Jeff Alan Greenway: The Soundtrack of Storytelling - Music, TV, and Cultural Representation

Hello, strangers.

Welcome to the third episode of Television Times Podcast.

Today's guest is the Canadian composer, Jeff Alan Greenway.

Jeff is a really great songwriter, and he currently scores movies and plays live in and around the Toronto area.

He's a good friend, and I've known him for about 15 years.

So without further ado, let's delve straight in and find out what he thinks about telly.

Welcome to Television Times, a new podcast with your host, me, Steve Otis Gunn.

We'll be discussing television in all its glorious forms.

From my childhood, your childhood, the last 10 years, even what's on right now.

So join me as I talk to people you do know and people you don't, about what scared them, what inspired them, and what made them laugh and cry here on Television Times.

Hello, Jeff.

Well, it's been a very long time since I spoke to you in person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's been a very long time.

How are you doing?

Yeah, I'm good, man.

I just come back from the school run, pick up the kids.

And now I'm here doing...

You look the same, man.

Are you getting younger?

You look the same too.

I don't look the same.

Fucking no way.

I think you're matching glasses now, which is kind of cool.

Well, yeah, I got to 44 and I was...

Where was I?

Somewhere in China.

And I had to go around the back of an Amprac to unplug something and the guy went, can you go and get like a blah, blah, blah, 0.5, 0.6?

And I went around the back and I was like, I can't see a fucking thing.

So I had to go and buy glasses that day.

So there we are.

Oh, thank you.

I've got a few of them.

They're called Easy Peasy.

They're Italian.

I buy them in a shop in London now.

Last pair I bought was on Carnaby Street.

How fancy is that?

Yeah, so nothing to do with it.

For my listeners, which will be, I'm sure, quite predominant in the UK, do you want to tell them about yourself, who you are, what you do, I'll tell them how I know you.

Sure, sure.

So I'm, I guess I'm a musician, a teacher and a composer.

I've been a singer-songwriter, I play piano and sing, and I've been trying to get into the film composition, TV composition area for the last seven years or so.

And that's going quite well for you, isn't it?

I've seen a lot of posts online of you doing scoring films and short films and...

Yeah, thanks.

It's getting there.

It's a slow, but steady climb.

It's hard when you're sort of doing something else full time and you're trying to do that to get it going, but it's getting there.

Yeah, tell me about it.

I'm trying to do a podcast while bringing up three kids, one of my wife's at work doing a proper job.

So I sympathize.

So what did you do today?

So I edited some audio for seven hours.

What did you do?

Oh, I made a set for a show, you know, okay, fair enough.

Yeah, you're more tired, even though I'm staying up in the night.

So Jeff, tell us about the new film you've been scoring, the one about Indigenous Canadians, if you don't mind.

Yeah, it was really interesting, actually.

One of the really cool things about working in film is that every project is totally different, and you learn a lot from it.

So this was about an Indigenous Canadian stand-up comic, a young lady named Janelle Niles, who's been sort of making waves in sort of the Canadian Indigenous community, because they were not featured a lot in like comedy bars and that sort of thing.

They had a hard time getting gigs.

So she basically created her own show, which is really cool, and just booked it across Canada, and it went gangbusters.

And she's featuring all Indigenous comics in her show.

And so this short film that I was doing as a short documentary was basically about her and what she's done.

And they wanted a mix of sort of modern music and Indigenous music.

So I, of course, knew nothing about Indigenous music.

So I had to do lots of research on it, and I ended up working with a percussionist in Quebec, who's Métis, and he did some hand drumming for me.

And then I mixed in a lot of electronic music and piano and stuff like that.

And it was a really fun project.

I got to meet everybody involved, and it was a great learning experience too.

It sounds really interesting, Jeff.

It's weird, because on this side of the pond, we see Canada very differently.

We see it as a very friendly place.

It's hard for us to sort of put it in the same category as, say, the USA, regards its issues with its colonial and indigenous past.

You know, obviously, I'm not naive.

I know there's been problems for every country, but Canada just seems so friendly, you know?

Yeah, I know Canada has a horrible past.

What do they call them again?

The residential schools.

So, basically, the church and the government conspired to take away Native children from their parents and their families by force.

And it led to a whole generation of Native Canadians, of indigenous people who lost their past, who suffered a great deal from that.

And it's still not been resolved.

So, going back to the Indigenous comic, that's great because I've been watching Reservation Dogs, you know, the American comedy show.

Yeah.

I believe the first American TV show that features cast and crew of Native Americans.

And it's been a massive hit, isn't it?

And until it was on, you didn't realize that it wasn't on, if you know what I mean.

Especially from over here, it was like, those people just did not exist.

It's like you go to America, you go to, sorry, I know you're American too, but you go to USA and you walk around.

It's like, where is everyone?

Well, they're all in that car.

There's like huge reservations there.

I mean, not that I know of.

It's kind of so hidden.

It's really strange.

It's like they live in a different dimension among us or something.

It's really not right.

Yeah.

Yeah, and you mentioned Reservation Dogs.

I love that show.

I've actually been getting into a little bit more sort of, you know, Indigenous shows in the last couple of years because they've just been becoming more prominent.

And there's another great show, I don't know if you've seen it, called Dark Winds, which is on AMC originally.

And it's great.

It's like, it's about a couple of cops on a Native reservation basically in the States, in the 70s.

Right.

And it's kind of like murder mystery slash what?

Not really horror, but it's got a bit of the supernatural in there.

So some interesting, you know, supernatural native beliefs and that kind of thing.

It's a very, very good show.

They're coming back, I think, with the second season soon.

I will check that out.

I might just have to check the name of this so I get it right.

Three Pines as well, which I was watching last year with Alfred Molina.

That also has quite a good through line with the indigenous people and the things they've had to go through.

Was that Canadian?

Was that in Canada?

Yes, it was in Quebec, I believe.

Yeah, that was a really good show.

Alfred Molina, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a really good one.

