A Little Silver Trumpet was the television programme that used Fauré's Sicilienne as its theme

In July 2012 I went to a recital in St Laurence's. Church Stretton, that was part of the town's arts festival.

One of the pieces I heard played was Fauré's Sicilienne, and I blogged the same day:

I am sure that it was used as the theme music for a detective series many years ago - probably one set in the Victorian era. However, no amount of searching will tell me what the series was.

I have solved the mystery. If I'm right then it wasn't the them of a detective series set in the 19th century but of a children's series set then: A Little Silver Trumpet.

It was screened in the afternoons when I was at university and didn't watch much television. The only repeat was in the spring of 1982 when I was working in Sutton Coldfield and wouldn't have been home in time.

But then I've never thought that I watched the mystery programme: I just remembered hearing its theme music. Well, maybe I did, but in a trailer.

I've another reason for thinking I didn't watch it besides my lack of any memories of it. It is that the cast included this blog's hero Norman Bowler, and I remember the shock of recognition I got when he turned up as Frank Tate in Emmerdale in 1989. If I had seen him before then and after Softly Softly: Task Force, I would have remembered it.

A Little Silver Trumpet is not on YouTube, but - miraculously - there is a live studio recording there. And in the section I have picked out above, you can see the banknote being discovered and then hear - after a long pause - Fauré's Sicilienne.

Tim Worthington has blogged about the series:

L.T. Meade’s A Little Silver Trumpet would probably have done nothing bar gather cloth-bound dust on the shelves of second hand bookshops were it not for a viewer who, having enjoyed – and presumably actually understood – The Moon Stallion, wrote in to suggest that this forgotten children’s novel was ideal source material for a run-up-to-Christmas adaptation.

There was no trace of olde-worlde-psychedelic fantasy in this straightforward social-status-swap melodrama, and the discovery of a fifty pound note somewhat implausibly stitched inside a dress was about as dramatic as it got, but it still won tons of awards and got a ‘lost’ book spruced up and reissued into the bargain so must have been doing something right.

It's easy to see how I could remember this as a detective serial, so I think I have solved the mystery.

And here is Sicilienne in all its insidious beauty.