It seems I've only got to turn my back on London for a moment, and everybody starts madly changing the scene. I got back home from a spell in New York a few weeks back and found they'd been messing about with the clock! Without telling me! No, I DON'T mean the one you tell the time by. Though, come to think of it, while I was away they messed about with that, too! Permanently.     They used to dodge it forward an hour at the start of every summer and put it back again for the winter. To give everybody an extra hour of daylight, they said. Which seriously upset the cows. But now they've done it for good. They're NEVER going to put it back. Which means that, for evermore, anybody in show business trying to get sleep after work in a nightspot gets deafened by birdsong. Because nobody seems to have told the birds!     But that isn't the clock I'm talking about. The clock they've been messing around with is what you might call the Pop Clock. They've rocked it back TEN YEARS! Back to the days of rock-'n-roll. Of Bill Haley and (appropriately) Rock Around the Clock - 1958.     Everybody's suddenly on a rock kick (which they tell me is more exciting than a rock cake - sorry!) Even the Beatles - if you listen carefully to Lady Madonna.     And the whole thing has set me wondering.     I mean . . . why? Why, when everything seems to be going swimmingly with beat or psychedelia or folk or protest or whatever . . . why does somebody, suddenly, whip back the clock and revive the past?     Remember the New Vaudeville Band? With Winchester Cathedral? They suddenly produced a 1930 sound and everyone went wild about it. Barbra Streisand did it with Second-Hand Rose - a real olde tyme song - and everybody went wild about THAT. Hello Dolly was another.     Julie Andrews had a hit with Baby Face - which MY Mum and Dad tell me first came out when THEIR Mum and Dad were kids!     Why? Is it (it can't be!) "they don't write tunes like that anymore?" Is it because people are afraid of the future and think it was better in the old days? (I'm sure it wasn't really.)     Anyway, the awful thing is that when I got back to find the rock setting in all over

again it made me feel terribly old, for about five minutes.     Because I can remember when it FIRST appeared!     I was 10!     And I remember how, suddenly, it gave a whole new lease of life to the pop business. Dance halls especially. Because for a long time bands had been losing audiences by playing gear that was way way out.     Progressive jazz. The sort of stuff that Stan Kenton pioneered. Beautifully. Great ideas, wonderful musicianship, brilliant ideas all round.     To listen to. Not to dance to. Not to buy.     But in came rock - simple, beauty, exciting. And back came audiences. Up went record sales. And up went the hands of the Mums and Dads in horror! Herman in action in the recording studios.     Today . . . well, up go their hands again. To clap to the on-beat. In delight! Because this is something they understand. Something for which, in fact, they probably queued up to jive to when THEY were kids.     Which, now I come to think of it, is why it's such a good thing when these old-type numbers do suddenly pop back into the Hit Parade. It makes the Whole World One!     Mums and Dads love it. We love it. Mums and Dads stop moaning about "that dreadful music." They're with it. They're with us.     So - whoever it was started Rocking Back the Clock - good luck to you. And in any case, rock was fun.     Which, basically, is what all music ought to be.     Not necessarily all the time. But basically . . .     Fun.

Another scene from Mrs. Brown You've Got A Lovely Daughter