Yeah.

I don't, yeah, I think it will come back, won't it, considering the ending.

No spoilers.

It's interesting to see those stories come to the fore after so long in the dark.

It must be good to be part of it, especially musically.

How do you adapt to those melodies and bring that into your music?

You said you work with a drummer from Quebec, but how do you, is it different keys?

Is it like detuned stuff or is it mostly rhythm?

Yeah, well, in my case, there wasn't too much of sort of traditional indigenous music because they wanted a modern feel.

So basically you can think of it sort of like, as like electronic music, you know, dance music with a little bit of an indigenous influence.

So I did actually do a lot of, you know, study of traditional indigenous music, because I wasn't sure at the beginning what they, how much they wanted and you know, what to feature.

And I spoke to some indigenous musicians, did a little bit of research.

And actually the fellow I worked with, Patrick Terrien in Quebec, gave me a really good history lesson on indigenous drumming.

And he also plays flute and all that, all that kind of stuff.

So he, he helped a lot too.

I also in school, we studied a little bit of indigenous music as well, like Arabic music and that kind of thing.

So I didn't really use a lot of sort of authentic indigenous elements in the music, because that wasn't really what they were going for.

They just wanted, you know, a little bit of that in, in the music.

It's always interested to me, like I've been watching a lot of Danish, Korean, everyone's watching Korean, but Danish, Spanish, Belgian shows.

And it's really funny when like a hip hop person appears and they start like rapping in like Danish or Spanish.

And it just seems so odd, but why would it be odd?

I mean, of course it's completely fine and completely normal.

But for me it's like, oh, that's, that's really quite, especially Danish, like a Danish rapper.

It's really funny.

Anyway, I should mention where I know you from.

So I met Jeff in Toronto in 2008, I believe.

So that's 15 years ago now.

Probably around this time, April, May, somewhere around there.

I was on, how would I say, I was working on a musical in England, which I decided to leave for various reasons.

And I put a guitar on my back, and I went around North America, literally sticking a pin in the map to see where I would go next.

Bought a guitar in New York, headed to Boston, headed to Toronto and did loads of open mics, where upon meeting Jeff, I then subsequently met my wife, all in the same couple of venues in Toronto.

So that was quite something.

And I believe we played together a couple of times, a couple of times maybe once or twice.

Trying to.

And Jeff came up to me after I played, the first time I played in three times, Jeff came straight up to me and said that he wanted to work with me and he really liked my music.

And I found that very, very, very humbling because I wasn't sure.

I was very nervous in that room.

Everyone seemed to be way more professional than me.

Imposter syndrome kicked right in.

The only thing I had in my favor was that I was from England and I had a kind of English vibe, I guess, which was a bit different.

Stop waffling on about music and get on with the subject in hand.

So this podcast is all about television.

Excuse me for asking.

I think we're about the same age, right?

Is that right?

Are you younger?

I might have a few years on you.

No, you don't.

Really?

With that face, this guy looks about 28.

What year were you born?

1969.

Me too.

69.

What month?

Are we buddies?

I guess we are.

What month were you born?

February.

Right.

Well, I was talking about this recently.

So you are literally almost, almost born for the Beatles rooftop gig.

Just a few weeks out.

I missed that.

I know.

Well, you know, it's weird to come from that time.

So we're going to have very similar things to talk about here.

So the first thing I'm going to bring up is something that I, you know, when you sort of hear a jingle or you see, obviously YouTube now, you can find the TV thing to anything.

And if someone mentions a TV show that you don't remember on, say, a podcast or whatever, you can then just check it out.

And of course you go, oh, yeah, of course, I remember what that was.

And over here, I don't know if it was somebody mentioned a TV show called The Beachcomers.

Do you know this show?

Beachcomers, yeah, Canadian.

It was Canadian, right?

And they talked about it, about a guy with a boat and they were like loggers or something.

And I was like, oh, I've never heard of that.

I put the opening theme on and I was like, oh, yeah, I know that show.

I used to watch that all the time.

But I don't know when I would have watched it.

I mean, it must have been on the BBC, I guess, over here.

Did you watch that show?

That's interesting that it even made it over there.

It was a Canadian staple.

It was on CBC television, like 24-7, like you could not turn on the TV without catching an episode of The Beachcomers.

And it was a great show, yeah, like the actors in that were great.

They actually had an Indigenous Canadian actor on that too.

That was one of the first shows, I think, that had as a regular in the cast.

And they had a few, actually.

Yeah, that's quite progressive.

Yeah, that's the early 70s, I'm assuming.

It was, yeah.

And yeah, it was a fun show.

I didn't watch it religiously, but you know.

Well, you couldn't, could you?

Because you probably, you couldn't pause it, you couldn't stream it.

You had to be there to probably get home for like, how was it there?

Because for us, we had until 1982, we only had three channels and BBC One, BBC Two and ITV.

BBC Two, there was nothing on there.

BBC One did about, I think it was from like maybe 420 to 545.

There was Children's TV on there and a bit in the morning as well, which became CBeebies.

And I don't think ITV did much.

There was very little to choose from.

Did you have a, because you, did you have cable as a kid in Canada?

Yeah, we were just kind of a step behind the US in terms of TV.

Like we would get what they got like maybe five years, two, three years later.

So yeah, we started out with like, of course, the over the air channels and we'd get like maybe five or six, you know, some in Canada, some from across the border, right in the US.

Toronto is very close to the US.

And then, yeah, then we got cable and then we had, I think, 13 channels.

Or something like that.

Right.

So, yeah, it gradually sort of increased over time.

So you would have had access to maybe more shows than us in some way because of that.

Yeah.

And a fair amount of American shows as well, right?

What we didn't have was British shows and that really tortured me as a kid because I was a huge, huge Dr Who fan.

And I would read about, you know, the latest Dr Who and, you know, the new villains and all that sort of thing in magazines.

It's like, we don't have that because we were two years behind England, right?

