Fourscore

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Fourscore was the signature tune used by Channel 4 in the United Kingdom for 14 years, from 1982 to 1996. It was composed by Lord David Dundas. Excluding test transmissions prior to launch, the complete 4 minute long piece was played in full only three times on the channel, once at its launch at 16:45 on 1982-11-02, and then again twice when the channel expanded its schedule to include afternoon programming. Various short excerpts from the piece, which were the various orchestrations of the same four note melody, were used to accompany the channel ident used between programmes. For each time the music was used for the ident, Dundas received a royalty of £3.50, which totalled approximately £1000 per week. At the time, the sequence of four notes was the shortest musical piece to be copyrighted.

A related piece with the same four-note theme, Fourscore II, was used by the channel to accompany stills in the event of technical faults, and was played during commercial breaks (and thus was only heard by viewers if their regional ITV franchise had not sold enough advertising to fill the timeslot. This was fairly common occurrence during the first few months of Channel 4's existence due to an industrial dispute which meant that no advertisements featuring Equity members could be broadcast).

[edit] References

• Pt 5: The Channel 4 Jingle. TINY MUSIC MAKERS. Retrieved on December 5, 2005.
• David Hastings. Back to 1982. EMC Seefour. Retrieved on December 5, 2005.
• Channel 4 Idents 1982 - 1996. TV Fetish. Retrieved on December 5, 2005.