MOVIE MUSIC UK

Composer, arranger and conductor Edwin “Ted” Astley died in Goring, Oxfordshire, England, on May 19, 1998, at the age of 76, following several years of declining health.

One of the defining musical voices of British adventure television during the 1950s and 1960s, Astley created memorable themes and incidental scores for Danger Man, The Saint, The Baron, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), while also writing for cinema and documentary television.

Edwin Thomas Astley was born in Warrington, Cheshire, on April 12, 1922. He left school at 14 and initially worked for a gas-oven manufacturer, but music quickly became his profession. During World War II he joined the Royal Army Service Corps band, playing clarinet and saxophone and arranging military and dance-band music. After the war he led the Ted Astley Orchestra before moving to London, where he became an arranger for singers including Vera Lynn and Anne Shelton.

Astley began composing for film and television in the mid-1950s. His early television work included The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he supplied incidental music and a memorable brass fanfare, followed by The Buccaneers and International Detective. His film assignments included the science-fiction monster film The Giant Behemoth (1959), Peter Sellers’s comedy The Mouse That Roared (1959), The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (1960) and Hammer’s The Phantom of the Opera (1962), for which he composed both the dramatic score and original operatic material.

His defining television assignment began with Danger Man in 1960. Astley scored the adventures of Patrick McGoohan’s secret agent John Drake and later devised the distinctive harpsichord-driven “High Wire” for the hour-long series. Although American broadcasts as Secret Agent used Johnny Rivers’s “Secret Agent Man” over their principal titles, Astley’s music remained fundamental to the series itself.

Even more famous was The Saint (1962–69), starring Roger Moore as Simon Templar. Astley’s stylish combination of brass, jazz rhythms and a concise musical signature perfectly suited the character’s debonair sophistication and became one of British television’s most recognizable themes. More than three decades later, Orbital’s electronic adaptation for the 1997 film The Saint reached number three on the UK singles chart.

Astley became closely associated with ITC’s glossy adventure series, subsequently providing music for Gideon’s Way, The Baron, Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). The latter allowed him to combine swinging detective music with more whimsical and supernatural colors for the adventures of a private investigator assisted by the ghost of his murdered partner. He also demonstrated a very different side of his talents with Kenneth Clark’s landmark BBC documentary series Civilisation (1969).

Astley gradually withdrew from full-time screen scoring during the 1970s, although he continued composing and arranging from his home studio. His daughter Karen married Pete Townshend of The Who, and Astley orchestrated Townshend’s “Street in the City” for the 1977 album Rough Mix. He later worked with his son Jon on symphonic arrangements of music by The Who and the Rolling Stones and arranged strings for recordings by his daughter Virginia Astley.