Ben Foster

British composer/arranger/conductor Ben Foster studied at the National Film and Television School and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He had his first credits on albums by rock and teen pop acts such as Toploader, Gary Barlow, S Club, and Nikki Cleary in the early 2000s. Soon, he began to get work scoring short films, and in 2004, he did the full-length feature Playground Logic. As an arranger/orchestrator and/or conductor, he handled more prominent assignments including The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005), Death at a Funeral (2007), and 27 Dresses (2008). After the BBC decided to resurrect the science fiction series Dr. Who, he was hired to arrange and conduct the score music provided by Murray Gold, and he served those functions on three resulting soundtrack albums released by Silva Screen Records in 2007 and 2008. For the spin-off series Torchwood, Foster was co-credited with Gold as composer, with a soundtrack album released on September 22, 2008. He alone scored the subsequent mini-series Torchwood: Children of Earth, its soundtrack album released August 11, 2009. ~ William Ruhlmann