Geoffrey Burgon composed the music for Doctor Who in 1975 and 1976, and in 1979 scored a direct hit with his music for the BBC's television dramatisation of John le Carré's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. The closing Nunc Dimittis theme entered the UK charts, and he won his first Ivor Novello award.

In the next decade he wrote the theme music for the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, and his TV work included Brideshead Revisited (1981) for Granada and The Chronicles of Narnia (1988) for the BBC. Brideshead went gold, selling more than 100,000 copies, and brought him another Ivor Novello award. He went on to win Bafta awards for best television music for Longitude (2000) and The Forsyte Saga (2002).

He produced a vast body of classical music, including works for full orchestra and for soloists, dance scores for the Royal Ballet, London Contemporary Dance Theatre and Ballet Rambert, and an opera based on Charles Dickens's Hard Times.

His first great classical success was his Requiem, premiered when the Three Choirs Festival was at Hereford in 1976, and described by the Times as "this year's most important new work". This was followed a year later by a piece based on a medieval Chester miracle play called The Fall of Lucifer.

In 1994 he wrote a concerto for the percussionist Evelyn Glennie, and three years later a piano concerto for Joanna MacGregor. But he was always passionate about the human voice, and integrated it into much of his output. The song cycle Merciless Beauty of 1997 was followed, three years later, by Heavenly Things. In 2003 came Three Mysteries, for soloists, choir and chamber orchestra. It is not surprising that so much of his choral work has become standard for cathedral choirs.

I was lucky enough to work for Geoffrey and achieved many fantastic features in the national press, on national radio and TV and in all the key music magazines.  My last job, very sadly, was to place Obituaries in The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Times on his untimely death in 2010.