Radio themes have formed an important part of various recent light music compilations from Marco Polo, Hyperion and elsewhere. However, they have tended to be pieces that have entered our consciousness over a lifetime’s listening and viewing. What Erato offers here is something much more specific and essentially very different. It’s a collection that, for people of a certain age (such as mine), very clearly captures the immediate post-Second World War years of rationing, pea-soup fogs and ‘Housewives’ Choice’. The programme includes such quintessential early-1950s pieces as Leroy Anderson’s The typewriter and Blue tango, and bandleaders such as Mantovani, Edmundo Ros and Frank Chacksfeld spring to mind as one listens to such items as Tico-tico, Charmaine and the theme from Limelight. The selection likewise recalls instrumentalists such as trumpeter Eddie Calvert, who had two big hits with O mein Papa and Cherry pink and apple blossom time. Purely instrumental items are interspersed with arrangements of songs by the likes of Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and Kurt Weill. Though Michel Legrand himself gets the credits as arranger, his great achievement is in capturing the original post-war sound of the recordings of the time. It’s all very cleverly done. There must be many of my generation who will welcome such items in 1990s sound, as well as younger listeners interested to hear the sort of sound that kept us happy those 40-odd years ago. '