A great man with a phenomenal craft for compression and the ability to summon a moment in a moment for the moment
Don’t expect an exhaustive account of Fenton’s lifelong achievements here. There are too many. Some of them, whilst high-profile and no doubt lucrative, won’t feature on the Thoroughly Good’s Fenton radar. The later stuff – the Attenborough tie-ins – are what you’ll find most readily on streaming platforms. The stuff that really matters to a certain generation is found in some of Fenton’s earlier stuff, and in particular some of the TV signature tunes.
Fenton was adept at summoning a middle-class middle England kind of doom to his news intros. Newsnight in 1982 was undoubtedly edgy, dark, aspirational. Peril. Drama. Jeopardy. Life on the edge described with an air of safety delivered by reassuring men in bland suits whose hair had received as close attention to as the few women newsreaders who accompanied them at the desk.
In the Six, the Nine, and Newsnight, Fenton presents as a lover of the theatrical, maybe someone who could make the unbearableness of the world around us a palatable proposition simply by virtue of compressing what we fear and what we ultimately need into as little as thirty seconds. We don’t actually need the news if we’ve heard Fenton’s news choons.
George Fenton / BBC Breakfast Time / 1983
Yet amid the many tributes that have rightly popped up today on air, few have credited him for the operatic feel he created to TV’s most groundbreaking moment. His intro to the premiere of the UK’s first breakfast TV programme in January 1983, did in truth make the moment sound far more exciting than it actually turned out. For some that score to the BBC’s Breakfast Time made the day seem full of hope far more than it had felt before. A score that still has the ability to conjure memories that have lasted longer than the presenters (and some of their reputations) ended up doing. And with good reason.
It takes a keen eye, a sharp pencil, and a perfectionist streak to compress the necessary elements into the most restricted of timecodes and still succeed in stirring the heart. Early Fenton did this reliably. The One O’Clock News theme from the mid-late 80s did a sound reliable job in not only selling news but selling journalism as a potential career in 1987. The One O’Clock had some gravitas – almost reachable (just so long as you swung by at Burton Menswear for a suit on the way in).
Others will rave about what followed – it undoubtedly met the brief. Yet, the stuff that still stirs the heart (for some) is lesser-known and lesser-heard, except for those with a certain sense of humour.
Fenton’s pop-infused score Clockwise captured all of the awkward tragedy of Mr Stimpson’s manic perfectionism. “It’s not the despair, Laura, I can stand the despair,” said headmaster Stimpson to his errant headgirl, coerced into a mad dash to the headmaster’s conference in Norwich, “it’s the hope.” For some, Fenton’s score aptly conjures the pathos in John Cleese’s agonising performance of a man on the verge (if not in the throes) of a nervous breakdown. A soundtrack for anyone who loves the detail and knows the tragedy of it too.
BBC Radio 4’s PM ran a tribute mash-up of Fenton’s music (far from exhaustive) on its 6 October 2026 edition, including the rarely heard PM theme tune.
