4 - State of Decay

Composer: Paddy Kingsland
Director: Peter Moffatt

What's the score?
The first story in production order to be scored by Paddy Kingsland, although not his first transmitted work for DW. Once again he uses woodwind sounds, lyricism and repeated motifs. The woodwind sounds are pitched lower this time, more like the oboe or bassoon than Full Circle's flute.

Musical notes

• Remember the "TARDIS flying through space" cue from Full Circle? There's a very similar cue in Part One over the very similar shot of the TARDIS flying through E-Space. A side-by-side comparison illustrates nicely the different timbre and texture of the two scores.
• There's a bit of a Hitchhiker's Guide moment in Part One when the Doctor accesses the Hydrax's databanks. I'm prepared to guess that this is one computer sound effect that Kingsland provided himself.
• The end of Part One features the sound that I like to call the "singing owl". It's that theremin-like sound that's routinely used in film and TV as shorthand for "spooky". The owl sings while the Doctor and Romana fight their way through the woods pursued by a swarm of vampire bats. However, it doesn't feature in the reprise in Part Two...
• It's not uncommon for DW composers to rework their music from the end of one episode at the start of the next, either to extend cues to bridge gaps in the soundtrack or in response to re-edited visuals. This kind of recap switcheroo tends to happen at the start of the final episode of a story, when a strong musical entrance is needed. Here, Kingsland performs pretty much the same composition in Part Two that he used in Part One, but he changes the sound palette: the singing owl is gone, replaced with rumbling bass tones. The owl sings again at the end of Part Three when Zargo shows off his vampire strength by hurling a man across a room.
• My favourite cue from this story is the sombre theme from Part Three that plays as the Doctor returns to the TARDIS to check his records on vampires. It's heroic in a grim, determined sort of way, which I feel gives us a plausible impression of the Doctor's state of mind at this point.
• The latter half of Part Four is dominated by one simple musical phrase, repeated in descending tones. It plays at some length over the shots of the vampires aging and crumbling to dust. The repetition of a motif in the latter part of a story is something I associate with Kingsland's scores, and although on this occasion it's not exactly overpowering, it's indicative of stronger examples to come.

Vox pop
Although this is another pleasant score from Paddy Kingsland, I can't help feeling that it's the Full Circle score's poor relation. It's less vibrant - Kingsland always sounds more alive when he's working at the treble end of the sonic spectrum. (Perhaps there's a comment to be made here about the aptness of a less lively score for a story about the undead.) His electric guitar is pretty notable by its absence too. It's a good score, but not one I'd consider essential.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.

3 - Full Circle

Composer: Paddy Kingsland
Director: Peter Grimwade

What's the score?
Full Circle is the first story to be transmitted with an incidental score provided solely by Paddy Kingsland - State of Decay was produced earlier, but transmitted after this one. This, and his work on the following story, gives Kingsland the chief responsibility for designing the musical feel of E-Space, as well as musically introducing the new companion, Adric.
Kingsland's score is lyrical and makes strong use of repeated motifs. He tends to favour woodwind-like sound - particularly high, fluting sounds in this score - and prominent bass drum accents. His electric guitar also gets its first proper workout here.

Musical notes

• A jolly "riding into action" cue plays over the shot of the TARDIS flying through space at the start of Part One. Hold onto that cue, it'll come in handy next week. It turns up again in Part Three when the Doctor pilots the TARDIS back to the Outlers' cave to rescue a comatose Romana.
• Adric has a theme, except that it's not exactly his theme yet. It starts out more as a theme for the Outlers, and ends up standing for the Alzarians in general. Variants of it play throughout the story. It crops up again from time to time in future stories in reference specifically to Adric. Perhaps surprisingly, Kingsland won't use it to reintroduce Adric when he turns up in the next story.
• K9 has a theme too, and it's heavy on the guitar! It's actually a close cousin of the Alzarian theme. It plays in Parts One and Two over scenes of K9 following the Marshmen through the woods. Unlike Adric's theme, K9's theme doesn't reappear in later stories; but then K9's only in two more stories, and he doesn't get a lot to do in either.
• A repeated seven note phrase plays over scenes that relate to Mistfall or that feature revelations about the Alzarian life cycle. The end of Part One, as the Marshmen emerge from the water, is a notable example. The notes rise and fall cyclically within the phrase, and the phrase itself rises across repetitions, as if emphasising the upward climb of Alzarius' super-evolving lifeforms. "The Ascent of Marshman", we might call it.
• The other major theme is a sombre piece that represents the Deciders. There's a special extra-sepulchral version that plays when we first see the cathedral-like space of the Starliner's bridge, where the Deciders hold court.
• There's an ironic little fanfare when K9 is beheaded in Part Two. It's almost as if the composer were making fun of this solemn, dramatic moment - surely not?
• This week's quote from the DW theme tune comes in Part Three, after the Doctor has rescued Romana. We get an overt "oo-wee-oo" over the Doctor working the TARDIS controls, followed by a more subtle bass "oo-wee-oo" as we track through to Romana's room.
• There's an unexpectedly rockin' moment at the start of Part Four when the possessed Romana lets the Marshmen into the Starliner. When I hear this cue, it puts me in mind of the "Piltdown Man" section of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells - no particular musical similarity, just the combination of rock guitar and primitive hominids. Is it just me?

