Catch up TV

Series 1: Episode 3

In television’s early years, specially composed music, otherwise known as the score, which had driven big-budget movies for decades, rarely featured. In this final episode of the series, we see how the importance of a TV score grew, from its origins in the 1960s and 1970s, to reach a peak in the big-budget world of Netflix and HBO.\n\nNeil Brand reveals that his first exposure to the impact of a score on television was in the documentaries of Jacques Cousteau, bringing adventure and drama to the natural world. He demonstrates how music has driven the success of BBC natural history programmes, talking with George Fenton, the film composer behind such landmarks as Blue Planet. Fenton was also pivotal in the development of music in TV drama, with his score for Jewel in the Crown. We learn how these breakthrough drama series competed with cinema in their scale and ambition.\n\nWe also meet some maverick creators of the TV score, including Roxy Music’s Andy MacKay, who wrote the songs that powered radical 70s drama Rock Follies, and David Chase, music buff and creator of The Sopranos. Neil gets to write his own score with Signature Tracks - the team behind some of the biggest successes of US reality TV such as Real Housewives and the Kardashian series.\n\nFinally, we see how the television score has now been forced to compete with the movies in huge blockbuster series such as Stranger Things and Game of Thrones.

Source: BBC 4