Bring Me Sunshine

"Bring Me Sunshine"
"Bring Me Sunshine" BBC CD cover
Song
Published	Bourne Music, 1966
Composer(s)	Arthur Kent
Lyricist(s)	Sylvia Dee
Language	English

"Bring Me Sunshine" is a song written in 1966 by the composer Arthur Kent, with lyrics by Sylvia Dee, and first performed by American artists in the late 1960s. In the UK, the song is synonymous with the popular comedy duo Morecambe & Wise, after it was adopted as their signature tune in their second series for the BBC in 1969.

Professor of Critical Musicology at Leeds University, Prof Derek B Scott, argues that the song is influenced by the Viennese popular style. He writes:

Although the second verse was often performed by an orchestra conducted by Peter Knight over the duo's closing credits, they only ever sang the first verse, the second one being purely instrumental, with Eric and Ernie performing a "skip dance" to exit the stage. The dance has been attributed to BBC producer, John Ammonds, and Eric's son Gary recalls that the inspiration for the skip-dance came from a Groucho Marx film sequence.

When Eric Morecambe died in 1984 so closely associated were the pair with the song that it was the title of the Bring Me Sunshine tribute show at the London Palladium held in his memory. Ten years later, the BBC ran another 3-part tribute, also titled Bring Me Sunshine.

Lyrics to the song were also read at Morecambe's funeral by Ernie Wise. Wise went on to declare it his favourite song during his appearance on the BBC radio programme, Desert Island Discs in Oct 1990. On the same program three months later, the song was also a choice of jazz singer Adelaide Hall. It has also been used for the title of several books about the pair.

When Morecambe & Wise defected from the BBC to Thames Television in 1978, directly after their record-breaking Christmas Special the previous year, the signature tune was dropped. It was however used in later installments of these shows.