The mourning begins ... Ros Taylor won't get out of bed for anything other than the UK Theme. Photograph: White Packert/Getty Images
I used to hate the UK Theme. When I first started getting up painfully early three or four times a week to write the Wrap, Guardian Unlimited's newspaper digest, it seemed to epitomise the cold, muscle-aching misery of rolling out of bed in the dark where no birds sing. I cursed. Boyfriends whinged about being woken. The tune played jovially on. For a long time, I didn't even know it was called the UK Theme; I vaguely associated it with the Last Night of the Proms.
So how did I come to love this "god-awful tune" (as a colleague calls it), this five-minute mish-mash of folk tune and classical medley that Radio 4 plays at 5.30am each morning? Why am I upset that the station wants to replace it with a perfectly decent news bulletin which would be of considerable use in my job?
Probably because the Theme has two qualities that make it ideal for the 5.30am slot. It is evocative, and it is rousing. Very few pieces of music, Beethoven's Ninth excepted, manage both, and the Ninth - crucial, this - has words. A person woken early in the morning does not want words. They crave non-specific motivation and reassurance that they are only temporarily abandoning bed, warmth and companionship. The piccolo tune of What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor is perfectly judged; the lyrics would annoy. Nor would I ever want to hear the words "Rule Britannia!" bellowed in my ear in the pre-dawn gloom.
For some reason, the penultimate section of the Theme evokes a quiet riverbank and the smell of grass for me - but why, I have no idea. Parts of it may be repetitive and mildly annoying, but I would no more kill it than I would scare away a blackbird singing a dawn chorus.
That's why it is disingenous of Mark Thompson, the BBC's director general, to point out that people "will be able to download the Spiegl medley from our website and programme their digital radios to play it whenever they like". Firstly, not everyone owns a digital radio that can be programmed in this way. Secondly, the UK Theme conjures a sense of solidarity with all the other poor benighted souls who are striving to reach a common aim: the hot water in the bathroom. It's not an on-demand download. It's a public service.
So perhaps it was inevitable that Gordon Brown would wade into the debate today to praise the Theme. The chancellor's intervention served to remind us of how hard he works, of course, but it was probably also inspired by his current cause celebre, Britishness.
Lay off the Theme, Gordon. It's bad enough to watch it becoming a political scratching-post for rightwingers - who probably never actually listen to it - desperate to expose the BBC's supposed PC culture. Once the poor tune becomes associated with a Presbyterian work ethic, it's doomed. Put it this way: I'm not getting out of bed for anything else.
* Listen to the UK Theme (BBC .ram file)
