A SUSSEX-based composer will see a piece of music he started writing 57 years ago performed this week.

TV and film composer Paul Lewis began writing his Overture: Brighton Beach composition in the last term of his school days back in 1957 at Brighton College aged 16.

He finished it just a few months ago after being commissioned by the Eastern Road college to write a unique work to celebrate the opening of the school’s new Music School.

The work, a nostalgic celebration of the Brighton seaside in the 1950s, will be performed by the school’s orchestra on Wednesday at St Mary’s Church in Kemp Town following a series of rehearsals at Brighton College’s Music School as part of the Brighton Festival.

Mr Lewis said: “I am thrilled to have been commissioned by the College to celebrate the splendid new Music School with an overture for the College Symphony Orchestra.

“This has finally brought to an end the longest gestation period of my composing career.

“The theme tune of the piece has nibbled at my brain intermittently since I was 16 and started writing it, and I have several times toyed with it in between the pressing deadlines that a busy life composing scores for TV and film perpetually thrust upon me. Now at last I have finished it.”

The composer made his name in TV and film from a young age.

At 19 his short orchestral pieces often accompanied cinema newsreel footage and at 20 he became assistant musical advisor at ABC Television, one of the larger British independent television companies at the time.

Within a few months he had composed his first score for a major TV drama.

Since then he has scored over 150 series and one-offs as well as being the subject of a half-hour ITV documentary.

His TV work ranges from high drama with Orson Welles, Peter O’Toole, Christopher Lee and Celia Johnson, to international award-winning children’s comedy by way of Benny Hill and Monty Python.

Many of his early library compositions are still sought after and can be heard in current popular series such as Spongebob Squarepants and Antiques Roadshow.

Despite the addition of many new ideas to the work, Mr Lewis’ original musical thoughts as a 16-year-old boy still remain, in the shape of the theme tune of the piece and the idea of a middle section in which the orchestra mimics a military band playing the stirring old march song Sussex by the Sea, long considered the unofficial county anthem of Sussex.