Titles and Music
The opening credits consist of outside shots of Slade prison and of several doors and gates being closed and locked, which was intended to set the scene for the programme. In the first series, there were also shots of St Pancras Station (now home to Eurostar rail services), which was changed in subsequent series to shots of Fletcher walking around Slade prison. Title music was thought unsuitable for a show set in prison, so instead there is a booming narration (performed by Barker himself) given by the presiding judge passing sentence on Fletcher:
| “ | Norman Stanley Fletcher, you have pleaded guilty to the charges brought by this court, and it is now my duty to pass sentence. You are an habitual criminal, who accepts arrest as an occupational hazard, and presumably accepts imprisonment in the same casual manner. We therefore feel constrained to commit you to the maximum term allowed for these offences; you will go to prison for five years. | ” |
Subsequently, Barker is reported to have said that he regretted recording himself as the judge, a character role subsequently played by Maurice Denham in a later episode.
The theme music for the closing credits was written by Max Harris, who had also written the theme music for numerous other TV shows, including The Strange World of Gurney Slade, Mind Your Language and Doomwatch, and would go on to write the theme for Open All Hours, another of the Seven of One pilots. The cheery theme was "deliberately at variance with the dour comedy" and given a music hall feel by Harris because of the lead character's Cockney origins.
Read more about this topic: Porridge (TV series)
Famous quotes containing the words titles and, titles and/or music:
“We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We have to be despised by somebody whom we regard as above us, or we are not happy; we have to have somebody to worship and envy, or we cannot be content. In America we manifest this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and hereditary privilege, but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)