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British composer Geoffrey Burgon has enjoyed careers in jazz and classical music, as well as a composer of film and television music. His interest in music didn't manifest itself until he was in his early teens, and Burgon taught himself the trumpet in order to join the school band. He later attended the Guidhall School of Music (whose alumni include future Beatles producer George Martin and conductor/arranger Richard Hewson) with the intention of pursuing a career as a performer. One of his teachers, Peter Wishart, saw his potential as a composer, however, and tried to push Burgon in that direction. For a time after graduating -- most of the middle and late '60s, in fact -- he made his living as a jazz trumpeter, but at the outset of the '70s, he decided to pursue composition full-time. His early concert and dance works established him as an innovative yet accessible composer and led to a pair of minor, early commissions for television. Those, in turn, resulted in Burgon being asked to score "Terror of the Zygons," one installment of a multi-episode adventure on the long-running BBC television series Doctor Who; his music for the show was so successful that he was asked to write a score for another adventure in the same season, "The Seeds of Doom." From there he went on to score such series as Testament of Youth, Brideshead Revisited, and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Burgon has since brought his talents to such feature films as A Foreign Field (1993) and Sirens (1994), but he has never entirely abandoned composing for television, having scored the 2002 and 2003 productions of The Forsyte Saga and The Forsyte Saga: Part 2 -- To Let, respectively. Over the decades, Burgon has proved capable of working in a wide range of musical idioms, from modernistic, dissonant yet accessible music for the Doctor Who shows to faux-Edwardian style on Brideshead Revisited. He has also continued to write successfully for the concert hall.