Remembering Jim Parker

Perhaps the name of Jim Parker is not well known – but his music is loved worldwide. Composer of numerous film and theatre scores, he is best known for his television music which includes Foyle’s War, House of Cards, Midsomer Murders and House of Elliott among many more. He has won the British Academy Award for Best TV Music on no less than four occasions. In 2017, Divine Art released Travelling Light: Music of Jim Parker which featured a number of Perker’s compositions which were not directly for TV but still have a marvelous pictorial quality. We were saddened to learn of his death on 28 July 2023.

Jim Parker (18 December 1934 – 28 July 2023)

“I committed a lapse of taste last month and I will not be surprised if I am dismissed from my honourable office,” wrote Sir John Betjeman in 1974. The letter’s recipient was Major Sir Rennie Maudslay, keeper of the privy purse. The lapse in taste was Betjeman’s Banana Blush, an album in which the poet laureate recited a dozen of his poems to a series of musical settings by the composer Jim Parker, who has died aged 88.

While the album widened the poet’s fanbase, it was the making of Parker, who would become one of the most prolific composers in television. Among the work he is best known for are the early TV dramas of Victoria Wood, the BBC’s House of Cards trilogy and 121 episodes of Midsomer Murders.

Part of the charm of his Betjeman settings was that they were deliberately dated to match the poet’s word pictures. “Choose your partners for a foxtrot. / Dance until it’s tea o’clock,” Betjeman intoned, and Parker’s wind band supplied the backing with sax-tinged tea-dance swing, jaunty brass chorales and mournful oompah tunes.…

—Obituary Excerpt from The Guardian

See The Guardian‘s obituary here.