Peter Gunn
By Ross Forbes, Blockbuster.co.uk

You know the music, straight away you will know the theme tune to this show, but why? How could you possibly know the theme music to a show that you and most of the people living on our little island have never heard of?

The answer is “The Blues Brothers” or that episode of ‘the Sopranos’ where they mixed the Peter Gun theme with The Police’s ‘Watching you’. Well that answers the question as to ‘why you know the music’, but what actually is the show? It’s one of those shows that Americans talk about and reference, like ‘Gilligans Island’ and like Gilligans Island…we in the UK know nothing about it.

So…Peter Gunn ran from 1958 until 1961 on American Television. Craig Stevens is the hard-boiled private detective with the name Peter Gunn, and with a name like that he was unlikely to become a landscape gardener.

Jazz at that point in time was the ‘in thing’ and the score to the series used jazz to accompany Peter Gunn as he oozed coolly through the streets like an ice cube gliding downhill. The result had Peter Gun stand out among its counterparts; no other show had an atmosphere like it.

Each episode is the equivalent of a Hollywood noir thriller condensed into half an hour of thrills. Back in its day this was the epitome of cool, with its music scored by Henri Mancini of Pink panther and Breakfast at Tiffany’s fame and written and directed by Blake Edwards (Pink Panther) and Robert Altman (M*A*S*H and Gosford Park).

With its tongue firmly in its cheek Peter Gunn threw it’s lead character through cases that fell on the not-so-serious-side of the fence. In the same way that the Persuaders series did in the late 60’s, the producers tapped into the fun of the era to create something that took you to a heightened reality where ‘cool’ isn’t a state of mind, it’s a way of life.

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