TWELVE thousand fans and one composer’s widow hope to receive a signal from the BBC today that a certain collection of folk songs will be put back on the early morning airwaves.

“I feel the voice of the people should be heard,” Ingrid Spiegl, 56, said. “And it is his birthday.”

Her husband, Fritz Spiegl, died three years ago, apparently unaware of the popularity of his composition, the UK Theme.

On Monday evening Mrs Spiegl received a phone call from Mark Damazer, the Radio 4 Controller, to say that her husband’s music was to be dropped from the morning schedule.

“I didn’t know how to respond,” she said. “He was saying it was a fait accompli. He said, ‘I suppose we will get a little bit of reaction’. I thought that was it. Fritz never expected his music would stay on air indefinitely.”

Since then 12,000 people have signed a petition to keep the medley on the radio.

“I don’t think he had any idea that it was that popular,” she said. “I think he would be amazingly grateful.”

Mr Spiegl fled Austria after its annexation to Germany in the 1930s. In Britain he became “a typical English eccentric”, she said.

As well as a composer, he was a newspaper columnist and author of Contradictionary, a dictionary of easily confused words that was published posthumously. Now, like so many composers, he has found a following after his time.

Not since his music for the police series Z Cars reached the Top Ten has his work been so celebrated. In parliament, two MPs have tabled motions accusing the BBC of political correctness and asking for the medley to be reinstated. The Prime Minister told MPs that the BBC would be “aware of the very strong feeling” in the country; Gordon Brown praised the music in the Commons.

Last night the London talk radio station LBC said that it wanted to acquire the tune for its breakfast show. David Lloyd, the managing director, said: “We’re with [Jeremy] Paxman on this. If our friends at Radio 4 don’t want the theme tune anymore, then we would seriously like to acquire it.”

Some listeners have called for its release as a single and there has been a rush to download the music. Next weekend it will make what is almost certainly its first appearance on the London club scene when Doug Slater, managing director of the club entertainment firm PopC Nation, plans to play the UK Theme at a ticketed evening at the Clapham Grand in South London.

“We are interested in preserving it as an experience that the nation shares, that brings the four different nationalities of Britain together on the dance floor,” he said.

The popularity of the UK Theme has been linked by some to the revival of folk music in Britain. As the BBC prepares to broadcast Folk Britannia, a three-part survey following music from the 1950s to the present, many are hoping that a discarded folk medley from 1973 will once again be embraced by the corporation.

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