Scoring A First

How did you get involved with The Furchester Hotel?

MJ: Our agent at The Composerworks asked if we would like to pitch for the show. Having grown up in the 1970's watching and loving Sesame Street and The Muppets - especially the music, we knew this would be the dream job.

We spent three weeks working on the demo, providing 22 items of music, including a theme, a song and several incidental pieces. After a nail-biting wait over Christmas, we were delighted to find out in January that we had won the commission.

What was the music brief?

MJ: The overall style was left pretty much up to us. We do like our jazz and blues and bearing in mind the genres of music that you traditionally associate with Sesame and Henson's, we wrote with a leaning towards that style. With the show being aimed at the pre-school audience, we were reined in a bit from the jazzy style, but we still sneaked as much in as we could. After all, nobody is as jazzy as Cookie Monster…

AB: And songs are really central in the show. The lead script writer Belinda wrote the vast majority of the song lyrics. This is quite a novel way of working for us (we normally write lyrics) but it worked really well.

What do you like about the show?

AB: A lot. The hotel is the most impressive studio set we've ever seen. The detail and humour in it is extraordinary.

MJ: Although the show is aimed at 3 to 6 year olds, there are still plenty of laughs for grown-ups, and if like us, you like anything with Muppets in it, this will have you smiling broadly. One particular episode had me in stitches (look out for the sheep…). There were also a lot of really talented people working on the production - some of whom we'd worked with before, but most were new which was great.

Describe the challenges faced with a score for a series of this size.

MJ: In a word, time. 52 episodes is a lot of telly! At 11 minutes per episode, it works out at the equivalent of the length of 5 pixar movies... And add that to the logistics of recording cast members in the studios (who were on a very tight schedule) and arranging session musicians to record live there’s a lot to keep on top of!

AB: The exciting part too was liaising with the UK and US producers – something we hadn’t experienced before. Managing the whole scoring process felt a little daunting at times - we had I think about 4 days off in 5 months - and we worked into the night and every weekend. But it's just so rewarding to have our music on the show. We’re both proud to have been associated with it.

You mentioned recording the cast. How was it working with them?

AB: It was great. We recorded the cast onsite at MediaCityUK. They are all really interesting and so professional.

The only tricky thing about the cast sessions was that due to filming schedules, we would end up with very short time-slots to record. However, the actors managed really well. We are usually hermits in our studio so it was a really nice change to record out on location.

MJ: We have learned that puppeteering is very physical and tiring - they even had a masseur on set which is apparently necessary to combat back and neck pain! There were 5 main character actors and about 10 others who played various roles. It was exciting meeting and working with Ryan Dillon (Elmo) and David Rudman (CookieMonster, and Scooter from the Muppets.)

And during one session I remember that Ryan managed to contain himself for about half an hour before finally bursting out with the news that he had been working with Michael Buble two days earlier. If it was us, we would have blurted it out before saying hello!

And finally… if you were a character from the show who would you be…?

MJ: Easy. We eat a lot of biscuits and cakes at the Studio so it has to be COOOOOOOOKIE. Nyum nyum.

AB: I'd love to say Cookie for the same reason as Mart, but as I was demoing all the vocal parts for the songs prior to them being recording by the cast, I found that Cookie’s voice was the one which I couldn't even get close to, so I'm afraid that's a none starter. And rather embarrassingly the voice I seemed to get closest was Funella's….oops.

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The Furchester Hotel airs on CBeebies from the autumn of 2014.