So we were always getting like the old doctor, right?

That is so behind.

I mean, that's like, that reminds me of when, as recent as 1999 to 2000.

I remember in 2000, this is not about films.

This is a television podcast, but still I'll mention this.

I happened to be traveling around the world in 1999.

And in the year 2000, I just saw all these films come out in the UK about nine months later that I'd already seen the previous year.

Sort of, you know, American Beauty, things like that.

Fight Club, Being John Malkovich.

They all came out about six months later, I think.

It was like you were watching films from the previous century because there was this massive delay.

But you're talking about a two-year television delay.

See, I...

And now everything's instant, right?

almost instant.

You can watch things from all around the world almost at the same time.

Well, I don't know if this is true.

We had the opposite situation in Ireland, in the Republic of Ireland, where I lived for five years as a child.

Now, this is word of mouth.

I don't know if this is true.

I guess I could check it out.

Maybe there's no information on this on Reddit or whatever.

But I was told that we got shows from the US.

They would test them on RTE.

They'd try them out on the Irish populace before they said okay to the UK.

Now, I don't know how true this is, but this is what I was told by my granddad at the time, my Irish granddad.

And I do remember the A-Team was on in Ireland.

And I used to watch that in my granddad's house.

And then I came to England.

And then it came out about a year after that as a new show.

So I think there might have been some truth to that.

There were shows that were shown in Ireland that weren't shown in the UK.

They never came.

Like, what's that American one where they always talk about it in movies, but I never know.

I don't have the reference.

MacGyver.

That's it.

See, we never saw that.

We don't know what that was.

It was always referenced.

It was like, what are they talking about?

No idea.

I do have a question for you actually, which isn't on my list.

Just because we were talking about being the same age.

For me, quite a lot of television I first saw was 60s TV as reruns and old black and white Laurel and Hardee's, Abbott Costello, little old black and white things that they would run on television on BBC Two, actually.

Now I think about it.

That was where you'd find the children's TV would end.

You flick over to BBC Two and there'd be like Harold Lloyd.

That's who I used to watch, which must have been what, 40 years old then.

Did they do any of that in Canada?

I remember seeing some Laurel and Hardee and of course like all the Bugs Bunny cartoons and that kind of stuff.

So there was a fair amount of sort of 50, 60 stuff on, but I think we might have been a little bit more ahead in terms of program at that time.

Like we were getting more stuff from the US and that kind of thing.

Oh, you're absolutely spot, because I was stuck watching Mr.

Ed and Bewitched, so I think we're a bit behind.

I remember Bewitched, I was onto.

Bewitched was good, wasn't it?

It was one of this much.

Well, we can probably link Bewitched to this, maybe not.

So Jeff, one of the questions I like to ask is a nice icebreaker early on.

Do you remember like which character, it could be a cartoon character, which person on television that you first kind of got those funny feelings about?

Is there someone obscure in Canadian television that we'll have to look up?

You know, you're a kid, you're looking at the telly, you go, oh, I like her, but I don't know why.

Yeah, yeah.

You know what's funny?

It was actually a British show.

New Avengers.

Do you remember the New Avengers?

This came up already with another guest.

Go on, tell me who.

Well, I think you know who.

There was only one female character.

Oh, the character changed.

The actress changed though in different seasons.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Apparently.

Maybe I didn't see that season or something.

Yeah, but it was Joanna Lumley, pretty.

Oh, Joanna Lumley.

She comes up on my radar in Sapphire and Still.

Do you ever see Sapphire and Still?

I don't think we got that one.

Did we get that one?

Very strange.

I don't think we really got it.

It was on for like a little while.

It was very late, 1979.

It rings a bell, but I don't remember that one as well.

I remember New Avengers was on quite a bit when I was younger.

I remember it because of the theme.

I love the theme of the show and the fact it was actually shot in Canada.

They had a whole season in Canada.

That was kind of neat to see all these Canadian locations.

How old would you have been when you got those little starings?

That's a good question.

Maybe 10.

Something like that.

Maybe 10, 11, 12.

And I still remember those huge pieces of furniture.

Caffeode ray tube, the size of your room, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember my granddad tried to fix one once.

He had the back off, the back was just plastic, and you could just access screws.

It wasn't like a Torx or anything.

It's just get a screwdriver.

He left it plugged in.

And I don't remember what exactly happened.

I found out afterwards that the copper retains some kind of electricity, doesn't it?

He got a massive bang off it.

Ow.

It's a good thing he was all right, because, yeah, I think people have been killed by that.

He was, I mean, he was okay doing that, but later on he tried to stick some egg boxes to the wall and he fell backwards into a glass table.

So I guess he was a bit of a klutz, bit of a Mr.

Bean character now, think about it.

Ouch.

Okay, so in the 90s, there wasn't a lot of Canadian TV shown over in the UK, but one thing that really caught my eye was Kids in the Hall.

Oh yeah.

I was a huge fan of Kids in the Hall.

When I first came to Canada, my then-girlfriend's cousin or whatever found out that I liked them.

And on the last day that I was in Toronto, he came and gave me this huge ream of paper.

And I said, what is this?

And he goes, oh, I just want you to have this to take.

This is before the internet, guys, 1997.

And he gave me this huge ream of paper and he said, this is all the scripts from the Kids in the Hall TV show.

I've printed them all out for you.

And I was like, and I'm to do what with this giant brick of paper?

I mean, I liked them, but I didn't need the scripts printed out.

It was very sweet.

But I remember coming, the first time I came to Toronto in 97, all I could think about was Kids in the Hall.

And I was looking for locations.

I saw a few of them, you know, it was very exciting.

That was the first thing I think that I knew, apart from Brian Adams, about Canada.

It might well be.

Did you watch that show?

Did you like it?

I watched it on and off.

I wasn't a huge fan, but they had some really hilarious skits.

And the thing I liked about them is they were really off the wall.

Like a lot of the writing was very fresh and different.

So it was interesting to see.

