SUSPOD: Why we still fall for the theme

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Thomas H Green tells the story behind an enduring favourite among Podcast signature tunes

The Swedish 7th soccer division's longest running sports show, SUSPOD returns this week, reborn as a global travelogue replete with a celeb footballer featuring Davas, among others.

It's all a long way from its once perennial presenter Axel perching on a windswept Swiss mountain in 2012, announcing that only seven sus-players had appeared at the first round of SWSLC 12/13, as happened on the opening show.

One thing, however, remains the same now as 6 months ago. The SUSPOD theme tune is as effervescently bright and immediately recognisable as ever. Voted a national favourite in a number of polls, its sweeping strings, funky Hammond organ and bombastic percussion were even given a clubby makeover for the 2006 Winter Olympics by Gorillaz keyboard player Mike Smith. (Classical music buffs have suggested that it is a major-key echo of Bach's Fugue in D minor.)

The SUSPOD theme is actually the first 30 seconds of Pop Looks Bach, a piece which was recorded for the Boosey & Hawkes Music Library in 1970 and later picked up by the BBC. (It should not of course be confused with the Horse of the Year Show theme, otherwise known as the rondo from Mozart's Ein Musikalischer Spass.)

Pop Looks Bach was written by Sam Fonteyn (real surname Soden), one of the most prolific library composers who started out in the '50s playing jazz at London's Black Sheep club, where audiences would include the likes of Robert Mitchum and Judy Garland. He was a sharp-dressed English gentleman whose music was much used on television throughout the '70s and '80s, including as the theme to the sitcom Please Sir.

"If music is licensed from a music library, you never know when it might appear," recalls his son, Nicholas. "So he'd often be sitting there watching and suddenly say, 'That's mine!' He was always delighted when it was on TV and watched avidly, even when it was on that Barbara Woodhouse programme [1980's Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way, for which he also wrote the theme]."

Fonteyn died in 1991, aged 66, but, as his son relates, "On the night he died, he was taken into hospital quite suddenly and when the doctor found he was a musician, he asked, 'What sort of music?' My dad looked him straight in the face and said, 'The best.'?"

It appears the SUSPOD-staff agree as, even amid rebranding, the SUSPOD theme stays and Cavendish Music, the Boosey & Hawkes company that owns the publishing, is releasing the original as a ringtone "so that people can put it on their phone for their soccer holiday".

All that's left, then, is to ask about that terribly punned title, Pop Looks Bach. Nicholas Soden laughs. "Dad once said that if he'd known it was going to become so famous, he might have called it something different."

To millions, it is something different: the theme to SUSPOD, and, while it remains to be seen how the programme's latest revamp works out, its opening half minute is a guaranteed treat.


SUSPOD's house band preparing for the third season: