Dudley Simpson, who has died aged 95, wrote memorable theme tunes for popular television series such as The Brothers and Blake’s 7, but was at his most prolific as the creator of incidental music for Doctor Who in the 1960s and 70s, contributing to 62 stories over almost 300 episodes – more than any other composer.

Ron Grainer’s theme tune for Doctor Who, realised by Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, became one of the most distinctive in television history, but each programme needed original music to accompany the Time Lord from Gallifrey on his adventures. Simpson, an Australian with years of experience conducting orchestras for ballet, joined the sci-fi drama in 1964 for the first story of its second series, Planet of Giants, a year after Doctor Who began.

Within a few years he had established himself as the programme’s in-house composer. Working with tight budgets, he began by using acoustic instruments and small chamber groups before going more electronic with the newly invented synthesisers – typically, in the 1972 serial Day of the Daleks. By then, he was marrying the two styles, but his later episodes saw a return to woodwind, percussion and strings.

Simpson’s era on Doctor Who (1964-80) covered the first four Time Lords – William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker – and he worked under three producers. He even took a cameo role as an orchestral conductor in the 1977 story The Talons of Weng-Chiang. However, when John Nathan-Turner took over as producer in 1980, Simpson was dropped in favour of incidental music being composed by the Radiophonic Workshop. The theme tune was also given a more funky arrangement.

Nevertheless, Simpson’s success on Doctor Who brought him work on many other programmes. His classical background came to the fore in the jaunty theme for The Brothers (1972-76), a popular boardroom-to-bedroom saga about a family haulage company.

Returning to sci-fi shows and electronic music, Simpson composed themes for The Tomorrow People (1973-79) and Blake’s 7 (1978-81), which was devised by Terry Nation, creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who.

Simpson was born in Melbourne, the son of Charles Simpson, a postal worker, and his wife Edna (nee Stephens), and attended the city’s boys’ high school. At the age of 13, he won an inter-state piano competition organised by a radio station and became its official accompanist.

While serving as a warrant officer in the Australian army in New Guinea during the second world war (1943-46), he injured his hand when a truck he was driving carrying explosives was hit by Japanese bombing, and found that playing the piano aided his recuperation.

He studied orchestration and composition at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and joined the Borovansky Ballet, which became Australian Ballet, as pianist, then assistant conductor, before becoming its musical director in 1957.

Two years later Simpson began a season as guest conductor of the orchestra of the Royal Opera House, in London. His career in Britain continued there with three years as principal conductor (1960-63), a job that included accompanying the Royal Ballet’s touring section in Europe and the Middle East, with Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev as principal dancers. He also orchestrated Liszt’s B-minor piano sonata for Sir Frederick Ashton’s ballet Marguerite and Armand (1963), created for Fonteyn and Nureyev.

In 1960 Simpson met the television producer Gerard Glaister, who invited him to compose the music for a BBC play, Jack’s Horrible Luck. Written by Henry Livings, the 1961 drama starred Barry Foster as a naive young sailor ashore in Liverpool, where he meets a busker (Wilfrid Brambell) and shares a rowdy night at his lodgings. Then Glaister, after rejecting another composer’s efforts, commissioned Simpson to write the music for Moonstrike (1963), an anthology thriller series about the activities of allied agents during the second world war.

This led to an approach to work on Doctor Who by its associate producer, Mervyn Pinfield. Simpson’s work was also heard in dozens of other programmes over the following quarter-century. He composed the themes for many television plays and adaptations of classic literature, including Lorna Doone (1963), Kidnapped (1963), The Last of the Mohicans (1971), Madame Bovary (1975), Sense and Sensibility (1981), Dombey and Son (1983), Oliver Twist (1985), The Diary of Anne Frank (1987) and Titus Andronicus (1985), the last production in the BBC’s Shakespeare canon, as well as Jacob Bronowski’s acclaimed documentary series The Ascent of Man (1973).

His incidental music was featured in other plays, as well as the 1971 run of the detective series Paul Temple starring Francis Matthews, and, on ITV, Super Gran (1986-87) and episodes of Tales of the Unexpected screened in 1988. A year earlier he retired and returned to Australia, where he lived in Sydney and continued to compose classical music.

Simpson’s marriage in 1950 to the ballet dancer Jennifer Stielow ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Jill Bathurst, also a ballet dancer, whom he married in 1960, and their three children, Karen, Alison and Matthew.

• Dudley George Simpson, composer and conductor, born 4 October 1922; died 4 November 2017