Brenda and I have been watching episodes of House, a medical mystery series. My son left the first two years of it at home when he went off to school. The medical stuff is more than a little disturbing, but the characters are growing on us. Not nearly as good as The West Wing, which took us all of the 2006-2007 school year to watch.
One of last night’s episodes ended with Doctor House (played by Hugh Laurie), sitting in his office, with The Who‘s Baba O’Riley playing loudly on his iPod, connected to Bose speakers. The quirky but brilliant diagnostician has just lied to the Transplant Board to get a new heart for his patient.
House is miming the opening synthecizer on his desk (We’ve all done this before — haven’t we?), when he reaches back and breaks into piano on the credenza. Just as the drums kick in, and he wheels his chair back to become Keith Moon, the hospital’s new Chairman of the board (who doesn’t like House’s unconventional demeanor) walks in. House, being House, doesn’t stop. He simply says, “Here comes the good part!” Rather than enjoy the show, the Chairman of the Board reaches over and switches off the iPod.
An amiable confrontation ensues, followed by a muting out of the set and the continuation of Baba O’Riley…
I don’t need to fight
To prove I’m right
I don’t need to be forgiven
It made me think, somebody, somewhere, has made a very cool niche job of researching out the perfect song from a vast history of musicology for a specific scene in TV or Movies.
This person could live in India — or she might live in the three stoplight mill town I grew up in.
Love it. 128Kbps Song on a Bose high end system. It’s like earrings on a cow.
MY husband too loves that show, and so I’ve watched it during its season. He is an asst principal, and teachers at his school tell me all the time he has HOuse’s demeaner. His response–it works.
THis group does a fantastic job putting together their shots and complimentary sounds. Kudos to them.
The Who is getting a lot of airtime lately. Kinda funny that a British band is being selected to provide the soundtracks for so many American shows. That same song is the theme tune for CSI New York, and Who are You is the theme tune for the original CSI. I’m kicking myself that I can’t remember the theme tune for the Miami flavour of CSI, but I seem to recall that it’s also one of theirs. Nice royalties, no doubt!
I’ve only ever seen one whole episode of House, and it was one in which a Romany kid got a toothpick stuck in his innards. For two days I squirmed in my seat after that!
I have often wondered just how that sort of match is made — the “perfect” song or sound byte or video clip with the perfect scene. I’m pretty naive about the nitty gritty of TV production. So part of me thinks that they’ve just got a really good person on that production team, where “really good” means that s/he has a deep knowledge of music lyrics, in this case, and comes up with the right match. However, part of me wonders if there is some massive, proprietary database with metatags for the producers to search. And in my imagination, this database is horrendously expensive because it has been compiled for decades and is used exclusively by the “big” TV folks (or maybe each network has its own?). This could be completely wrong, but I just don’t know. It’s sort of like a newspaper clipping service for audio (or video) pieces.
Makes the show just that much more sophisticated and enjoyable, though, doesn’t it?
Love House – it’s a good show. Witty. Unlike a lot of garbage on TV. 😛