confidential singer of evident Italian origins, it was quite popular at the time in the USA.

Bizarrely, Italian television re-proposed the show – from 20 May 1958, on a Tuesday evening – in the original language, with some minimal dubbing, by a voice-over who naturally had serious difficulty in having to readjust the lines intended for the American television audience. There would be no point in talking about it in this column of ours if it weren’t for the theme song: a song by none other than Burt Bacharach, with lyrics by Hal David, which became an international success and also hit the charts in Italy, generating – to confirm its popularity – a series of rather salacious parodies. It’s called “Magic moments”.

1959 – The working woman

An investigation in eight episodes entitled “The Working Woman” was broadcast between March and April 1959, on Wednesdays in the late evening. Curated by Ugo Zatterin and Giovanni Salvi, it aimed to tell the story of the female contribution to the evolution of work in Italy: from Lombardy to Puglia, 31 different locations were visited, rigorously collecting live testimonies from as many women. It was precisely 1959, in pre-boom Italy, and the investigation had considerable resonance; so much so that several years later, in 1993, it was revived by Rai Tre – at the time it had been broadcast on the National Program – enriching it with new interviews with the same women interviewed 35 years earlier.

The theme song of the show, “Stasera tornrò”, was a classic triplet composed by Gino Peguri, and entrusted to the interpretation of the singer and actress Miranda Martino, who gave a truly intense interpretation. Listen to it again below:

1959 – Club yellow

It aired for three seasons, between 1959 and 1961, hosted first by Paolo Ferrari and then by Francesco Mulè. It was a sort of cross between a quiz show and a TV series: three guests of a hypothetical crime fiction club were invited by the host to watch a TV series which was interrupted shortly before the culprit was identified. At that point, the guests were asked to give their opinion on the solution to the mystery which then continued until the conclusion. The protagonist of the TV series was Lieutenant Ezechiele Sheridan (played by Ubaldo Lay). The theme song, “Call 22 22”, was composed by Armando Trovajoli.