Here's journalist Andy Lewis with the tale of how a smash hit show, a Black man from the South, and a Jewish man from New York connect.

[whimsical music] I discovered MASH in middle school.

I was a dedicated watcher.

When the show came to an end, I remember making a big deal about it and talking to my friends about it and thinking about how sad I was that it was going off the air.

I have probably seen every MASH episode four or five times.

I love it to death.

And [door creaking] I get regular press releases from auction houses.

They meant a lot to me.

I'm...

possibly a better musician for having done that not because people who study music properly um aren't any good far from it they're amazing players and they get some fabulous gigs and they they they can create some of the most amazing music in the world but sometimes all of those qualifications don't count for anything when it's an emotional thing that you're trying to get, or it's, you know, you're conjuring up some sort of spirit from, you know, trying to understand what the song's about so that you can get something into the arrangement or into the baseline or into the production, which makes it a better song and a better listening experience, you know? And I think that's something you can't, I don't think it's impossible to learn it at a college where you study music, but I think it's really hard to teach it because a lot of the people teaching it, it's hard to articulate what it is you're actually trying to get somebody to learn in that situation.

And I was working on a record with a guy in Austria and the musical director and the studio engineer both had the Thom Meister qualification, which in German and the German speaking world is the highest qualification you can get to be involved in music.

It means you're a classically proficient concert standard instrumentalist and you have equivalent of a doctorate in physics.

So you've got all of that going on.

But we were tracking this string section and it was great.

It sounded OK, but there was something missing from it.

I'm not going to go back as four-year-old Andy, but, you know, a bit sort of like, say, you know, if 14, 16-year-old Andy sat there, what advice would you give to him now, being in the position that you are and the kind of the way you've circumnavigated the various different aspects of your