Move Closer to Your World (MCTYW) is a television news music package composed in 1970 by Walt Liss [1] and released by jingle writer Al Ham under his Mayoham Music label.
Since the 1970s, it was considered an anthem for local television news, notably of WPVI-TV in Philadelphia for its Action News broadcasts. [2] An original long version was sung by The Hillside Singers, and a short clip of that vocal version is used by WPVI as part of their closing theme song when extra fill-in time is required. Once a common theme across the United States (especially among other stations using the Action News format), as of 2023, only two U.S. stations currently use the theme or a variant thereof: WPVI-TV, and WNEP-TV in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
When the Action News format debuted in 1970, WPVI (then WFIL-TV) commissioned its first theme from Tom Sellers, a student at Temple University, and his group The Assembled Multitude. Sellers's "Action News Theme" bore similarities to the later "Move Closer to Your World," being in the same key and centered around a trumpet lead and a timpani-driven climactic finish, but had more of a jazz rock arrangement. [3] [4]
During the time that the station was owned by Triangle Publications, the Sellers theme and Action News format were distributed among the other stations it owned; stations other than WPVI continued to use that theme into the 1990s. In 1972, Triangle exited the television business and sold WPVI to Capital Cities Communications. Al Ham, an established session music composer and arranger with several other themes to his credit, and Liss, a Capital Cities executive who was based at WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York at the time, shared writing credits. [1] A May 2022 obituary credited Liss only as the lyricist for the theme, with Ham as the composer. [5] The song had been used at WNAC-TV in Boston, Massachusetts since 1970; when WNAC's Mel Kampmann moved to WPVI in 1972, he brought the theme with him, aided by the fact that WKBW was also a Capital Cities station. [6] "Move Closer to Your World" would be distributed across Capital Cities' stations along with a slightly modified version of WPVI's Action News format. Eventually, other stations outside the former Triangle stations and Capital Cities cluster also took on the format.
"Move Closer to Your World" remained a popular news theme through the rest of the 20th century and was not removed from most stations until the late 1990s, when more modern themes were introduced. Other than the two stations still using it, WKBW, continued to use the theme until 2003, then (after its replacement was deemed to be one factor in the station's fall to a distant last place) used the theme again from 2008 to 2014.
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