George Fenton (1949-2026)

It is the fate of many successful composers for the screen to be widely-heard but poorly-known. George Fenton is surely one of the most extreme examples of this. His writing credits include iconic themes for BBC news and current-affairs programmes on television and radio, and a large number of David Attenborough’s nature documentaries. If you’ve watched or listened to anything produced by the BBC in the last forty years, you’ve almost certainly heard his music - potentially quite a lot of it - but unless you’ve paid close attention to the credits it’s entirely possible you’ve never heard his name before. 

Born in Bromley (then in Kent, now part of Greater London), Fenton grew up in a musical household with a drummer father and a pianist mother. He himself began to study the electric guitar while still at primary school, as well as dabbling in the organ. After toying with the idea of pursuing music college, he eventually settled on acting - indirectly giving rise to his professional name, as the trade union rules at the time forbade two actors sharing a name. ‘Fenton’ had been his mother’s surname before marriage, and it became the one by which he was known to the world.

Modest acting parts would follow on both stage and screen - his most notable acting credit is probably a recurring role as soldier Martin Gimbel in ITV’s Emmerdale Farm - but music was already sneaking up on him in the shadows. He had understudied for up-and-coming composer Carl Davis during the latter’s stint as musical director for a production of Alan Bennett’s Forty Years On, and directors would frequently cast Fenton as a musician, in roles requiring him to play an instrument.

By the mid-1970s, then, he had accepted what increasingly seemed to be Fate’s true calling and switched - or reverted - to music as his career. Stratford’s Royal Shakespeare Company offered him early work as a composer and musical director, and clearly there was a spark in Fenton that had just been waiting for this opportunity. It took him just eight short years from that point - still mostly self-taught and with only a couple of previous film scores under his belt - to garner an Oscar nomination for his score to Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi, which saw him collaborate with Ravi Shankar.

From this point on, scores and themes flowed thick and fast - for TV series during the 1980s (in particular Bergerac), for BBC news programmes including Newsnight, for the hard-hitting Cry Freedom documenting the murder of anti-apartheid campaigner Steve Biko (a collaboration with Jonas Gwangwa), and for many David Attenborough nature documentaries, beginning with 1990’s The Trials of Life and continuing with the ‘Earth Trilogy’ of The Blue Planet, Planet Earth and Frozen Planet. Fenton also collaborated with director Ken Loach on eighteen projects, including the Palme d’Or-winning The Wind That Shakes the Barley, and received the extremely rare honour of being named a Fellow of The Ivors Academy.

His haul of ‘silverware’ is impressive by any standards - twenty-eight awards in total, including Baftas, Emmys, Ivor Novellos, BMIs, and a Classic Brit Award.

Details of his death have not been released, but his family described it as sudden, and less than a month ago he had signed a new publishing deal. He is survived by his wife Amanda, ex-wife Jane, children Gemma, Grace and Bridget, and grandchildren Lola, Audrey, Alfred, George, Frank and Beatrice.