Vox pop
This is a charming score, eerie and lively in equal measure. The liberal use of the electric guitar adds a lot of fun to the mix, too. It works well with the TV episodes, and Kingsland's development of themes within the score makes it a great listen in its own right.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• The score was released on the Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume 4 CD in 2002, alongside the Kingsland/Howell score for Meglos. Volume 3 included some of Dick Mills' sound effects from the story.

2 - Meglos

Composer: Paddy Kingsland (Part One), Peter Howell (Parts Two to Four)
Director: Terence Dudley

What's the score?
As Paddy Kingsland explains in the DVD commentary, Peter Howell was assigned this story to score but fell ill; Kingsland stepped in to score Part One while Howell recuperated, using notes that Howell had made in discussion with the director.
It would be wrong to say that we hear Kingsland giving an impression of Howell in Part One, or Howell of Kingsland in Part Two. Part One is unmistakably Kingsland's handiwork, elements of which recur in later episodes, either wholesale or modified to fit Howell's style. The music is bouncier than in the previous story, even jittery in places. But it doesn't take long for Howell's own voice to make itself heard - quite literally, in fact.

Musical notes

• In scenes that feature Deon ceremonies, the chanting of the Deons becomes a part of the incidental score thanks to the electronic magic of the vocoder. This device takes vocal input, processes the sound through a number of electronic channels and returns it as a buzzy, robotic sound that can be played on a keyboard. There's some irony here given the Deons' opposition to the science-fundamentalist Savants. In most cases the chanting is performed by Peter Howell himself, but for a couple of musical cues the studio dialogue provides the input. I think this might be the only time in DW's incidental musical history that the vocoder is used in this way - although Howell's arrangement of the theme tune also includes some vocoder elements, as can be seen in the "Synthesizing Starfields" extra on the Leisure Hive DVD.
• The vocoder was designed as a military tool for scrambling communications during World War Two, laid the groundwork for the technology that made mobile phone communications possible, and became the hot musical toy of the 1970s for artists like Kraftwerk and Wendy Carlos. How to Wreck a Nice Beach by Dave Tompkins offers plenty of further information about the vocoder for interested readers. Speaking of Wendy Carlos, the cue that introduces Lexa, the Deon high priestess, in Parts One and Two sounds rather like the opening theme from A Clockwork Orange. Or perhaps I should say, they both sound like the march from Purcell's "Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary". There's no obvious relevance to the funereal aspect of the piece, but it's possible the cue was intended to liken Lexa to Mary II, another capable and devout political leader.
• Meglos is represented by the rattling sound of the vibraslap. In scenes where he's impersonating the Doctor, the vibraslap plays a subtle part in the music, reflecting his subterfuge; when the cactus breaks through, the sound is louder and electronically enhanced to give it a more prickly quality. If you could hear a cactus shouting (other than when it's being played by Tom Baker), I imagine this is what it might sound like. Readers at home who own the Doctor Who - The Music album or any of its reissues can hear the enhanced noise right at the start of the "Meglos" track. Oh listen, there's a quote from the DW theme tune at the end of that cue.
• The "reset" sound for the chronic hysteresis in Parts One and Two is a peculiar "twinkle" that wouldn't sound out of place on the end of a pantomime fairy godmother's wand. Perhaps it was meant to point up the magical nature of this bit of pseudo-science? Again, an interesting choice for a science-vs-faith story.
• On the DVD commentary, Howell recalls a prank he played on producer John Nathan-Turner during a screening of Part Three. For the scene in which Meglos takes Caris by the hands and leads her off into the shadows of the bunker, Howell replaced the transmitted cue with the sound of a tango; Nathan-Turner didn't notice.
• Meglos' lighthouse/elevator/weapon thing gets its own signature sound once it's fired up in Part Four. It might best be described as "like that seagull noise at the start of the Bergerac theme".
• Famously, the closing theme music at the end of Part Four was played at a lower pitch than normal - closer to the Derbyshire arrangement's key of E minor - albeit at the correct speed, and to this day nobody knows why.

Vox pop
This score could easily have ended up sounding like a retread of the previous one - there are several cues in the latter half that would fit comfortably into the Leisure Hive score - but the use of the vocoder and the vibraslap keep it fresh. The inclusion of Paddy Kingsland's peppy style in the mix also helps. Perhaps the Radiophonic composers should have collaborated more often? Not one that I listen to regularly, but entertaining.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• The entire score was released on the Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume 4 CD in 2002, alongside Paddy Kingsland's score for Full Circle. A selection of Dick Mills' sound effects from both stories were included in Volume 3 the same year.
• Doctor Who - The Music included a single musical cue from Meglos, lasting about a minute and a half - it's the one from Part Two, when Meglos is hiding from the Tigellan guards inside the bunker.

1 - The Leisure Hive

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Lovett Bickford

What's the score?
The incidental music for The Leisure Hive, the first story of the Nathan-Turner era of DW, was composed by Peter Howell, who had also provided the new arrangement of the DW theme tune. This gave the new-style score and new theme a consistent musical texture, a canny move that would be repeated with the introduction of the Dominic Glynn arrangement of the theme tune for The Trial of a Time Lord and the Keff McCulloch arrangement for Time and the Rani.
As Howell and director Lovett Bickford explain in interview on the Leisure Hive DVD, Bickford included several lengthy transitions and scene-setting shots for Howell to provide "epic" music for. It's suggested that this was down to Bickford's filmic vision as a director; scurrilous bloggers like myself might wonder if it was also a creative way of filling out a short-running script. The epic music is very welcome in any case.

Musical notes

• As this is the first story to feature the Howell arrangement of the theme tune, let's talk about it. It's a very dynamic arrangement, sure to excite the viewer's anticipation of the episode that lies ahead. An echoing treble line, not all that dissimilar from the sound of the original theme arrangement, is driven along by a growling bass line - the rock 'n' roll years of DW have arrived. Parts, notably those that were created using a vocoder, have almost the quality of an electric guitar about them. The formation of the DOCTOR WHO logo is heralded by a very quiet washing sound - that'll change in 1985. The closing theme includes the middle eight section of the tune, which I like to think of as the "mouse chorus" - a high pitched vibrato synth sound. It tails off almost disappointedly as the singing mice are ushered out of the room and the main body of the theme returns. Rather than fade out, the closing theme ends with a rushing sound and goes out with a bang.
• Delia Derbyshire's theme arrangement was in the key of E minor, but the new arrangement is in the key of F sharp minor. As Howell recalls on the DVD commentary for the next story, Meglos, the practical consideration of the keyboard layout of his synthesizer led him to use the key of F; he then felt it was running too slowly, and sped it up to leave the final version another semitone higher.
• Part One famously opens with a long tracking shot along Brighton beach on a grey day, and Howell matches this with a wistful, desolate opening cue. It's probably best if we pass quickly over the little refrain of "I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside" that announces the Doctor's appearance. There's a hint of seagulls in the mournful cue that plays after K9's explosive attempt at bathing.
• The military-sounding cues in Parts One and Four show signs of classical influence. Mena's shuttle, returning to Argolis from Earth, is heralded by a cue with some similarities to Ravel's "Boléro", while the cues that play in Part Four while Pangol is creating an army of tachyonic copies of himself owe something to this and something to "Mars, the Bringer of War" from Holst's "The Planets" suite. Both pieces - with their associations of the romance of the industrial age and mechanised warfare respectively - are appropriate referents for the Argolin, whose fate depends on a machine.
• Howell plays along very nicely with the Part One cliffhanger and Part Two reveal, in which the Doctor appears to be dismembered by the Tachyon Recreation Generator. He sets this up with a sort of horrified synthesizer yelp and an urgent, downbeat cue during the earlier scene in Part One in which a tourist really is killed in the TRG; he then repeats this at the start of Part Two, after we've seen the Doctor's image suffer the same fate. When it becomes clear that the Doctor's unharmed, the urgent-sounding cue evaporates into an audible sigh of relief.
• The TRG has a little motif of its own, a repeated four-beat bass phrase that pops up at various points during the story. There's a panicky version of it when the TRG seems to be about to dismember the Doctor.
• I'm very fond of the cue leading up to the end of Part Two, in which Hardin's time experiment fails and the Doctor is aged 500 years. It conveys that something's gone wrong in an understated, melodic way, before subsiding into an angsty, wavering treble sound as the elderly Doctor is revealed. It's as if the music is as stumped as the characters as to what's happened and is taking a while to react. Then, once everybody's settled down at the start of Part Three, there's another nice melodic cue with a couple of minor key "tumbling" phrases to underline the downward spiral of the situation of Argolis.
• There's an unexpected burst of sequenced sound in Part Three that would have made Tangerine Dream proud. It comes just after Romana's removed a component from the TRG. For some reason, it plays over a shot of Pangol walking down a corridor.
• Once all the martial music in Part Four has died down and Mena and Pangol have re-emerged from the TRG, there's an odd upbeat fanfare that sounds almost like the flourish after an illusionist's trick. Which I suppose in a sense it is, but still. It's mood whiplash in musical form.
• There's a little taste of the bass line from the Howell arrangement of the theme tune in the cue early in Part Four when Mena collapses, and more confidently at the end of Part Four during the Doctor's "back to work" exit speech. Thus begins a long tradition of electronic composers working bits of the DW theme into their scores.

