Bring me Sunshine

Jive Aces playing on the Tube

A video of a London swing band performing Bring Me Sunshine is so catchy and cheerful that it has been prescribed by a doctor as a cure for depression. Sally Schneider, who lives in Seattle, was told to watch the Jive Aces playing the Morecambe and Wise theme song on YouTube as an “instant mood lifter” by her doctor Wallace R Hodges.

Ian Clarkson, lead singer of The Jive Aces, who came second in this year’s Britain’s Got Talent show, said: “We were amazed when we found out that this Seattle GP actually prescribed our Bring Me Sunshine video to a patient. Music certainly has therapeutic effects, so let’s see if our good old NHS will do the same thing.” The song, written in 1966 by Arthur Kent, was adopted in 1969 by Morecambe and Wise as the sign-off tune for their second BBC series and became one of their most famous routines.

Ms Schneider wrote on US blog The Improvised Life: “Recently, I took an ancient friend to visit her doctor. He’s famously late keeping appointments because he spends a lot of time with each patient, whatever he feels is necessary to really hear and address their concerns which, as we all know, are pretty unusual these days. His patients are happy to wait. “At the end of the visit, he unexpectedly wrote me a prescription. ‘Check this out,’ he said. ‘Can I blog it?’ ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘spread it around. It is an instant mood lifter, whatever your predicament might be.’  ”

The band, famous for its bright suits and support of Scientology, has been cheering up commuters on the Tube of late and will play at the Hippodrome casino in Leicester Square this month. Their YouTube video, which has been seen 2.1 million times, features the band bringing back the colour to a dreary London being brought down by a series of gloomy headlines.