Because a lot of Canadian comedy, I think before that, was very formulaic.

Yeah, I forget who we had before that.

There was like a comedy duo that was really well known in Canada.

And I forget their names.

And they were like huge for like, I don't know, 30 years or something like that.

But they were very, very sort of formulaic and sort of stiff for lack of a better word.

You know, like it wasn't, I was really into Monty Python at the time, right?

And I love that kind of skewed sense of humor and kids in the hall reflected a little bit of that, I think, you know, they also did some really wacky stuff.

It's funny you should say that, because you just made me think that for me, like the Canadian comedies that have been on in the last few years, is it Corner Gas?

And what's the one in the convenience store, an Asian convenience store?

What's that called?

Kim's Convenience.

I tried to watch it, but I mean, I'm not going to say it's terrible or anything, but it's not like groundbreaking.

It's not exciting.

It doesn't, considering the amount of comedians that come out of Canada, and they have the Montreux Comedy Festival.

It is weird that the Canadian TV shows aren't generally that funny until up to, say, Schitt's Creek.

Really, it is odd, apart from Sketch.

Yeah, there's always been that kind of comedy show here.

Like, there's, you know, stuff like Kids in the Hall was rare.

You know, like, there were a few shows that were good like that.

Letter Kenny is quite funny.

That's done quite well in the US.

Yeah, I've seen a few clips of that.

Is that on Netflix or something?

Yeah, that's kind of different, too.

It's quite cute.

Letter Kenny.

Is it in any way Irish?

Because that's an Irish county.

I don't know.

Irish Canadians or something.

There may be some Irish heritage to it.

Yeah, maybe.

It's just, it's a real slice of sort of like small town Canadian on that show and the characters are very, very funny.

I don't want to bore everyone with the same answer on every podcast, but Jeff and me probably agree on this one.

So if I was to ask you which TV show or TV series, starring David Saul, in the late 70s, scared the shit out of you, what would be your answer?

I guess Stursky and Hutch is not the correct answer, right?

There's an S at the beginning.

Oh yeah, Salem's Lot.

Oh my God.

I watched the trailer again yesterday.

It's still horrific.

It's still...

What were they thinking?

Yeah, I got the Blu-ray a few years back.

It was in Scowick Static that they finally released it on Blu-ray.

I watched it when I was probably about six or seven.

I think my dad, it was a little bit of a parenting fail there.

He used to watch TV at night and he was fine if I just sat down next to him and we were watching TV together.

I don't think he really thought too much about what it was we were watching.

I watched some terrible stuff with him.

So Salem's Lot was one of them and I think there was a movie called Blood Beach or something like that too.

Kind of questionable.

Although we sometimes mention movies, all the movies mentioned, you will realize, were shown on a television at some point.

So technically these are movies on a television watching at home.

Still television, television, television, television times.

It was like you got sucked in by the sand on the beach, by these monsters that were underneath.

You have to be aware of the sand.

The quicksand, yeah, in the 70s and 80s.

It was all about quicksand, wasn't it?

Which I've subsequently heard is not true.

But I always thought I was going to, if I went off a path or whatever, I remember even being in New Zealand as an adult going, if I go over there, is that quicksand?

Am I going to just go into the earth?

Yeah, meanwhile, it's really slow sand.

It takes like a day or something.

Yeah, that's crazy.

I mean, I do wonder about this.

Maybe you had remote controls.

We didn't in the late 70s in England, but maybe you had a clicker as they call them.

I do wonder if that's why, when my kids come in, if I'm watching something inappropriate like the comedy show Dave, which I love, I have to pause that because it's so inappropriate.

If my boy comes in and he sees that, he's going to see something you shouldn't, or you try and click to the frame where you're trying to pause it at a frame where it's not obvious that something dodgy is happening.

Of course, no one did that for us.

I remember going downstairs the same and seeing all manner of horrific ITV cop shows with people beating the shit out of each other, all the professionals, I used to watch the professionals.

That's true.

I used to watch the professionals.

I must have been about eight or nine.

That is hugely inappropriate.

There was prostitution and drugs and people fighting and calling each other as many swear words as they could get away with then.

You know, come here, you tart, fuck you.

You'd have to walk through the house to go to the bathroom, I guess that's probably why.

Silly question, but did you have remote controls when you were a kid?

I don't remember when we got them, but eventually, yeah.

We had, I think, the remote that sat on the TV with all the buttons, you know, so you could push all the different channels.

It wasn't really a handheld remote.

So you still had to go over.

Yeah, I've heard about this one.

It was really a remote, it was connected to the TV, but you had to walk over it to push it.

What's the point of that?

Yeah.

Make the cable longer.

And then we got the ones with the digital readout and the little clicker, right?

But yeah, I think probably late 70s, early 80s, something like that.

It's like a poor man's remote.

You know what I had like that?

I think when I was about 10 or 11, I got a remote control car and I always wanted a remote control car.

But one of my aunt's or uncle's got me like a cheap one.

And it was, but it was connected.

So I had to walk around with the wire connected to the car.

So it didn't quite have the same vibe.

True.

I remember our TVs, they used to have like a special plastic, would it have been plastic?

A special little thing that you would shove in just above the channel.

You had a little clippable secret box that you'd open and in there were these little dials and you put them in, a bit like putting a pen on a cassette and you would just ever so slightly move it and it would tune the channel better.

I just remember that.

Oh yeah.

Before digital tuning, manual tuning.

They sound like we're from 1850s, seriously.

It's unbelievable, man.

So, let's bring it up to Modern Times.

What's your favorite show on right now over there?

Something maybe we don't know about.

Favorite show, favorite show.

I'm watching a bunch of stuff right now.

I'm really into sort of the horror shows that are on.

There's been a real resurgence in like good horror TV in the last few years.

And I've really gotten into this show called From, which is on Paramount, and it is killer.

It is like one of the best horror shows I've seen in like 20 years.

You posted about this, didn't you?

