If you need a theme tune, composer Christopher Gunning is your man. If you don’t know his face, you’ll certainly know his music. The soundtrack to Under Suspicion? That was him. La Vie En Rose was too. And that panpipe jingle for the Martini adverts? Also him. Or the string arrangement on The Hollies, The Air That I Breath or Colin Blunstone’s Say You Don’t Mind? Yep, you’ve guessed it.

The four-time BAFTA and three-time Ivor Novello award-winner’s scores have transformed endless television programmes and films, adding flavour and feeling to the action on screen. He’s a master of meeting the brief – but what happens when there isn’t one? Like with his latest release – Flute, Clarinet and Guitar Concertos, recorded with members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

“It’s a different discipline and the complete freedom is tremendously liberating on the one hand and it can also be quite scary,“ he tells me from his Croxley home. “Because you don’t have a straightjacket to work in. I feel a tremendous excitement when I’m writing a new piece and I love doing it but it’s also a torment! Because on the face of it you can do anything you want.“

Having spent most of his career meeting deadlines, to get his personal pieces finished meant making up his own.

“I think keeping yourself motivated when you don’t have to do it by next Thursday is a difficulty that people encounter,“ he explains. “When I was setting out to be a composer of symphonies and concertos in my early 20s my life seemed endless – it didn’t matter if I did it today or tomorrow or next week or next month – so I won’t do it now! As you get older you realise the tap’s dripping the whole time and if you don’t do these things you never will.

“They’ve been in mind for a while. I was really desperate to get them done.“

Also now on release is perhaps the best-known of all Christopher’s work, the theme tune and music he penned for long-running series Agatha Christie’s Poirot.

His brief required the music to suggest the ‘30s, and the fashionable ‘30s at that.

“Nothing had been shot at this point,“ he says. “It was all guess work on my part from reading the scripts. I thought about the classical music of the period. What do we know about Belgian music? There have been some composers, some really good ones, but they’re relatively thin on the ground.

“So you start thinking of French composers – even though Poirot would get extremely irritated at the mere suggestion there was any French blood in him!

“I could also see there was going to be wit around, that was another ingredient and then lastly we’re dealing with murders and other crimes, so I felt the music had to have a darkness.“

With so many elements to include it’s a wonder he managed it at all, but manage it he did, creating music that instantly puts the Poirot character in mind.

“I can work very, very fast when I know what I’m doing,“ adds Christopher. “When I don’t, it’s like anything isn’t it – you wallow around in massive indecision and get in a state!

“In the end if it’s required of you that you come up with something – you just have to, in the end needs must.

“There’s no other way of it getting done, so it gets done, somehow, by hook or by crook!“

Both CDs are available now. To order and for further information visit: www.christopher-gunning.co.uk