I think that my cultural compass may be a little out of line with normality.

Yesterday I was watching TOTP2 on UKTV Gold, because sometimes its fun to be reminded of  long-forgotten songs or artists even if it does mean putting up with Steve Wright’s inane comments.  At one point a song from 1978 was introduced with a comment that if you look closely you will see one of Britain’s top composers performing.

We then had three blokes playing keyboards and wearing daft sombreros.  The track was an instrumental that sounded like background music at a Spanish tourist hotel.  Back in 1978 I probably watched TOTP every week but this song rang no bells at all, but a face looked familiar: that looks like Rod Argent in the middle, I thought…

And then the caption at the bottom pointed out that the famous composer referred to was Andrew Lloyd-Webber, and indeed the bloke on the left was Lloyd-Webber.   Had I really been thinking that a mainstream show would refer to Rod Argent as a top composer and expecting the audience to recognise him?  What was I thinking?

I had to laugh when the next caption explained that the band name (Rodrigo Argentino and the something-or-others I think) came from the the name of Rod Argent who it turned out was the bloke in the middle after all.  I still can’t believe he was responsible for the record.  It was bad and bland even by AL-W’s standards, let alone his. No wonder they all tried to obscure their faces with sombreros.

Further captions explained that this was the theme tune for ITV’s coverage of the World Cup.  You can just imagine Rod knocking out a quick tune for a TV show and then finding himself contractually obliged to mime it on TOTP when its released as a single, and dragging some mates in to help out.  I wonder who the third person was?

For some reason the Wikipedia page on Rod Argent doesn’t mention this record at all, although it does mention his theme for the 1986 World Cup.  In fact a semi-thorough trawl through the Internet uncovered no direct references to this record at all.  I really wonder how the TOTP2 researchers found it and decided to include it.