This really is one for nerds. The rest of you skip to the next post…

When I first saw “Law & Order” on Five I liked the theme music. On the internet I noted the composer, Mike Post (Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue), had won an award for it.

One day I saw an old episode on Hallmark and it had a different theme. I speculated this was on old theme, been replaced with a newer jazzier version – as happened with the Avengers, amongs other series.

Since then there have been spin offs: SVU with a variation on the theme and CI with a (fantastic) new theme. What puzzled me was comments on the internet saying both themes were a variation on the original. And then I saw an episode of SVU which had a variation on the old theme I saw on Hallmark, and I wanted to find out exactly when the theme had changed. I couldn’t find any reference to a change of theme on the net.

Today I cracked it. I found a comment which noted Channel Five had changed the theme for UK broadcast, taking a track from former Kylie songsmith Rob Dogan’s Furious Angels for L&O & SVU and another for CI. NBC never used these themes, and still uses the Mike Post original (scroll to the bottom of this page to hear all the variations – they’ve grown on me). Someone at Five disliked it so much they were prepared to have all the episodes dubbed before transmission.

Case solved.