I'm utterly thrilled to announce...

...that this Christmas represents a FESTIVE BONANZA for my music!

Firstly, it was an honour to be asked to co-write with Dan McGrath the new theme music for The Royal Variety Performance 2021.

Royal Variety Performance 2021 at Royal Albert Hall, London. Photo: Matt Frost/ITV

To have our music played live at the Royal Albert Hall, conducted by none other than Strictly's Dave Arch, is a great honour.

It's on ITV this SUNDAY 19th DECEMBER at 7.20pm.

Secondly, I can't believe what's happened this month...the very same Dan McGrath (to whom I owe all the beer) got me involved in this year's Comic Relief Pantomime: Beauty and the Beast!

Lily James Image: BBC/Crook Productions. Illustration: Quentin Blake.

Filmed over Zoom, this hilarious festive romp features Lily James, Celia Imrie, Oliver Chris and a host of other stars, including some brilliant cameos from David Walliams, David Tennant...and a couple of surprise ones too. Illustrations by Quentin Blake.

And it's absolutely plastered with orchestral music by me! Magical, fantasy, Disney style orchestral music. Can we say this was a dream job? I think we can. And I was on a Zoom call with one of my heroes, Richard Curtis.

Air Date: On BBC Two this SUNDAY 19th DECEMBER at 9pm.

(You may notice it overlaps with the Royal Variety Performance...so get recording!)

And that's not all...

Four years ago I co-wrote the theme music (with guess who? Dan McGrath) for ITV's All Star Musicals.

This year's special, All Star Musicals at Christmas is on Boxing Day at 8pm.

Image: ITV.

What A Year...

I've truly had the best composing gigs of my life this year, including having Rylan's adverts for Cinch running all year, a bespoke trailer for animated movie Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness (coming Feb 2022) and even squeezing in writing songs for my long time collaborator and friend Hannah Phillips for her production: Badass Medusa #MeToo.

It's taken a long time, years of work and patience to get to this point, but now I'm here I'm never letting go. Here's to lots more wonderful work in the world of music in 2022!

It's been a hell of a year, which included more home schooling, our whole family having COVID, cancelled holidays and uncertainty about the future, so it's wonderful to also have all these positives to celebrate.

And I hope you all have as much fun and merriment as is humanly possible this Christmas...make this year The Best One Yet! (If you know, you know 😉)

Much love,

Nik

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