And I wrote it down somewhere, I forgot.

Yeah, I believe it's from The Creators of Lost.

And it's basically, it's a mystery about this small town in sort of the middle of nowhere in the US that people get trapped in.

They're driving somewhere and all of a sudden they get stuck and they can't get out.

Oh, that's reminded me of a 1960s episode of The Twilight Zone, Black and White, where they try and leave the town, but every road leads back into the town.

Stop over in a quiet town was a 1964 episode of The Twilight Zone by Rod Serling.

I originally thought they took a car to leave the town.

It turns out they took a train.

And that's probably where all of that originally comes from, right?

But it's really, really well done.

Like it's, you know, it's like layers of mystery upon each other and the creatures in it are genuinely horrifying.

They're basically like vampire types.

They're like regular people until they're not.

And it's, it's a genuinely scary show.

And I can't say that there's been a lot of those around.

And it just started a second season now.

So they're on the second season, but it's really sort of under the radar.

Not a lot of people know about it.

Yeah, I haven't heard of it.

And I only saw your post and I do remember meaning to write it down.

I didn't, and then I probably couldn't remember.

I remember who's in it.

It's that guy from Lost and from Oz, isn't it?

What's his name?

Yeah, I don't remember the names of the...

Harold Perrineau.

I was always scared of horror, probably because of Salem's Lot and other TV shows that I saw as a kid, like Rent a Ghost and things like that.

But for me, I've definitely had a massive resurgence of my interest in horror, but I lose it.

I lose faith in this TV show usually for one of two reasons.

It's usually kind of the same reason, but it's always if it's religious, if it suddenly goes and God must, and you've got to put a cross up to stop something, it's like, well, I'm out.

Or there's some kind of demon.

I watched a movie, we're not talking about movies, but I did watch a movie recently where it was pretty good until the end and then it became something about a demon and a Bible and I was, that's ruined it for me.

Can we just keep away from that?

At least have some kind of like underground demon dweller that isn't anything to do with God.

Then I'll be invested because I'm not going to believe in that.

It's just not realistic.

You'd like this show then because it has nothing to do with religion whatsoever and there's some really, really interesting ideas in it.

It's very, very well done.

The other show I was going to mention that I really like, but I don't think you will because it's got a lot of religious overtones.

Sometimes, I mean, I can watch, you know, I'll watch like, what's it called in English?

It's called Ride Upon the Storm.

I think this is the Danish show.

That's all about a priest.

I can watch that.

That's fine.

It's just if it's like the cure to this demon going back to hell is some kind of special water or a silver bullet or something.

I just I don't buy any of that because it doesn't scare me because I don't believe in it.

So what I believe in?

Weird things jumping out at me in the night from the sitting room.

That's what I believe in.

So just show me a shadow behind a door and I'll shit myself.

You know, that that gets to me.

Stuff like that.

Like those.

I was going to say, it's much more effective when they do that.

Right.

And what you imagine in your mind is 10 times more horrifying than, you know, the bad CGI that they often show you on the screen.

Yeah, true.

Absolutely.

I agree.

It's interesting that we're all getting into horror, though, isn't it?

I wonder if that's a thing now, like people of our generation who, you know, they didn't like it as kids, but feel safe enough to watch it now.

Maybe it's taken like 30 years of like internal therapy.

There's a TV show from Korea where this monster comes up.

This one works, comes up from, I think, what they call hell, but because it's not Christian, I can watch it.

And these monsters just turn up in the middle of Seoul and start trashing the place and dragging people down.

And it looks absolutely mad, like, well, I'm not gonna enjoy that.

I was really, really impressed of how well they did it.

And it was scary.

This is where we took a little break in the recording.

That's why it sounds a tiny bit disjointed.

Anyway, back to the podcast.

So the TV show I was talking about is called Hellbound.

So it is hell that they're talking about.

And these monsters come up and they just drag people that I think they consider to be bad down to hell.

But the way it's done is it's a TV show, but it looks like a $300 million American movie.

It's amazing, amazing what they're doing in Korea.

It's incredible.

Never heard of that one.

What year was that around?

I think it was last year.

I saw it.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, it's pretty recent.

See, I don't like zombie stuff either.

Zombie stuff does nothing for me.

Yet somehow the Korean stuff manages to pull me in, you know, in a way that things like Walking Dead didn't.

Are you a Walking Dead guy?

I was for the first season and then, you know, I kind of reluctantly stuck with it until they went off the rails.

I think it was season seven or something like that.

And then I just, I lost interest.

I do like The Last of Us though.

I don't know if you've seen The Last of Us.

Yes, I was just about to say, because I too, I think I saw one or two episodes of The Walking Dead.

It's not for me.

I understand it's probably a very good show.

Maybe I'll watch it when I'm 70, but right now it's not really my cup of tea.

And The Last of Us, I completely wrote off about 10 minutes in when a certain thing happens to the main character's relation.

And I thought, I'm out.

I can't watch things like this.

And then we rewatched the whole episode together and then we were in.

And it was, it's fantastic, really good.

I didn't think I'd go for it because it does seem, firstly, it's a computer game, don't care about that.

Secondly, it's, you know, a man on a quest with a child and she's special.

And I was like, oh God, really?

Seriously, is this gonna be, you know, through a land of zombies, which aren't zombies.

But you know, I was really impressed with it.

And it really did tick all my boxes in the end, which I was surprised by.

So never judge a book by its first 10 minutes, I guess.

Yeah, yeah.

I think the characters are really sell it.

You know, like the actors are wonderful and the writing is really, really good too.

Really top notch.

Absolutely excellent.

And the other show that I obviously love and I'm not an original person here, but the best writing I've seen since, you know, all those good shows like Sopranos and The Wire that I watched way too late is Succession, which I don't know if you watch Succession.

It's incredible television.

Yeah, I haven't seen that yet.

But yeah, like your recommendation is, you know, taken very highly there.

I'll check that out.

I love The Wire too.

