60 Minute Makeover « David Schweitzer

60 Minute Makeover

[Series 1-6, ITV1, 2004-9] Daytime home improvement series hosted originally by Claire Sweeney and later by Terri Dwyer, Producer: Granada

I got this job back in the spring of 2004, and boy did i need it at the time! Despite my having done more and more film and tv scoring work, much of which was getting quite a lot of critical acclaim, these were mostly low-paid jobs and I was still earning very little. In January 2004 I remember I was doing a big gig of my songs at Blackheath Halls, and I had borrowed my parents car to ferry instruments around and so on. The day before the gig the car got towed from outside my flat in Stockwell (single yellow line for 10 minutes!), and I remember being absolutely desperate as I simply didn’t have the money to pay the fine, and had to borrow the £200 or so from my parents (to add to my other long-standing debts).

The gig went really well, but I think it was the next day, sitting on the sofa of my parents house, that one of them tentatively suggested that perhaps it was time I took up a different path, and had I thought about teaching music? I was pretty devastated by this, as my life seemed to make no sense as anything other than a composer, and I was determined to get the next job that I could.

In fact I was lucky that I got the opportunity to pitch for this show shortly afterwards (a friend of a friend was a director working on the series and suggested to the series producer that I should have a shot at it). After a couple of pitches, I got the job. I know it might seem like there are endless number of home improvement shows on tv, but a large number of these shows don’t catch on and disappear without trace, so I was doubly lucky that the series was popular and has been re-commissioned many times.

I wrote a large library of tracks for Granada that they used almost exclusively on the first three series of the show (with Claire Sweeney). Here are a couple of the pieces that got quite a lot of use on those shows.

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In 2007 they rebranded and got a new presenter and also largely new music. I wrote a few more tracks for them that were more guitary that the new series director wanted, such as…

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These days, they still use some of my tracks on 60 Minute Makeover, but I think most of what they put on the show is library music these days. Anyway, the upshot of that long-winded story is that I am still writing film and tv music… Getting that job allowed me to keep on the same path for enough time to get some other more substantial jobs under my belt (including my first two feature films). So I will be eternally grateful to this show, and long may it go on!

Here is the homepage of 60 Minute Makeover.

Documentaries, Series, Title themes