Sad to wake up this morning and discover that one of the heroes of my youth has passed on, at the not-unreasonable age of 79.You might not recognise the name, but you know the tunes .
I first became a conscious admirer fairly young, something about the accompaniment to an episode of ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’ impressed me enough for me to sit and read the credits at the end to find out who was responsible. A matter of days later, I was blown away to suddenly realise that the musical riff in the intro to ‘Yes Minister’ was cleverly based around the melody of the opening chimes from Big Ben. And it was the same bloke! I was hooked, and pretty soon accumulated a catalogue of sightings, as in those days, he was all over the BBC.
I remember being extremely tickled when Spitting Image lampooned him in one edition, as the most significant British composer of the 20th century, or some such gag. Disappointingly, as I recall they just used one of their generic bloke muppets, presumably they thought nobody would have recognised him, if they’d done a proper one.