Neil Brand (born 18 March 1958) is an English dramatist, composer and author. In addition to being a regular silent film accompanist at London's National Film Theatre, Brand has composed new scores for two restored films from the 1920s, The Wrecker and Anthony Asquith's Underground. Brand has also acted and written plays for the BBC. His book, Dramatic Notes, focuses on the art of composing narrative music for the cinema, theatre, radio and television. For his contribution to music, in 2016, Brand was awarded with a BASCA Gold Badge Award. Background and education Brand was born in Burgess Hill, Sussex, England, and attended Junction Road Primary School in Burgess Hill, then Brighton and Hove County Grammar School for Boys (now Brighton Hove & Sussex Sixth Form College). At the age of 18, he went to the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, to study Drama under John Edmunds. However, he had a talent for music, and it was at Aberystwyth that he began writing and playing music seriously for the first time. In 2013 he was made a Fellow of Aberystwyth University. Television and radio On television, Brand has appeared in Switch, a BBC drama for the hearing impaired, as Ted, a bullying businessman. In 2004 he appeared as an expert on cinema accompaniment in Who Do You Think You Are? which investigated the musical background of soprano Lesley Garrett. Other work for the BBC has included musical compositions and radio plays. He also composed the score for Channel Four's three-part documentary series on the Crimean War in 1997. One of his plays, Stan, was broadcast on radio in 2004 on BBC Radio 4 and then adapted as a television play, first broadcast on BBC Four. It documents Stan Laurel's touching last moments with best friend and comedy partner Oliver Hardy, who lies bedridden after a stroke. Another play broadcast on Radio 4, in 2007 Seeing It Through, dealt with Charles Masterman and his efforts to coordinate writers and journalists for the British propaganda effort in World War I. In September 2013, Neil Brand presented the BBC Four programme Sound of Cinema: The Music that Made the Movies]. In the first episode in the series, he looked at the impact of classic orchestral film scores via the work of European-born composers (such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold) and their influence on contemporary film composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Hans