End of an era

As I'm sure our non-Canadian readers will know, hockey (ice hockey to Brits) is Canada's national sport (technically it's lacrosse, but we'll conveniently ignore that fact for the moment), just as it's soccer in England and drinking in Ireland. Now, this past week has marked the opening of the new hockey season, and it has also marked something of the end of an era. CBC's Hockey Night In Canada is the premier hockey show over here as well as being the world's oldest sports-related programme still on air - to call it a national institution would be something of an under-statement - and after forty years the show has decided to change its theme tune.

I say decided, but it would really be more accurate to say forced, because the reason for the change was a copyright dispute with the theme's publishers, resulting in the commissioning of a new theme via a nationwide competition. The new music has been written by a schoolteacher from Alberta, and speaking as a relative outsider with no emotional ties to the old theme, I must say that I like it (I also think that it sounds not unlike Jean Michel Jarre's Rendezvous IV). See what you think; the first clip is of the old theme, and the second is of the new one:





The whole issue has been a major talking point over here, and although it has not quite forced parliamentary debate (there is the little matter of an election coming up, after all), emotions have run high in some quarters. Many Canadians view the old theme as the nation's second national anthem, and apparently some mischievous tour guides have been known to pass it off to visitors as the national anthem. The old theme will live on though as CTV, a rival network to the CBC, has bought the rights to the music for its own hockey coverage, but even taking this fact into account, it certainly is the end of an era for hockey fans all over Canada.