Composer of The Sunday Game theme tune, James Last, dies

Big band leader James Last, who composed Jägerlatein - The Sunday Game signature tune - has died at his home in Florida, aged 86.

This article was originally published in The Irish Times in July 2013. In it Malachy Clerkin talks to some people associated with the famous piece of music and the story behind it.

The most recognisable piece of music on Irish television owes its fame to somebody who wasn’t particularly interested in sport, who had never watched a GAA match and whose life since has been devoted to academia, mainly in the areas of racism and sociology. Ronit Lentin grew up in Israel but moved to Ireland in 1969. In time she would go on to be Head of Sociology in Trinity College but back in the ’70s, she was a young woman just looking for work.

Ronit Lentin: "I had worked on Israeli television before I ever came to Ireland. I didn't work on sports there, I worked as a general production assistant. I did one basketball game as a production assistant, that was all."

Jim Carney: "The sig tune may have been one of the great flukes of all time. Genuinely. None of us had heard it before. Well I certainly hadn't anyway. But it just so happened that Ronit Lentin worked in the sports department for a while and that's how it came up."

RL: "I first was a production assistant and then I became a research assistant for Seven Days. Then I went off to have children but came back to work in the sports department for a year. It was a short-term contract but it was good fun, very good fun. Some of it went over my head because I wasn't a sports aficionado. It was a job."

JC: "She came back from Israel with a tape of this music and she passed it on to the sports department. It may not have been specifically for this new show but it would have been something that they could use."

RL: "Really? Jim said that? Well I don't remember that. I do remember suggesting the tune but I don't remember a cassette. I thought I whistled it for them and they went to look for it. Maybe I'm wrong. It's possible. This tune had been used a few times on TV in Israel. It was very well known. So I suggested it for RTE."

JC: "They then had to track it down because all they had was this tape recording. And it James Last happened to be playing in Ireland around that time. Oliver Barry brought him over a few times to play in the RDS and he always did a few nights in April with this big orchestra of his.

“So what happened was that someone in RTE actually went to the James Last concert, wormed their way backstage at the end, went up to him and asked could they use Jagerlatein as the theme tune. He said no problem and he said he’d give them a real recording of it. It was the equivalent now of going up to Bruce Springsteen backstage and asking for moment of his time to see if he had an MP3 of Born In The USA handy to use for a TV show.”

Jagerlatein (which translates as the ‘tall tales hunters tell’, since you ask) became the sound of the summer over time. And it stayed that way for 25 seasons of the show. But ahead of the summer of 2004, it was replaced. To almost universal outrage.

Michael Lyster: "The argument was it was time for a change and that we couldn't just do the same thing with this programme year after year. There are lots of ways you can do that and one of the ways was to change the music. Now, the guys who wanted to change it, their argument was that the old music was of its time and it was difficult to put pacy pictures along with it. They wanted the fast-fast – two seconds of this, two seconds of that."

Paul Byrnes: "It was a huge thing to change the music. Management just felt that the programme needed to be looked at again and refreshed and modernised and they felt a change was needed. It was a matter of trying something to see how it works. But we never thought we'd get that reaction to it. The public outcry kind of said it all."

ML: "The number of people who came up to me telling me to change the music was incredible. And I was going, 'Sure don't be giving out to me. Ring RTE and make them change it.'"

JC: "I rang up and gave out stink about it. Des Cahill brought myself, Michael Lyster and Seán Óg Ó Ceallacháin on to his radio show. I was gone from RTE so I didn't care really. I was still freelancing but I had kind of packed it in a bit. So I didn't care and I said on Des's programme that this was a terrible thing. The music was the single most iconic tune on Irish television. Not just sport, television in general. A nation wept almost."

ML: "Some pieces of music just become iconic. The Formula One Fleetwood Mac music, the Match Of The Day music – people just like them. And it was the same with The Sunday Game. People just like it and they don't really care if the pictures go with it or not. So it eventually came back."

PB: "The music was hugely popular but it was only when it was gone that people realised how popular. And more than that, actually how important it was to the public. Thankfully it returned a few years later."

In 2008, ahead of the show’s 30th season, Jagerlatein came back. And all was right with the world.