obitcheries

David Fanshawe is dead.
He was famous among music aficionados for his recordings of ethnic folk music worldwide.
He also received kudos from the Pseud Brigade for an original work entitled African Sanctus.
None of this matters.
What matters is that he wrote the theme tune for a late 1970's piece of television hokum produced in Britain called Flambards.
Flambards was based on a children's book by one KM Peyton, a children's book whose television adaptation was geared towards adults.
The televisual adaptation had ambitions towards the sensibilities of Evelyn Waugh's supposed classic Brideshead Revisited.
Brideshead Revisited would be filmed for television a few years after Flambards with bigger stars and bigger money and bigger credibility, and would win a host of awards, be endlessly repeated and talked over, and became a sensation in the British Isles.
Flambards never managed that.
But Flambards, referentially imitative, silly, soap operatic Flambards, with its lesser known actors and childish storyline, and David Fanshawe's music, Flambards was pure poetry.
Flambards is the closest thing British television has ever produced to a work of high art.
And David Fanshawe's theme tune is a near perfect haunted eulogy to lost time.