[3] For the first eight years of Ron's life the Grainer family lived in Mount Mulligan, a small town built around the extraction of coal from three seams which lay beneath a 400-metre-high sandstone monolith,[4] located 100 km west of Cairns.

[8] Concerts in the years following the disaster included performances by a very young Ron Erle Grainer, taught piano-playing from the age of four by his mother [9] and encouraged to learn the violin by an elderly Welsh miner.

He enrolled at the University of Queensland in 1939 to study civil engineering and music,[20] a course which included harmony, counterpoint, and composition as taught by classical musician Percy Brier, a traditionalist educator who encouraged his more talented students to think for themselves.

[22] After the outbreak of World War II, Grainer joined the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) in December 1940 and was sent to Amberley, Queensland, posted to 73 Signals, given a course at Point Cook and assigned to Radar Station No.

In the official report on his audition performance the only music piece mentioned by title was Ravel's Bolero,[24] a seemingly simple instrumental riff which holds the listeners' attention in a similar manner to Grainer's later themes and signature tunes.

[29] In August 1951 a presentation of Delius, Faure, and Milhaud compositions by Grainer on piano and Don Scott on violin was ridiculed in a newspaper review for the duo's "uncompromising disregard of mob appeal", "lack of practical concert sense", and "unrelievedly pastel colouring" set list that was "in need of a more impulsive and heartfelt spirit on the well tendered surface" having earlier said "by the time the programme ended the recital badly needed blood transfusion".

He managed to find a three-month engagement playing piano in a nightclub along with other occasional jobs, the worst of which became a twelve-month stint with a touring Australian comedy act called "The Allen Brothers and June."

This required the classically trained Grainer to be hit on the head nightly by a falling grand piano lid and then to topple over into the orchestra pit, an experience he later said was even harder to do than a day's fencing in the Australian outback.

Taking inspiration from Orson Welles' 1938 radio drama of The War of the Worlds, the production used a similar format in which a regular programme broadcast was interrupted by a fake public service announcement.

[36] When Maigret was given the Ivor Novello "Outstanding Composition for Film, TV or Radio" award in 1961, commissions from a wide range of genres poured in: Goon Show silliness (It's a Square World, 1961), one-off pilots (Comedy Playhouse), documentaries (Terminus, 1961), kitchen sink drama (A Kind of Loving), quirky domestic sitcoms (Steptoe and Son 1962), classic serials (Oliver Twist 1962), teen films (Some People 1962), late night satire (That Was The Week That Was, 1962), outpost angst (Station Six Sahara, 1962), ballet (The King's Breakfast, 1963), science fiction (Doctor Who, 1963), psycho killers (Night Must Fall, 1964), children's adventure stories (The Moon Spinners, 1964), patriotic biography (The Finest Hours, 1964), big-budget musicals (Robert and Elizabeth, 1964), unusual love stories (Boy Meets Girl, 1967), acclaimed dramas To Sir, with Love (1967), allegorical social commentary (The Prisoner, 1967) and crime-caper movies (Only When I Larf, 1968).

He once indicated he felt a "trifle wistful" that so many people just associated him with the Doctor Who theme,[39] the only tune in his extensive portfolio that had its sound dynamics realised by someone else – Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

[44] In September 1968, tired of London traffic jams[citation needed] and worried about his intensifying eyesight problems,[45] Grainer moved permanently to his former retreat property in southern Portugal.

The last of Grainer's TV themes, It Takes A Worried Man, was broadcast on 21 October 1981, and featured a closing credits film clip of the series hero gradually losing pieces of his torso and face until all that is left are his eyes.