Alexander Faris obituary

Conductor and composer who won an Ivor Novello award for the theme music he wrote for the TV series Upstairs Downstairs

The conductor and composer Alexander Faris who has died aged 94, was on a rostrum in an orchestra pit somewhere in London theatreland almost constantly from the late 1940s to the 1980s. He composed music for film and TV, a musical, and plenty of anonymous library music used here and there for commercial purposes.

In 2009 he was belatedly but briefly propelled into the limelight by The Edwardians, the signature tune he had written for the 1970s television series Upstairs Downstairs. He was uncredited for the first series. As he said, “If they’d known it was going to be so successful they would never have asked me to write the music.” But successful it was, and the theme gradually became familiar to worldwide audiences, winning Sandy an Ivor Novello award in 1975.