Ron Grainer

Ronald Erle Grainer (11 August 1922 – 21 February 1981) was an Australian composer who worked for most of his professional career in the United Kingdom. He is mostly remembered for his television and film score music, especially the theme music for Doctor Who, The Prisoner, The Omega Man, Steptoe and Son and Tales of the Unexpected.

Ron Grainer was something of a fixture in pop music in England during the 1960s, and as a composer at least two of his creations -- the title theme from Doctor Who and the title theme for The Prisoner -- remain known to millions of people around the world, decades after his death. Born in Queensland, Australia, he started playing the violin at age four and subsequently took up the piano. After studying at the Sydney Conservatory of Music, he decided to go to England to pursue a career in classical music, but once there he found himself sidetracked into popular music. His skills as a pianist placed him in great demand as an accompanist, to homegrown talent and also to visiting singers such as Guy Mitchell, Frankie Laine, and Billy Eckstine, among others. It was from his work as an accompanist and rehearsal pianist with the BBC that led to his first engagement as a composer, of music for plays presented by the radio and television service. That, in turn, led Grainer to his first assignment in scoring a regular television series, Maigret, based on the books by Georges Simenon, the title music from which -- utilizing an array of then little-heard, archaic instruments, including the harpsichord and the clavichord -- became a hit composition and earned Grainer the first of three Ivor Novello Awards for his work in popular music. With that success behind him, Grainer was suddenly in heavy demand as a television composer, and his later successes included Comedy Playhouse and Steptoe and Son, the latter one of the most important and influential British comedies of the 1960s, which also earned Grainer his second Novello Award. He also moved into film scoring and into producing rock & roll music at approximately this same time. By sheer chance, he discovered an instrumental rock & roll band from Bristol called the Eagles -- not to be confused with the California-based outfit of the next decade -- whom he got signed to Pye Records and produced for the next couple of years. He also put them into a 1962 juvenile delinquency drama called Some People, which Grainer was scoring. The soundtrack included a song entitled "Some People," which was released as a single by the Eagles (with singer Valerie Mountain on the vocals) as well as a handful of other artists. The Eagles' rendition was the most interesting, however, displaying the composer's penchant for unusual sounds, including a break played on a calliope -- the latter, in fact, was sort of the good-natured antecedent to the ocarina break on the Troggs' "Wild Thing." With his penchant for unusual sounds, Grainer could easily have been a competitor to the likes of Joe Meek, but he never pursued pop music activity, as television and movie soundtracks -- at which he was already proficient and writing profitably -- held his attention from 1964 onward.