I didn't get into that until literally 10 years ago.

Oh, I watched it much more recent than that.

It was for me, it was around 2017.

And I started watching, I watched all of The Wire.

And then I watched The Sopranos.

I think I saw maybe the first season of Sopranos or some of it at the time, the first season.

But it was the year 2000 or 99 or something.

And I was like, what am I gonna program a video and come back and watch it on a Sunday?

I mean, I can't do this.

I was always away.

There was no way to like, there was a massive gap for me between 2000 and 2006 where I never watched anything.

Because it was just, you know, it was on.

And once I, if I missed it, that was that, you know.

People do know, I guess by now, but I used to work in theater.

Some of the sound engineer and I'd be working on various plays and musicals.

And I was on the road once and a friend of mine came up with a DVD of House.

I'd never heard of it.

Like now I would not be able to not know about a television show, but for this big sort of six-year gap, I knew nothing about popular culture when it came to television.

And it was season two of House because I've got both seasons.

You should watch it on your laptop.

I only recently got a laptop as well.

First laptop was 2004.

So I put the DVD in and I was hooked.

That was the first TV show that got me back in.

And then I spent some time in Japan and I go to, oh, let me say it correctly, Steyr Video Shop.

And they still had like video rentals, obviously DVDs.

And I would get CDs and pump them into iTunes.

But I'd also get a lot of DVDs when I was in Japan.

And I would just watch and I would devour TV shows that I'd missed, like extras, you know, Ricky Gervais.

Any DVD I could find that was a TV show.

And I would be thrilled if there was two or three seasons of something like that.

Whereas now, when a new show comes out, it better be a limited season or a very good show.

Cause if I start watching it and I think, well, am I gonna watch this for six years?

I don't know if I can think so.

It's gotta be good.

It's gotta get my attention.

You know what I mean?

It's a commitment now.

Also getting older, I don't wanna kind of just waste my time.

I'm not gonna watch it till I'm 65 or something.

Come on.

Yeah, there's too much content out there now.

Like that's a big problem, right?

I mean, if you think about it back in the nineties, you know, if we go back to there, there were the major networks, you know, that all had a certain number of shows.

Now you've got like the major networks.

You've got Netflix.

You've got Amazon.

You've got all these different streamers and they all have like 15 shows.

Yeah, you can have your own one.

Set one up now.

We're doing content right now.

We're adding to the pile.

Yeah, it's so hard to know what to watch, right?

It really is.

And I do do quite a lot of research, but man, there is so much.

And there are shows that I do want to watch that I sort of, it just doesn't feel like the time, but like how did I find time as a kid to watch like The Little House on the Prairie then?

You know what I mean?

Cause that's shit, isn't it?

That was shit.

Obviously it was shit.

The very, very slow show that one.

I remember watching that as a kid.

I was an avid watcher of that.

And it was so like, you know, puritanical and like, you know, yeah.

I guess that was authentic for The Times, right?

I guess so.

Wholesome, wasn't it?

Wholesome.

That and The Waltons, right?

Remember The Waltons?

I didn't like The Waltons.

There was something about The Waltons that creeped me out a bit more.

It felt like a family of paedophiles to me.

Is there any big reality TV shows over there that you watch, anything like that?

I mean, we don't watch a lot of it over here, just a few select good things.

To be honest, I hate reality TV.

I hated it since it started.

I don't like the idea of sort of cameras and people's faces following their life.

I find it makes me uncomfortable.

I feel like it's too intrusive, and then half the time it's scripted anyway, so it's not really real.

People pretending to be themselves, yeah.

It's awful.

I mean, we only watch, I've watched Traitors recently, which I did like.

Really, we only watch the UK Apprentice, and we do watch Dragon's Den, which I believe is still called Dragon's Den in Canada too, isn't it?

Yeah, actually I did watch that a little bit.

I found that was an interesting show.

Yeah, and the Americans took it and turned all the volume up and made everyone even worse and started asking for 90% of everyone's business.

Called it Shark Tank.

It should have been called something else.

But yeah, I mean, I've watched a few of those and it's okay, but I mean, it's just nasty.

It's just like a capitalist nightmare version.

Like over here, one of the dragons will go, okay, yeah, I can do that for 6% and you think in America, they'd ask for 80.

And they want to be the CEO or whatever, right?

Yeah, take the whole thing.

Exactly, they just want to steal the companies off everybody.

That's pretty awful.

So your Dragon's Den was obviously with UK business people as opposed to Canadian business people, which was the original show, I think.

I believe it's from Japan.

It was a Japanese concept in the late 90s and then UK was one of the earlier Western ones and then You Guys and then America, America Last.

There's even Australian one.

I'm pretty sure there's an Australian.

See, I did not know that.

That's interesting.

I thought it was actually a Canadian show because I'd never seen it anywhere else.

Like it hadn't been on our TV.

The Dragon element is the Japanese element, I believe.

I can't remember what it was actually called.

The Tigers of Money.

The Tigers of Money.

That doesn't quite translate, does it?

Yeah.

It first aired in 2001.

So the first year of the 21st century, for all of those out there that actually know how maths works.

Okay, Jeff, so we talked a little bit about sci-fi.

Are you a sci-fi guy or a sci-fi guy?

Yeah, a huge sci-fi guy, but I have to say, I've been disappointed with a lot of TV sci-fi.

Few years back, everybody was raving about the reboot of Battlestar Galactica.

I had a feeling you were going to say that.

I started watching it, and it's like, what is this?

Yeah, I fizzled out.

Nothing, well, I think partly because I grew up with a 70s TV show.

Yes, me too.

And so I was kind of new to the story and who the characters were.

And it's like, everything's different in this.

You know, why are Cylons like, why do they have blonde hair and look like beautiful women?

You know, like, this doesn't make any sense to me.

So I couldn't get into that, right?

And I didn't like how they totally changed it completely.

But there have been some really good shows in the last little while.

I, of course, grew up with Dr Who, right?

