Morse composer regretted the impact of his TV success

Life Story

Barrington Pheloung, who has died aged 65, was a composer and arranger who became best known for the theme and incidental music to the television detective series Inspector Morse, and its spinoffs Lewis and Endeavour, which lent a languorous quality to occasionally hectic plotting.

The staccato opening refrain of the main theme to Morse, first heard in 1987 in the episode ‘‘Dead of Jericho’’, used a motif based on the Morse code for ‘‘M.O.R.S.E.’’ and Pheloung claimed that he occasionally spelt out the name of the killer in the incidental music. When astute viewers worked this out, he took up the challenge by dropping in the odd red herring.

As director of music for the series, he was also responsible for educating the musical tastes of the title character, and Morse’s creator Colin Dexter was said to be delighted with the lengths to which he would go to incorporate passages from Wagner, Mozart, Schubert and Maria Callas.

His work won him a Bafta Award nomination for best original music. In 1991 an album of music from the series reached No 4 in the charts and sold nearly 200,000 copies.

Yet Pheloung, who also wrote ballets and works for musical ensembles, and who taught composition at the Royal College of Music, was said to feel that his identification with television and film scores had not improved his chances of being taken seriously.

Barrington Somers Pheloung was born into a Roman Catholic family in Manly, in Sydney’s northern suburbs. He began playing R&B guitar in clubs, but his discovery of Bach in his late teens prompted a change of direction. After working as a postman to raise the money, at the age of 18 he moved to London to study classical guitar under John Williams and Julian Bream at the Royal College of Music.

But he also studied composition and conducting, and it was these that became the focus of his career after he began getting commissions for ballet scores.

He would go on to compose 52 scores for ballet and dance companies in Britain and Europe, including Run Like Thunder and Rite Elektrik. Other commissions include scores for the West End production of The Graduate, starring Kathleen Turner and later Jerry Hall, and The Wheel of Fire, a 2001 musical and theatrical spectacular performed by China’s Shaolin monks.

One of his early works caught the attention of the film director Anthony Minghella, who commissioned him to write the score for his stage play Made In Bangkok in 1986, and at about the same time he got his first television commission, scoring the Michael Elphick crime drama Boon.

As well as Inspector Morse, he went on to

score dozens of other television series, including Dalziel and Pascoe. His film music credits include Minghella’s Truly, Madly, Deeply (1992), the 2005 rom-com Shopgirl (‘‘Philip Glass on Prozac,’’ wrote one critic) and Hilary & Jackie (1998), based on the life of the cellist Jacqueline du Pre, for which he earned a second Bafta nomination. He also composed the first music played at London’s Millennium Dome on New Year’s Eve 1999.

Pheloung was virtually unknown in his native Australia, a fact he regretted. ‘‘If I’d stayed here I would have ended up a much better surfer and a relatively successful blues guitarist,’’ he told an Australian newspaper in 2001, ‘‘but I made my profession from composing. My greatest ambition is to do all the things I do, but live in my own country.’’

He rediscovered his Catholicism late in life. It became very important to him, and he attended daily mass whenever he could.

Pheloung is survived by his wife Heather, and by their three sons and a daughter. –

He was said to feel his identification with TV and film scores had not improved his chances of being taken seriously.