Composing for children's TV

Composing for children's TV

If you are of a certain age, you will only have to hear the first few bars of Alan Hawkshaw's immortal synth-heavy funkfest and you'll be instantly transported to images of Mr Bronson puffing his cheeks out and Zammo McGuire just saying yes. If you aren't of that age then the Grange Hill theme probably won't have the same effect on you.

Perhaps the Postman Pat music sends you into raptures then or the Blue Peter hornpipe makes you think of sausage hotpot and chicken pox. Either way, the TV music of our childhood has a profound effect on all of us.

As a composer there can be few more satisfying things than to have your music regularly hummed by children the world over and, if there's a couple of verses of rude words made up that you didn't put in, then all the better.

'The music itself can be quite diverse for pre-school kids as they are so open to new sounds'

Lester Barnes has composed music for Reebok, Morrisons and Clearasil but he is best known as composer for CITV's popular brat-fest Horrid Henry. 'The age group the show is aimed at does affect the type of things I'd write and what the producers think that kids would like,' says Barnes. 'Obviously for pre-school shows you have to be very careful how you portray emotions so as to make the point of the scene but not overdo it. The music itself can be quite diverse for pre-school kids as they are so open to new sounds but, alas, some producers do like to stick to simplistic sounds and melodic patterns.'

Barnes - who studied at the Guildhall and has also composed the music for other children's shows such as Mama Mirabelle's Home Movies and Me Too! for CBeebies - explains that composing for a TV show is completely different from composing a meisterwerk of your own devising.

'Songs start off life in the studio and obviously have a pretty free reign as they are not held back by the same restraints that writing to picture has,' he says. 'With a song you can do pretty much what you like with the arrangement and structure, timing and tempo. You can have nice even 16-bar phrases and repeated sections following a natural form. Writing to picture is a whole different ball game and scoring cartoon music to picture is the hardest of them all.'

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