This timely issue in the Chandos Movies series marks the centenary of Clifton Parker (1905-89), a prolific composer represented here by documentary films and features like Lewis Gilbert’s Sink the Bismarck! which was premiered at the Odeon Leicester Square on February 11, 1960, and went on to become one of the year’s biggest box-office attractions in the UK, alongside such diverse fare as Doctor in Love and Hercules Unchained!

Treasure Island, the version starring Robert Newton as Long John Silver, directed by Ken Annakin for Disney in 1949, is one of five marine-linked scores in this collection. It begins in opulent fashion with Parker aping the swagger of Korngold and introducing a noble brass theme (0’59” in) that serves as a peroration point in the concluding track. Shanties and figures racing in the strings lend a thrill of splicing the main brace to accompany Stevenson’s classic adventure story. The cue ‘Leaving the Island’ introduces an elegiac note where the tenderness of the moment catches us off guard, a not uncommon characteristic of British light music.

Parker’s Western Approaches, a 1944 documentary depicting the crew of a Merchant Navy vessel surviving a torpedo attack, is muted in tone, the grey waters of the ocean predominant in the orchestral colours. The Blue Lagoon, the story of children shipwrecked on a desert island is picturesque and touched with a childlike innocence (1’30” in). In contrast, Virgin Island, released in 1958 at the height of the calypso craze, is an exotic, tuneful, sun-soaked score with an imaginative use of the guitar amongst the splash of orchestral colours. The March from Sink the Bismarck!, crisp and starch-collared, follows in the tradition of Elgar and Walton’s marches and Sea of Sand, another march for a desert adventure, doesn’t quite stick in the mind despite being championed by the booklet-note writer. No reservations, though, for Night of the Demon, a no-holds-barred main title from Parker for a 1957 thriller that conjures up a nightmarish world of the occult with a pithy brass figure leering out of the scoring, or for Blue Pullman, an evocative through-composed 15-minute composition for a 1960 documentary marking the train’s maiden voyage from Manchester to London’s St Pancras. A resourceful, tuneful score with a suitably ritzy theme (3’10” in) as dinner is served in the luxury Pullman carriage, it brings this CD to an eminently satisfying conclusion.

The indefatigable Philip Lane, who has arranged and edited Parker’s music, is one of the heroes of this recording; the others are the BBC Concert Orchestra, replacing their northern colleagues, the BBC Philharmonic, in this series. They play with huge gusto under Rumon Gamba. The booklet with excellent documentation, stills from the films and a charming photograph of the composer and colleague Muir Mathieson with Jean Simmons, on whose every word they appear to be hanging, is a pleasure in its own right.