Television
In 1976, Fenton wrote his first television score, continuing his collaboration with Peter Gill, composing for Gill's production of Hitting Town written by Stephen Poliakoff.
By the late 1970s, Fenton was working regularly in television, becoming a popular choice for dozens of television productions, including Shoestring, a BBC police drama which ran for 21 episodes in 1979-1980.
He composed the music for all six of the Six Plays by Alan Bennett which were broadcast during 1978 and 1979. Their collaboration continued with the TV series Objects of Affection in 1982. A year later he composed the score of Bennett's TV film An Englishman Abroad (1983) which was directed by John Schlesinger. Fenton also composed for all of the episodes of Bennett's highly acclaimed Talking Heads series in 1987 and, a decade later, Talking Heads 2 in 1998.
Fenton also collaborated regularly with the director Stephen Frears, composing for his television productions of Bloody Kids (1979), Going Gently (1981), Saigon: Year of the Cat (1983), and Walter and June (1983).
By the mid 1980s, Fenton was composing for big budget TV series including the multi BAFTA winning The Jewel in the Crown (1984) and The Monocled Mutineer (1986).
Perhaps the TV series with which Fenton reached the widest audience was Bergerac which ran for ten years between 1981 and 1991, and for which Fenton composed the much-loved theme tune. He received his first major award for this, a BAFTA in 1982.
Read more about this topic: George Fenton
Famous quotes containing the word television:
“Television ... helps blur the distinction between framed and unframed reality. Whereas going to the movies necessarily entails leaving one’s ordinary surroundings, soap operas are in fact spatially inseparable from the rest of one’s life. In homes where television is on most of the time, they are also temporally integrated into one’s “real” life and, unlike the experience of going out in the evening to see a show, may not even interrupt its regular flow.”
—Eviatar Zerubavel, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Fine Line: Making Distinctions in Everyday Life, ch. 5, University of Chicago Press (1991)
“Cultural expectations shade and color the images that parents- to-be form. The baby product ads, showing a woman serenely holding her child, looking blissfully and mysteriously contented, or the television parents, wisely and humorously solving problems, influence parents-to-be.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)
“It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play . . . today’s children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games.”
—Marie Winn (20th century)