Vox pop
The director gave him the opportunity to show what the Radiophonic Workshop could do, and Peter Howell seized it with both hands. This score is lush, varied, and really feels like an all-out showcase for the new sound of DW. It sounds every bit as good on its own as it does over the episodes, and rewards repeated listening. I love it to bits.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• The entire score (without the episode breaks) was released on CD as Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Volume 3 in 2002, along with some of Dick Mills' sound effects from this story, Meglos and Full Circle.
• The 1983 album Doctor Who - The Music included a five-and-a-half minute suite of music from The Leisure Hive, topped off with the TARDIS dematerialisation sound and Dick Mills' atmospheric wind sound as used for Argolis exterior scenes.

0 - Fanfare

This is the 50th anniversary year of Doctor Who (DW), and it seems like a pretty good excuse for a blog. There are a lot of projects underway at the moment to celebrate DW's big five-oh, up to and including a hopefully memorable TV episode. My own contribution is this, a series of rambling considerations of the electronic incidental music that featured in DW during the 1980s.

Doctor Who - The Music was one of the first albums of electronic music I heard, and it had a huge impact on me. It was released by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as part of DW's 20th anniversary celebrations in 1983, and was followed by a second album in 1985.
The staff of the Radiophonic Workshop were commissioned to create all the incidental music for DW starting in 1980 as part of a bold series of changes implemented by the show's new producer, John Nathan-Turner. Prior to this, much of the show's incidental music had been composed by Dudley Simpson (exclusively, for the previous four seasons) or taken from library stock, and was usually performed on conventional instruments, although there had been a few electronic scores.
The Radiophonic Workshop themselves had contributed incidental scores prior to 1980 - Brian Hodgson had provided music as well as special sounds for The Wheel in Space (1968) and Malcolm Clarke had created a highly experimental score for The Sea Devils (1972). Louis Niebur, writing in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space, makes a persuasive argument to the effect that Brian Hodgson's contributions to The Dominators (1968) also do the work of incidental music. More recently, Silva Screen released a CD of Hodgson's special sound from The Krotons (1968) with liner notes by Mark Ayres emphasising its musicality. Dudley Simpson sometimes collaborated with the Radiophonic Workshop, using their apparatus to completely "electronify" some of his Pertwee-era scores or to add impact to some cues in Tom Baker's stories. But 1980 was when radiophonic music became the norm for DW.
Later, in 1986, Nathan-Turner looked to freelance composers to take on the job of creating DW's incidental music, with the Radiophonic Workshop continuing to provide special sound. The music, however, remained electronic until DW's demise (temporary, as it turned out) in 1989. 1986 was when I started watching DW, and this more pop-influenced electronic music also had an impact on me.
John Nathan-Turner produced 50 DW stories between 1980 and 1989 (assuming that you count The Trial of a Time Lord as four stories - which, musically, it is). I aim to tackle one a week with a pair of bookend posts (including this one), making 52 in total.  50 stories for DW's 50th birthday... it seemed to fit the bill.

Somebody or other once observed that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", but what the hell, I'd do that too, if there was enough demand for it. It'd be something for us all to look forward to.

