In the mid-1970s, I was, as a film trade paper journalist, invited to meet the brothers Robert and Richard Sherman. They had provided the score for The Slipper and the Rose, Bryan Forbes’s Cinderella musical, then in production at Pinewood. To my surprise I was ushered into the ballroom of a large London hotel and found them draped round a grand piano, extremely amiable and infectiously enthusiastic.
Rather than a conventional interview, they gave me a preview of some of their score, which they played and sang for this privileged audience of one. I wish I could report that the composers of some of musical cinema’s greatest hits had come up with something, anything, to rival their enduring work on the likes of Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Sadly, for me anyway, their tunes were, this time round, sweet but entirely unmemorable.
