The Persuaders was the first TV show I remember loving. And John Barry’s theme music – one of the first hits of 1972 – remains my favourite of that or any other era.

It was the age of dashing secret agents and “gentleman adventurers” like Jason King (Department S), Simon Templar (The Saint), John Drake (Danger Man) and John Steed (The Avengers – though I grew up on The New Avengers).

Dashing men who dashed around the world dashing the dastardly designs of dangerous foreigners to take over our country and end our traditional way of life – which seemed to be limited to drinking, gambling and womanising. But doing it very stylishly.

The Persuaders was an international spin-off from The Saint. Roger Moore and Tony Curtis played a pair of jet-setting international playboys who solved crimes and conspiracies in between bedding beautiful women and engaging in bantering badinage with a strongly racist and classist undercurrent, while whizzing around Europe’s most upmarket beach resorts and casinos in fast cars and fast yachts in search of dolly birds. Or something.

I loved it. I also loved the theme music, by John Barry. It’s still my favourite TV theme. Every note instantly conjures up that early-Seventies era, as well as the show itself: an action-comedy affair in which our two millionaires – Lord Brett Sinclair, an aristocratic Englishman played by Moore (obvs) and Danny Steele, a rough diamond from the slums of New York played by Tony Curtis (double-obvs) – are forced to team up to solve crimes that, for unspecified reasons, have baffled Europe’s police forces.

Naturally, they detest each other – they have a fist fight in episode 1 – but (you guessed) grudgingly come to respect each other. Much is made of their contrasting backgrounds. There’s a lot of banter in which Moore (Harrow, Oxford, The Army) mocks Curtis (Brooklyn, Oil, Wall Street) for being common and having no manners because he’s American and that’s what they’re all like over there, while Curtis constantly mocks Moore for being a poncy toff with a silly posh accent because he’s English and that’s what we’re all like.

Then they solve a crime together, combining Moore’s supercilious charm and Curtis’s streetwise brawling skills, usually landing their punches in hand-tailored calfskin gloves from Jermyn Street, and celebrate by driving to Monte Carlo, winning big at the roulette tables, and spit-roasting a supermodel. Or something. It’s all a bit homoerotic really.

I once had the privilege of meeting Mr Prendergast (Barry’s real surname) in 1998, to talk about The Beyondness Of Things, his first album of non-movie music. We met at his house in Knightsbridge at 11am. He invited me in and asked if I would like a gin and tonic. I declined.

While he poured himself the first of several generous glasses, his much younger American wife (No.4) began quizzing me about activities in London for small children, explaining that this was not exactly John’s speciality, her husband being a dour 65-year-old Yorkshireman at the time.

Our bonding made him more irascible than he already was, which was quite a lot, but he gave a great interview, filled with racy anecdotes about the Swinging Sixties, mostly involving high jinks with his flatmates Michael Caine and Terence Stamp that made the televised adventures of Moore and Curtis seem quite mild by comparison.

During the course of his career, Barry scored 11 Bond films, from 1963 (From Russia With Love) to 1987 (The Living Daylights) and won five Oscars for film soundtracks (two for Born Free, plus The Lion In Winter, Out Of Africa and Dances With Wolves), and further nominations for Chaplin and Mary, Queen Of Scots. Among more than 100 other memorable movie scores, beginning with Beat Girl in 1960, were Midnight Cowboy, Walkabout and Zulu.

But this, for me, remains his towering achievement.