Back in 2011, I wrote about a song I remembered from primary school. It came from some sort of musical about a songwriting competition, in which one character wrote a beautiful song about a blackbird and another, less scrupulous character tried to steal it. To counter this, the protagonist wrote a decoy dirge-like song with the aim of that being stolen by the villain. I could remember the tune clearly (not hard, it was one note!) and, more remarkably, four lines of the lyric:
The blackbird sings a tuneful song, With turns and trills so fine; Such skill has he, such majesty, But it’s not as good as mine.
What I could not remember was what the musical was called, who had written it, or where our school had obtained it. Nobody else I spoke to seemed to recognise it. Internet searches produced nothing, and so the song remained one of those odd fragments of childhood that somehow survive after almost everything surrounding them has disappeared.
Fourteen years later, in December 2025, I returned to the mystery. The internet had grown considerably since 2011, but the blackbird song remained stubbornly absent from it. I wrote a follow-up post, partly to gather together what little I knew and partly in the hope that someone else might eventually type one of those remembered lines into a search engine and find me.
That is exactly what happened.
In January, Paul left a comment saying that he remembered the song too. He believed it had been performed by Lucie Skeaping in a BBC schools programme called The Music Arcade, sometime around 1983 or 1984. He also remembered a character called Harlequin.
That last detail helped to unlock some more fragments from my memory. Once Paul had supplied the name, more of the story began to fall into place: Harlequin was trying to trick Pantaloon in a song competition.
There was a slight complication, though. Harlequin and Pantaloon aren’t exactly obscure characters. They go back to the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition and became familiar figures in British harlequinades and pantomime. So adding Harlequin and Pantaloon to my searches wasn’t quite the breakthrough it might have seemed.
Still, Paul independently remembering the same song, the same characters and The Music Arcade was far more than I’d had before.
Paul and I exchanged a few emails at the time, comparing memories and trying to pin down the programme. It was already enormously satisfying simply to discover that somebody else remembered the same thing. This was no longer an obscure childhood memory that apparently belonged only to me. Paul remembered it too.
At that point, though, we still didn’t have a recording, or anything else that definitively proved we’d landed on the right thing.
Then, completely out of the blue, another email from Paul arrived today.
He had been looking through some old cassette tapes for something entirely unrelated when he came across an unmarked tape. On it were recordings from The Music Arcade — including the blackbird song!
Even more wonderfully, he remembered our exchange from seven months earlier and took the trouble to convert the recordings to MP3 and send them to me.
Bless him for that.
The first recording even comes complete with an unmistakable bit of BBC continuity:
“This is Daytime on Two. Time now to visit The Music Arcade, to listen to some vocal sounds.”
Hearing that alone is oddly transporting. There is something about the sound of old BBC schools television — the continuity voice, the slightly formal presentation, the piano and orchestral arrangement — that instantly evokes classrooms, television trolleys and programmes watched in the middle of an ordinary school day.
And then there’s the song itself.
It is exactly the song I remembered, albeit with a female vocalist, while the version in my head has always featured a male voice — presumably one of our teachers.
There are a few more orchestral flourishes than our primary-school production managed, unsurprisingly, but the tune (or lack thereof) is unmistakable. More gratifyingly still, the lyrics I had been carrying around in my head for all those years weren’t merely close. They were spot on:
The blackbird sings a tuneful song, With turns and trills so fine; Such skill has he, such majesty, But it’s not as good as mine!
When Paul first commented, he wondered whether the third line might have been “such talent has he, such artistry”. It turns out that, on this occasion at least, my memory had preserved the original wording with remarkable accuracy.
The recordings also confirm the wider story. Harlequin is trying to trick Pantaloon in a song competition, and the rival composition really is the deliberately dreadful one-note song I remembered. After decades of wondering whether I had merged several childhood memories together, there it all is: Harlequin, Pantaloon, the blackbird, the stolen song, the competition and the gloriously terrible alternative.
There is something rather strange about hearing a piece of music that has existed for so long only as an internal recording. Usually, rediscovering something from childhood reveals how much memory has altered it. The voice is different, the tempo is wrong, or the remembered fragment turns out to bear only a passing resemblance to the real thing.
In this case, pressing play didn’t replace my memory with the original. It confirmed that the original had been there all along.
The ending is also almost comically appropriate. In my previous post, while describing how easily school music vanished in the years before digital archives, I wrote:
Fold up the lyric sheets. Box up the cassette. Move on to the next term’s topic.
And that, apparently, is more or less what happened.
The recording survived not in an online archive or a carefully labelled collection, but on an unmarked cassette Paul happened to find while searching for something else.
The cassette had been boxed up. It was simply waiting for the right person to open the box again.
My original 2011 post was effectively a message in a bottle. Fourteen years later, I sent out another one. This time Paul found it. His own memory led him to the blog, and months afterwards a chance encounter with an anonymous cassette completed the story.
So the lost blackbird song is lost no longer.
And after all these years, the blackbird still sings a tuneful song — with turns and trills so fine.
Huge thanks to Paul for reaching out and sharing these recordings. Maybe we aren’t the only two people out there with this song living rent-free in our heads, and this will prove some kind of therapy for others!
Goddammit 
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