So I was really excited when they did the reboot of Dr Who.

Couldn't really get into it as much as the original.

The Christopher Ecclestone season, the first one.

Yeah, I liked him.

I liked him.

I wish he would have stayed on a little bit longer.

Well, I didn't, what I wasn't as crazy about was the writing.

I found it to be a little too soap opera-ish, romantic undertones and...

Oh, was there a will they, won't they kind of thing between the doctor and the...

Yeah, and it's like, and a lot of family drama.

And it's like, yes, I remember that in the show.

I've never seen a David Tennant episode.

I've never, I didn't follow it far into that new version.

Dr Who for me is embedded in my past.

It's not something I watch now or I'm really interested in the new ones with Disney and everything.

Come on.

But that one was Event TV in the UK, because it's such a established show and everybody has grown up with it.

There was a huge gap where it wasn't on 10, 15 years.

There was some little bits here and there around the millennium.

But when that Christopher Eccleston episode aired in, I want to say 2006, 2007, I was on another theatre show and we all went downstairs into the green room in Cambridge.

I remember this and we all sat around in like a Big Brother type sofa.

We all just watched it and everybody shut the fuck up.

We all watched it and it was great.

We were all so happy that it was back.

And then every week we would all do this on tour.

That was the silent time.

We'd all go before the show because it was on perfectly time that we could watch it before the show.

And we'd all go to the green room and watch Dr Who.

It was incredible.

It was such a nice feeling.

I remember almost being tearful that it was back, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, it was great that they brought it back.

And there were some great episodes like there was one, I forget the name of it, where they had children with gas masks and stuff like that.

I was kind of set during the war.

That was a brilliant episode.

That was really, really good.

And there was the Weeping Angels, where a great new character that they brought in.

So there were some great stuff, and I'm really happy that they brought it back, you know?

But my heart is still with the original series.

You know, I grew up with Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker.

Yeah, Tom Baker was my doctor.

Yeah, and even though the special effects were, you know, sometimes pretty shoddy, you know, budgets were a little short, you know?

Sometimes the writing was, you know, a little misogynist, or especially those earlier shows.

It was great, you know.

The stories were really interesting.

You know, they were talking about environmental stuff and, you know, lots of really sort of heady topics, you know, to be, you know, for what was essentially a children's show.

And you say it wasn't on regularly in Canada?

No, it was terrible.

It was on once a week.

And like I said, it was two years behind.

It was on once a week for me, too, Bill, wasn't it?

Yeah, well, I guess that's because those were the days that everything was on once a week, right?

Yeah, I remember it was always Saturday.

And if I think of Tom Baker being Dr Who, I can see myself sitting down on the carpet in front of the TV with a bowl of Heinz tomato soup and some big white bread, because that's what I associate with that doctor.

John Pertwee was okay, but he always seemed a little creepy for me.

So Tom Baker was just, you know, a breath of fresh air.

I got to meet him once.

Yeah, in 1989, I was working in a tool shop in the West End, and he came in to buy, I'll probably have to cut this.

So we came into the shop and he bought something, and I was like blown away that he was standing right in front of me, and he was towering, you know, and he was bending down, he was larger than life, big curly hair, big white face.

I was like, it's fucking Dr Who, it's Dr Who, I'm serving Dr Who.

It was amazing, it was amazing for me anyway.

And then I saw him again like six months later, just walking down the street, buying a coffee, and I went, oh, I get it now, he's just around here.

You I think for me, around that time, there were other sci-fi shows that I watched, like Space 99.

Yes.

I used to watch Buck Rogers in the 25th century.

Was that Lee Majors?

No.

No, it was someone else.

Was it Lee Majors?

I don't know, everything was Lee Majors, wasn't it?

It wasn't in every single show.

I remember the Fall Guy, he was in the Fall Guy.

Fall Guy, which they're remaking into a movie with Ronald Gosling right now, in Australia, I believe.

Interesting, yeah, that was a fun show.

But yeah, I don't remember who was in Buck Rogers.

I don't think it was Lee Majors, it was somebody else.

The actor who played Buck Rogers was actually called Gil Grad.

But there was a little robot thing that ran around that used to go, midi, midi, midi, midi, midi, midi, midi.

Midi, midi, midi, midi, midi.

For me, it said midi, musical instrument, digital interface.

And then there's a robot dog, too.

Or was that Battlestar Galactica?

Sorry, I'm getting those two.

I thought that was Dr Who, K-9.

Yeah, yeah, but there was Battlestar Galactica, I think it had a robot dog, too.

With actual feet, as opposed to wheels.

Oh, I don't remember that.

I used to watch Battlestar Galactica and I was just like you, somebody told me, oh, you're going to love it, Steve, just watch it, it's really political and it's really...

And when my first born son arrived, I stayed up all night so that she could sleep and then I would sleep in the day.

I would watch episodes all night long of Battlestar Galactica, the new one, this would have been 2014.

And like you, I got quite into it, like not into it, as in I liked it.

I just got quite far into the season two or three.

And I just thought, what am I doing?

This is so boring.

And I know the 70s one was probably naff and if you watched it now, it would just be unwatchable.

But I think it's impossible to replace things like that.

It really is.

It's how people feel about Star Wars and stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, well, the 70s show was pretty cheesy.

And it was quite obviously a complete rip off of Star Wars too at the time, right?

Which was kind of questionable too.

But I think probably the writing was better in the new one.

I don't know.

I didn't stick with it long enough to really find out because I think they tried to do more with it than they did with the original.

The original one was just basically a group of humans trying to get away from the Cylons.

Yeah, that's the whole story.

And they just fight with each other all the time.

I just thought of another show that I think I used to get them mixed up.

Something called Blake Seven.

We never got that here.

I remember reading, I was really into Starlog back in the 70s.

I don't know if you know that magazine, but it was all things science fiction.

And they always talked about Blake Seven.

