Top 10 childhood TV theme tunes

Becoming a parent has been a more valid excuse to indulge in childhood nostalgia. She can have her own roaring '20s nostalgia, but I'd be neglectful if I didn't sprinkle some glorious '80s in there.

Here are my favourite TV themes enjoyed in childhood that have also stood the test of time, with no regard for the accompanying visuals (however skill) or the actual quality of the show (when I even watched it). They're not all from kids' shows.

Featuring embedded video links that I'll allow to deteriorate over time like our memories.

Alrightreads: B

Iain Banks, The Business

1999 / Audiobook / 390 pages / UK

*

If you read the blurb hoping for a conspiracy thriller, or had forgotten that Banks' "mainstream" novels had any traces of the fanciful stripped out of them by the '90s, you'd probably be disappointed by this tediously humdrum romcom take on Chris Carter's Millennium.

Steve Matteo, The Beatles' Let It Be

2004 / Audiobook / 141 pages / USA

**

I've never got the Beatles obsession, but I like their later albums well enough and could do with knowing them better. This wasn't very illuminating, focusing more on the artists' personal lives and the context than digging into the music like I like. Maybe there's not that much to it.

John Medina, Brain Rules for Baby: How to Raise a Smart and Happy Child from Zero to Five

2010 / Ebook / 300 pages / USA

****

Smarter than the average baby book, this is the usual 21st-century advice backed up by reliable studies and evolutionary biology. We'll see how things turn out.

David Garfinkel, Breakthrough Copywriting: How to Generate Quick Cash With the Written Word

2014 / Ebook / 113 pages / USA

**

Some timeless tips and old-school cheese packaged with the dubious USP of urgency. I didn't sign up to the course he kept pushing, so he can't be that good.

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

2014 / Audiobook / 609 pages / UK

***

I'd been disappointed that Mitchell's novels post Cloud Atlas weren't the lesser retreads of that style I'd been expecting, but he got there in the end. Omitting the pastiche aspect, and taking place over a less impressive timeline with more explicit connections, this ends up being the more coherent novel. Never mind.

Alrightreads: Islands

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

1881-82 (collected 1883) / Audiobook / 282 pages / UK

***

Nicely paced until they get to the island and it shifts from wide-eyed adventure to depressing action and the tedious fallout. It wasn't as fun as I'd always assumed, the Muppet version's better.

John W. Campbell, Islands of Space

1931 (revised 1957) / Audiobook / 224 pages / USA

***

I don't know if these vintage sci-fi writers were following received wisdom that you had to focus on either plot or character at the expense of the other, or if that's just how it tended to come out. In its lengthy descriptions of future tech and exploration of slightly-differentiated new worlds and inferior civilisations, this is squarely in the former camp, with occasional moments of wonder. Sometimes travel's about the places, not the people.

Mo Hayder, Pig Island

2006 / Audiobook / 352 pages / UK

****

Starting out as your basic but morbidly fun marauding monster investigation/debunking, this becomes more interesting when the mystery's seemingly solved before the halfway point and the horror gives way to sympathetic drama. For long enough that you let your guard down.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: Season Five – The Unofficial Guide

2009 / Ebook / 279 pages / USA

****

As exhaustive a guide as the show's most self-absorbed year requires, also going satisfyingly extracurricular to cover the promotional games, fan theories of the time and the significance of books and other works name-dropped. Bursting with enthusiasm, but not to the point of overlooking distracting continuity errors and bad wigs.

Bill Bryson, The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island

2015 / Audiobook / 400 pages / USA

**

Twenty years on, the veteran travel writer tours Britain again, but mainly moans about the internet, the young people today and other random targets and gets into pointless arguments with proprietors and other locals. Maybe this is what reading my travel blog was like.

Alrightreads: Four Seasons

Geoffrey Himes, Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A.

2005 / Ebook / 144 pages / USA

***

I've never paid much attention to lyrics outside of Nick Cave, so it's gratifying when these books cover the laboured songwriting process and get inside the writer's head rather than just recounting humdrum studio anecdotes. If that's too deep for rock 'n' roll journalism, he ends with a ranked discography, good man.

Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer

1956 (collected 1957) / Audiobook / 188 pages / USA

***

Less piss-takingly complex than my favourite Heinlein time travel stories, but still satisfyingly tidy and I was still left with that familiar unpleasant aftertaste by the end, the dirty get. Pete the cat was the best character.

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

2010 / Audiobook / 480 pages / UK

**

David Mitchell (Not That One) has certainly done his research into Japan and the Dutch East India Company at the turn of the 19th century. Well done. I'll stick to his supernatural works over his grim realist horrors.

James Goss, Doctor Who: Dead of Winter

2011 / Ebook / 255 pages / UK

***

Goss can be relied on to shake things up, and this epistolary tale told in multiple unreliable voices mucks around in ways that wouldn't work on TV or audio, which is more than I expect. A minimalist historical horror, it fits well thematically with the parallel sixth series.

Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: Season Four – The Unofficial Guide

2009 / Ebook / 205 pages / USA

****

Journeying down a specific nostalgic avenue, this comprehensive guide to my favourite year of the irresistibly annoying TV series considerately avoids spoilers for those reading along episode by episode (you wouldn't get that with a fan wiki), while still being adorably time-bound in its more delirious fan theories and excitement for the future. A knowitall retrospective would be boring, it was all about the journey.

I made this

Do you remember that short-lived Children's BBC 'Genie' ident from 1995, with the generic Aladdin bloke whose head was bigger than his body, as if he'd been drawn by a child who was still in single digits and had no knowledge of anatomy, but knew how to flatter competition judges by unsubtly implying that their channel was magic? I did that.

My unimaginative winning entry to the CBBC ident competition (I think the stop-motion bees one was the other winner) has never showed up in ident compilations on YouTube, when I've been feeling self-indulgent enough to check, and it's still classified as lost media by people who think that information is valuable enough to include on a wiki, but who clearly aren't obsessive enough to skim through random continuity uploads from early 1995 to see if it's there.

Found it! (4:06)



That was 25 years ago. I should probably get some new achievements.