Howard Goodall, the composer who gave Mr. Bean a cathedral choir

Howard Goodall

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	May 26, 1958 Bromley, Kent, England, United Kingdom
Occupation	Composer, broadcaster
Known for	The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years
Awards	Emmy · BRIT Award · BAFTA · Ivor Novello · BASCA Gold Badge

This month, choral societies in Bradford, Buckingham, Billingshurst and East Grinstead are rehearsing the same requiem. Its composer also wrote the music that plays while Rowan Atkinson falls from the sky in a beam of light, a cathedral choir intoning “Ecce homo qui est faba”: behold the man who is a bean. Howard Goodall has never treated those as two careers. The Latin joke and the Latin mass come out of the same training, and he has spent four decades arguing, on television and in print, that the line between serious and popular music is drawn in the wrong place.

That argument has kept his music everywhere and his name in the margins. Viewers know his television themes without knowing who wrote them: Blackadder, Red Dwarf, Mr. Bean, QI. Choirs sing his setting of the twenty-third psalm and his “Love Divine” without connecting them to sitcoms, though one link is literal: the psalm is the theme of The Vicar of Dibley.

The church came first. Goodall, who was born in Bromley, Kent, on May 26, 1958, sang as a boy chorister in the choir of New College, Oxford, then went on to Stowe School and Lord Williams’s School before reading music at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a first-class degree. Oxford also gave him collaborators. As an undergraduate he met Rowan Atkinson and the writer Richard Curtis, and that friendship opened his first door into television, the sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News. He also played in a band, Half Brother, which released one album in 1978.

Through the 1980s and 1990s his themes became part of the furniture of British comedy. He wrote the music for Blackadder and for Red Dwarf, where “Tongue Tied”, a song from the series with lyrics by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, reached number 17 on the UK singles chart. For Mr. Bean he adapted a passage of Bruckner’s motet “Locus iste” into a choral theme in mock-liturgical Latin, sung by the Choir of Southwark Cathedral. The Thin Blue Line, 2point4 Children, QI and The Catherine Tate Show followed, along with the films Bean, Mr. Bean’s Holiday and Johnny English Strikes Again. The most serious of his screen scores, for the HBO film Into the Storm, about Winston Churchill in wartime, won him a Primetime Emmy in 2009.

The stage was where he wanted to be heard on his own terms. The Hired Man, written with Melvyn Bragg from Bragg’s novel about a Cumbrian farm labourer, reached the West End in 1984 and won an Ivor Novello Award the following year. The Kissing-Dance and the dreaming followed with the lyricist Charles Hart. Love Story, from Erich Segal’s novel, opened at the Minerva Theatre in Chichester in 2010 and has since been staged from the United States and Italy to South Korea and Brazil. Bend It Like Beckham: The Musical, written with Gurinder Chadha, opened at the Phoenix Theatre in London in 2015 and closed in March 2016 after a nine-month run. The magazine Opera Now has called him one of the most distinctive and undervalued composers in British musical theatre, a verdict that the uneven commercial fortunes of those shows tend to confirm.

His largest audience is the people who sing him. Eternal Light: A Requiem, commissioned by the chamber orchestra London Musici for its twentieth anniversary and first staged in 2008 with Rambert Dance Company, strips the Latin requiem to its core and interleaves it with English poetry from five centuries, by writers from Francis Quarles and John Henry Newman to John McCrae and Mary Elizabeth Frye. Recorded for EMI Classics with Natasha Marsh, Alfie Boe and Christopher Maltman, it won him Composer of the Year at the 2009 Classic BRIT Awards, and his publisher, Faber Music, now counts more than 800 performances. Enchanted Voices, a setting of the Beatitudes released by Classic FM in 2009, became that year’s best-selling specialist choral album. Larger commissions followed, from Every Purpose Under the Heaven, an oratorio for the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible first heard at Westminster Abbey in 2011, to Unconditional Love, a pandemic-era cantata premiered in Houston in 2021.

Goodall has also been one of Britain’s most visible explainers of music. His Channel 4 series, from Howard Goodall’s Organworks in 1996 to How Music Works in 2006, explained harmony and rhythm to viewers without a music degree, and Howard Goodall’s Big Bangs won the BAFTA Huw Wheldon Award. In 2007 the government named him England’s first National Ambassador for Singing, leading the Sing Up programme in primary schools, and in 2011 he was appointed CBE for services to music education. He was also Classic FM’s composer-in-residence.

The same conviction that makes him a gifted explainer is where his critics push back. When BBC Two broadcast Howard Goodall’s Story of Music in 2013, the companion book was broadly well reviewed, except on one subject. In The Telegraph, Ivan Hewett called its treatment of Schoenberg “wrong-headed” and “a serious blot”; in The Guardian, Nicholas Lezard placed its dismissal of atonality and serialism in a “grand British tradition of near-philistinism”; in The Scotsman, Stuart Kelly found it “intemperate”. The objection matters because it describes his own music as much as his history: tonal, melodic, written for amateurs to sing and understand on first hearing. Goodall has never pretended otherwise. Reviewers read it as a blind spot; it is also the reason amateur choirs keep programming him.

In March, the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra and Chorus gave the Ukrainian premiere of Eternal Light at the Central Baptist Church in Kyiv, conducted by Viktoriia Konchakovska, in a performance marking four years of war. “It is a great, great honour for me that you have chosen to perform the premiere of this piece, at a time of such difficulty and sorrow but also a time of great courage and resilience,” Goodall wrote to them. In 2025 Bray Choral Society in Ireland marked its 40th anniversary with the premiere of The Creation Song of the Choir of Light, set to a text in Irish and English by the poet and farmer Keith Brennan, and the animated Mr. Bean, for which he writes all the music, has just finished a fourth series on ITVX. Stunners, a musical with the novelist Joanne Harris, remains in development.

Goodall is married to the classical music agent Val Fancourt, and they have two daughters. On November 14, the Bradford Festival Choral Society sings Eternal Light at Bradford Grammar School, one of five performances of the requiem in England this month, eighteen years after its premiere.