He then spent the next two decades learning his trade by touring with productions (of variable quality) all around the UK - in his own words conducting "third rate opera and second-rate musical comedy".
[1] In 1907 he worked with Edward German to reduce the orchestral scoring for the opera Tom Jones down to 15 players for touring purposes.
[3] He was a great admirer of O'Neill's work, and once compared a performance of Mary Rose without his music to "a dance by a fairy with a wooden leg.
[1] A notable early success was the British version of Lilac Time, with music by Schubert adapted by George H. Clutsam, which opened at the Lyric Theatre on 22 December 1922 and ran for 626 performances.
In 1928 he was contracted by Charles Cochran to direct the music for This Year of Grace by Noël Coward, which ran for ten months at the London Pavilion.
B. Priestley's then experimental play Johnson Over Jordan, which opened at the New Theatre on 22 February 1939, directed by Basil Dean and with Ralph Richardson in the title role.
[3] In the early 1930s Basil Dean appointed Irving music director at the newly opened Ealing Film Studios.
He composed many scores for classic Ealing comedies including Whisky Galore!, Turned Out Nice Again (starring George Formby) and Kind Hearts and Coronets.
In this he had the backing of the studio's head of production Michael Balcon, who encouraged Irving to engage serious composers routinely and to use large orchestral forces and unusual scoring.
At the time of his death five months later Irving was working on a comic operetta (The 'Orse) and had almost completed his autobiography (posthumously published in 1959 as Cue for Music).