A bit of vibraphone nostalgia

With glitter and lentils a lot could be achieved

The late Tony Hart gave a generation of children enthusiasm for homemade art, but he also helped popularise a tune now used to tap into our sense of nostalgia.

Anyone who was a child in the 1970s will remember hearing Left Bank Two, although probably not the name.

Hearing it should conjure up images of blurred chalk-drawn sailing boats and landscapes rendered in leguminous media - all the magic of The Gallery on Vision On, on which Tony Hart, who died at the weekend, became a children's TV star.

There quite a move now towards folk music, going back to real instruments - some of our kids stuff has got an organic feel to it Frank BarrettaDe Wolfe

A vibraphone tootles away while a brushed drum and a strummed acoustic guitar meander around in the background.

By comparison with Left Bank Two the average piece of shopping centre or elevator music sounds like thrash metal. As a piece of music it ambled along in sympathy with the cut-up card creations and intricate stencil work that flashed up in The Gallery, which also became a fixture of Hart's subsequent venture, Take Hart.

The piece was written and published in 1963, the work of a "Wayne Hill", also responsible for the award-winning theme to the 1960s TV series The Power Game.

It was recorded by anonymous session musicians in the Netherlands as library material for the British film and television music company De Wolfe. The session musicians were dubbed the Noveltones.

"They were just given names to give it some authenticity," says Frank Barretta, senior music consultant at De Wolfe.

The track would have been sent to the BBC on a promotional record, and having been chosen for a programme De Wolfe would then supply a broadcast version on magnetic tape.

But for it's appearance in Vision On, the music would have disappeared into relative obscurity, used occasionally but with no significance for the listener.

De Wolfe also supplied two other pieces of gallery music for Vision On, Merry Ocarina, by Pierre Arvay, and Accroche-toi Caroline, by Claude Vasori.

And being cheap and accessible library music with an emotional appeal, Left Bank Two has been used many times over the years, particularly on adverts.

"It's a natural reference to something with pictures or paintings. There is a certain demographic who would recognise it. It has been used on campaigns for cars, directly aimed at people of a certain age."

Distinctive pieces

An advert of a couple of years back for a company called Picture Loans used Left Bank Two. A woman is negotiating a