The Annotated Prisoner - Arrival Act 3 Continued - Music Begins Where Words Leave Off

All We Hear Is Radio Fenella

Music Says All

P is boiling with anger from the moment he enters Number 2’s living space at the start of Act 2, but it’s the music oozing gooily from the un-turn-offable speaker in his cottage that pushes him fully over the edge.

The particular number in question is ‘Moon Lullaby’ performed by Charles Williams and the Queens Hall Light Orchestra. Williams was a prolific composer and conductor, with several bona fide chart hits after the war, and wrote the music to the Potters Wheel interlude and ‘Devil’s Galop’ the theme to the radio series Dick Barton, Special Agent. (You know that one, even if you don’t think you do.) ‘Moon Lullaby’ isn’t one of his own, but written by Mark Lubbock - another composer/conductor of much the same ilk, famous enough to get on Desert Island Discs in 1974. I wonder how they felt about their music being the thing that sets McGoohan off into a destructive rampage.

The very disc that induces the smashing

It’s a fairly inoffensive piece of library music, released by Chappell Recorded Music. The parent company Chappell was formed in 1810 as a piano manufacturer and sheet music publisher, and in 1941 formed the Chappell Recorded Music arm, which released non-copyright vinyl records for use in films, newsreels, etc. (This was called stock music or library music then, but  is now called production music - well, officially it is.) The Queens Hall Light Orchestra were one of their house bands, and tons and tons of this stuff was pumped out on 10” shellac discs. Chappell still exists, guzzled up by Warners and now by Universal. Their entire library is in the process of being digitised. And the vast majority of their output in its first few decades was British light music.

Funny way to spell exhilaration

But what was British light music?