Hi,
Thanks for your help Fredpauli however unfortunately I have still not had success. I have trawlled the internet (including Chappells sheet music), asked at a big sheet music shop and, although I now know the name (!) and composer (which is very useful-thanks again), I still cannot track down the sheet music for the J.R.Hartley theme by Dick Walter.I am suprised since it is so popular and surely must exist somewhere (probably in a volume of other T.V. themes pieces)since it is so popular. Can anybody help?

I have found the script from the commercial and a photo still from the commercial...but no sheet music yet. I'll keep looking. I do so love a challenge. In the meantime, enjoy:

(Elderly gentleman visits a book shop)
He: I don't suppose you have a copy of Fly Fishing by J.R. Hartley ... it is rather old.

Assistant: Nothing I'm afraid.... I'm sorry.

(He tries another book shop)

He: It's by J.R. Hartley....

(Then he tries a few more without success before returning home)

Daughter: No luck Dad? Never mind — you can always give this a try:
(she hands him the Yellow pages)

Voice-over: Good old Yellow Pages! We don't just help with the nasty things in life, like a blocked drain— we're here for the nice things too!

He (speaking on the phone): You do! Oh, that's wonderful! Er...can you keep it for me? ...
My name? Oh yes ... it's J.R. Hartley.

[With Norman Lumsden]

Ha! Found the video online at
youtube.com Nice music! It's easy enough you should be able to pick it out by ear and then write it down. But I'll still keep looking.

This ad was a cult ad A bit off topic but you may not know:

It was so well-loved and so successful that a publisher capitalised on it by republishing a genuine book on fly-fishing but changing the original writer's name to the pseudonym 'J R Hartley'. So there was then a real 'Fly-fishing' by J R Hartley (And it sold well, being timed for the Christmas market as a suitable jokey gift)

The actor in it did not start an acting career until he was 65. Norman Lumsden, a bass, had been a very successful opera singer whose career started in the 1930s. In his late years he took bit parts and odd bits of advertising to pass the time: he was chosen for this ad at 76 It made him famous overnight, to his great amusement, and far better known for a few words than he ever was in his whole, proper, career at Covent Garden or on records ! And he had never fly-fished, but, sprightly as ever, he decided that it would be silly to be so famous fictionally for something he'd never done in real life so, eventually, at the age of 85, he took it up He died at age 95.

Fred, he also reprised his role in a later commercial (1994) by Yell entitled "New Passion". He returned as JR Hartley and has given up fly fishing on the advice of his doctor and used the yellow pages to take up golf. As info, the name of this campaign was called "Not Just For The Nasty Things In Life" and ran from 1983-1992.

Hi,
I am very grateful for your help and interesting comments about the advert. I have looked on utube but despite registering, for some reason I am unable to access the video-though I have adobe reader.I will try again later, but I really hope the sheet music is available.

Thanks again

I'm not registered on youtube.com and I had no problem finding the clip and playing it. I just did a search for "1983 yellow pages" and that one video popped up. I didn't even need Adobe Reader.

I have just done the same as you, Georgia, and enjoyed the advert very much. A classic in its own right. Fred, very interesting information, thanks for that.
Rachel, a lady of your skills should be able to write down the notes from the given information...... If the piece is too ephemeral for your requirements, extend the ideas into a larger, structured composition.

Pretend it is a component part of a music degree course...

"Develop the given material into a jazz composition for solo piano. Your work should last around 8-10 minutes, using a variety of textures. Counterpoint, changes of key and time signature, and imitative sequential writing are perfectly acceptable compositional techniques for this exercise, but adhere fairly closely to the prevailing mood; wistful, nostalgic, introspective. Samba, Rock n' Roll and Rap styles are best avoided for this section."


PS Well done, Georgia. There are some bright lights in this website, are there not?

Hi,
Still can't access the music on youtube to remind myself now how it goes after all these months, but I'll keep trying.Is there another website which plays the music?

I just don't know why it isn't working for you. When I click on the above link it simply opens a browser window with media player up and running in the window. It has an option to share the video so I could e-mail it to you but more than likely the e-mail would just have a link to this same page. Do you have a myspace profile? There is also an option to post video and if I click on that it will probably give me an html code to post into myspace or a similar site. But I do have to create an account in order to access that code. Let me know if you want to try that...

Actually I just found this code that someone posted:

|object width="425" height="350"||param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/abt6wGtWVX8"||/param||param name="wmode" value="transparent"||/param||embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/abt6wGtWVX8" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"||/embed||/object>

It should be the html code for the video and as I mentioned above, if you have a myspace profile you should be able to add this video. However, after posting I see that the site didn't accept everything in the code so I've replaced all the "<" and ">" with "|"

When you say to 'post video' on Youtube, it actually posts it completely for you. But I also put in the code Georgia gave and uploaded it and here it is. Does that help? It's still pretty much the same type of thing.

Justin, you rock! And I didn't know you had a profile over there.

He is a star, is he not...?

Yep. There's not much there though. This is actually my first blog entry.

Hi,
I'm ashamed to say I have been away a while and have not accessed 'answerpool' for a long time, therefore I did not see your last post until recently. Thanks for your help- It'll probably work when I'm at my parents computer rather than this really ancient lap top I'm borrowing, which I'm not 100%sure plays sound. Anyway, you've been really helpful. Thanks again.