I don't know if maybe it was even a UK magazine, I'm not sure, but they would talk about Blake Seven, Dr Who, right?

And I was really confused, you know, what's this Blake Seven?

Because we never got it over here, unfortunately.

For me, Planet of the Apes has only linked to one story.

I don't think it made it into the book, You Shot My Dog and I Love You, available at all bookshops and online.

I went away for a summer holiday with a group of troubled kids, I guess is the word.

And when I got back during the holiday, they'd allowed me to buy a Galen mask.

Galen, that's the character, right?

Yeah.

Mask.

And all it was was a very crude, brown monkey mask.

And if you moved your jaw, it moved, you know, so it would move like that.

I got off the coach and my nan was waiting for me in this sort of, you know, untarmacked, gravelly field.

And I got off the bus and the first thing she did, she came over to me and goes, get that fucking thing off your face.

And she threw it in the nearest bin and dragged me off.

I know, it never made it home.

That's terrible.

She told me, I told you you couldn't have that.

You're a man of music.

What's your favorite TV theme?

You got one of them?

This is a stupid question.

I just thought I'd ask you.

You're the only one being asked that.

Yeah, oh, thanks.

Yeah, no, well, I mean, the 70s and 80s were like the height of TV themes, right?

And I don't think it ever came back to that again.

Although, what's really interesting is I think it made a resurgence in the last few years.

I think True Detective was one of the ones that really struck me as like, wow, they've got a real long theme for this.

And it was great.

It was a song as opposed to instrumental, but it was really, really well done and fit the show perfectly.

But I was hugely influenced by TV themes growing up.

And I think that's one of the things that made me want to become a composer.

I think the first one that really hit me was, I don't know if you guys ever got Battle of the Planets?

Do you know Battle of the Planets?

Sandy Frank Presents, yeah.

I write about it in my book.

Yeah, because I talk about this often, like you always know who produced the thing before you watch it.

It would always say that, a bit like old movies, they give you the full list before.

Sandy Frank Productions.

And yeah, Battle of the Planets, about 1979, I remember watching that, like a lot, I would run home to watch that.

What were they?

Yeah, same here.

What are they called?

What's the team called?

G-Force.

G-Force, G-Force.

That's it, of course.

I really called Science, was it Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, if you look back.

Yeah, yeah, Gatchaman, yeah.

For me, I thought it was just an American TV show.

Of course not.

Yeah, they completely neutered it for American audience.

If you look at the Japanese one, it's like, wow, the show was really about that.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, the theme for that was just killer.

It was like something ripped right out of Star Wars, right?

So that was huge for me.

It's like, wow, this is exciting.

And then of course, all the sort of action TV shows of the time, Starsky and Hutch, Magnum PI.

I think my favorite theme of all time, those got to be Hill Street Blues.

Now that makes sense.

That's kind of jazzy, right?

Kind of, yeah.

It's like a piano pop ballad kind of theme.

And oh, it's really well done.

All of course, all that stuff was Mike Post, right?

Who was a fantastic, fantastic TV composer at the time.

I do know that name, yeah.

And it's a shame that they kind of lost that for quite a few years.

I remember really getting into Heroes when Heroes first came out.

And the theme was literally like five seconds.

I was the first one that did that.

We're in sort of a hybrid time now, because there are some shows that literally just go boing and the show begins, and there are some with beautiful beginnings.

A lot of Apple TV shows like Silo, fantastic beginnings to Silo.

Yeah, Foundation, Foundation has, I don't know if you've watched that show.

I don't know.

Amazing music.

It's actually a film composer did the whole series.

His name is Bear McCreary.

He also did, well, he's actually done film and TV.

He did Walking Dead as well, which had a great theme, short, but really, really good theme.

Yeah, I do love a good theme.

Yeah, but with like skip intro, do you think people bother anymore?

There are now loads of skip intro people, I'm sure.

I think it depends on who you are.

I have to hear the theme every time, you know, Last of Us 2 is the other one.

Yeah, that's good.

Severance, you've seen Severance.

What a fantastic show, fantastic theme.

That I can't not watch.

I haven't actually watched that.

I haven't watched that.

That's one for you.

You will like that thing.

If you like themes, there's only two shows that I can't turn the theme off.

And that one is Severance, the other one is Succession.

I need to hear that music in Succession to get me pumped up for what I'm about to watch.

No, I watched a couple of episodes, and I watched one, I think it was about a pig or something like that.

Oh, that's a good one.

So the reason the pig story, I believe it's called the national anthem, that episode, where the prime minister is blackmailed into adding sexual intercourse with a pig.

And when Charlie Brooker wrote that, he couldn't, he's written quite a lot of episodes that have sort of come true, the gist of things have come true.

And after that episode aired, it was very soon after, when David Cameron, who was prime minister at the time, was accused of putting his penis in a dead pig's head while he was eaten, and he had to go and deny it.

This was like a big story, and he would go, of course I did not fuck the pig's head.

But you know, when he wrote it, it was like, well, of course the prime minister is not gonna, and it turned out to be sort of vaguely possibly true.

I don't think it happened, but that kind of stuff is kind of wild.

Where can people find your music?

Most of my music is on SoundCloud, right?

So if you go to soundcloud.com, it's Jeff Alan Greenway.

And I have a YouTube channel as well.

My website is jeffalangreenway.com.

So the audio at this point got a little bit scrambled, but luckily we were nearly finished anyway.

So I want to thank Jeff for popping in and seeing us on Television Times Podcast.

It was great chat, really enjoyed talking to him.

It's been way too long.

And now for a little treat, instead of having to listen to me, witter on and sing at you, we're going to end with one of Jeff's songs, my all time favourite song of Jeff Greenway's, which is Cavalry.

I hope you love it as much as I do.

Now, that is a goddamn motherfucking tune.

That's Jeff Alan Greenway with Cavalry there.

Absolutely fantastic song.

Now, if you enjoyed this podcast, please follow us wherever you are listening to it.

Simple as that.

Come back next week.