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No, not THAT Laurie (the sweater-borrowing dead girl Dickie Lee sings of on Kenny Everett’s World’s Worst Record Album). We are of course referring to LAURIE JOHNSON, the composer whose themes have enlightened everything from The Avengers and Jason King through Thriller to a series of Barbara Cartland adaptations. Here, DARIUS DREWE delves into the life of the great man, and evaluates one of the Now Sound’s true mavericks...


STRANGE THINGS HAPPEN IN


OU’RE HOME, IT’S 1968, AND strange sounds are emanating from your television set. A clattering of


percussion, followed by an ominous blare.


BOOM! DANANER-NER.... BOOM! DANANER-NER....


A thunderous timpani, a blast of horn, a temporal shift, and a string arrangement lusher than Mancini or Mantovani – to which a dapper gent, armed with a lethal-looking umbrella and some of the most glamorous women British television has ever seen, vamp around a Pinewood-constructed set in glorious monochrome (and later, even more glorious technicolour). A spinning wheel, a clink of glass, a glistening tiara, a leather catsuit.


The programme is The Avengers, the music by Laurie Johnson: a veritable institution in the world of film and television, maybe a genius. Yet how many would recognise him on the street? And what is known about the man? His autobiography Noises In The Head (his terminology for the force that drives him to compose) has thrown more light on the matter, but for those who don’t know…


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Laurence Reginald Ward Johnson was born in Hampstead in 1927, to musical parents, and raised, like many other greats, in the Holy County of Middlesex. There must have been something in the water. After a formal education he attended The Royal College Of Music (where his classmates included Cyril Ornadel), and found gainful employment via the “orthodox” route of the day – military bands. This background, which begat everyone from James Last to members of The Spontaneous Music Ensemble, sharpened his “chops” and led to work at the BBC.


Here he met Jack Parnell, who would become a friend for life, and accompanied everyone from Ambrose, Ted Heath and Geraldo to Hoagy Carmichael and a young Pet Clark – but it was publisher Jimmy Phillips who changed his life twice in 1954, introducing him to his future wife Dot (to whom he is still married) and director J Lee Thompson, whose musical production of JB Priestley’s Good Companions became Johnson’s first soundtrack commission. Subsequent work on a series of classic Brit films including Tiger Bay, Dr Strangelove and First Men In The Moon honed the trademarks he would later perfect on television, such as the use of


THIS WORLD... Y


woodwind to suggest mystery and intrigue, and brass and timpani for dramatic gravitas. The next time you hear that signature “muted trumpet and flute” middle C at the end of a thriller, sitcom or sketch, ponder where it might have come from. “What about Ronnie Hazlehurst?” I hear you cry, and you’re quite right, but that’s another story which may take even more telling than this…


ITC is a name synonymous with “cult TV”’, yet The Avengers was NOT, as some believe, an ITC production: rather, it was made by ABC from ’61-68, when Thames took over and the episodes went into colour (didn’t the whole world at this time?) Theme tune aside, Laurie’s job was to compose individual pieces right through the John Keel, Martin King/Venus Smith, Kathy Gale, Emma Peel and Tara King eras of the show, doing the same again in the ’70s with The New Avengers’ Purdey and Gambit. Only once (in ’69) was he assisted by another composer, Howard Blake – and only because he was so busy with Hot Millions that he couldn’t get the time off.


Such a body of work is further proof of his drive and vision. Think about it – 161 episodes


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