What this blog is not

• A technical catalogue of the hardware used to create DW's incidental music in the 1980s. I am not a scientist or a highly skilled synth geek, and know nothing of specific models of synthesizer beyond what I can find out (and understand) on the Internet. My ability to identify particular sounds within the music will pretty much be limited to my ability to describe them in terms of other sounds. This approach should offer obvious benefits to readers who share my lack of technical expertise.
• A thorough analysis of the compositional techniques of the artists behind the music. I am not a B.Mus. and know nothing of musical theory. I hope to be able to pick out motifs, references to other musical works, easy things like that, and occasionally to be able to make an insightful comment about some part of the music. I can't guarantee that, though. It's my hope that readers will point out any major points that I've missed by submitting comments to the blog.
• An outlet for bootleg copies of the incidental music under discussion. Although I plan to use sound files of 15 seconds or less to illustrate particular points here and there, it certainly isn't my intention to give out entire musical cues, much less entire scores. I'm assuming many readers of this blog will already be familiar with the compositions and/or the stories in which they appear, and I'm hoping those who aren't will be encouraged to track down the stories and discover them for themselves. If you're not keen on buying your own copies of the DVD releases, or if you want to try before you buy, check with your local library - there's a good chance they'll have a copy you can borrow for a small fee. If you don't want to pay a library fee to watch the DVDs, ask your DW-loving friends if you can borrow theirs.

What this blog is

• A celebration of the electronic music that defined the sound of DW in the 1980s, and a celebration of DW itself in this, its 50th anniversary year.
• A bit of fun.
• An exercise in getting me to write to a fixed schedule, in the hope that this'll encourage me to write more in general. Write more by writing more. So, we'll just see how that works out...

The players

• Peter Howell started out as a folk musician working in collaboration with John Ferdinando. He joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1974 and stayed there for 23 years. His first musical contribution to DW was providing electronic supplements to Carey Blyton's chamber orchestral score for Revenge of the Cybermen in 1975. In addition to arranging the theme in 1980 (with tweaks in 1985) and composing for ten stories, he provided the music for the 1981 spin-off K9 and Company and the Jon Pertwee DW radio plays The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space. Besides composing for TV and radio programmes, he released an original album through the Radiophonic Workshop in 1978. In 2013, he was lecturing at the National Film and Television School. Contributed to: The Leisure Hive, Meglos, Warriors' Gate, Kinda, Snakedance, The King's Demons, The Five Doctors, The Awakening, Planet of Fire, The Two Doctors. 
• Paddy Kingsland composed TV and radio theme tunes and incidental music at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1970 to 1981. He notably provided the theme and soundtrack for The Changes, special sound for Fits One and Seven to Twelve of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series and incidental music for the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series. He left the BBC to start his own studio, PK Studios, which he was still running in 2013 with his son Matthew. However, he continued to compose incidental music for BBC programmes, including DW as well as Michael Palin's programmes Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole. Contributed to: Meglos, Full Circle, State of Decay, Logopolis, Castrovalva, The Visitation, Mawdryn Undead, Frontios. 
• Roger Limb joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1972, having previously been a newsreader for the BBC World Service. His work over 23 years at the Workshop included music for The Box of Delights and a whole lot of material for the children's programmes You and Me and Look and Read. However, his first love seems to have been jazz, and in 2013 he was the musical director, producer, arranger and pianist for Aydenne Simone's Jazz Culture Band. Contributed to: The Keeper of Traken, Four to Doomsday, Black Orchid, Time-Flight, Arc of Infinity, Terminus, The Caves of Androzani, Revelation of the Daleks. 
• Malcolm Clarke is the most senior of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers covered here, having joined in 1969. He (in)famously declared that radiophonic composition should be treated as an art form, and surprised all concerned with his incidental music for The Sea Devils. His most highly regarded work outside DW was the sound he contributed to August 4th 2026, a 1976 radio adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains". Clarke died on December 11th, 2003. Contributed to: Earthshock, Enlightenment, Resurrection of the Daleks, The Twin Dilemma, Attack of the Cybermen, Terror of the Vervoids (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Nine to Twelve). 
• Jonathan Gibbs had an extremely short tenure at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, lasting only from 1983 to 1986. His last work for DW was providing incidental music for the 1985 radio serial Slipback. However, his career at the BBC spanned a full 20 years, and he left in the 2000s to go into business. In 2013 he was working as the governor of a school he founded in Hertfordshire. Contributed to: The King's Demons, Warriors of the Deep, Vengeance on Varos, The Mark of the Rani. 
• Elizabeth Parker started working with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1978 and was the last member standing at the time of the Workshop's closure in 1998. She only composed music for one DW story (and provided special sound for another, not covered by this blog), but has a huge portfolio of compositions for other TV and radio programmes. Notable credits include the theme tunes for Points of View and Horizon, a lot of music for BBC Natural History programmes including David Attenborough's The Living Planet, and the special sound for two and a half seasons of Blake's 7. She was still composing in 2013. Contributed to: Timelash. 
• Dominic Glynn's 1986 arrangement of the DW theme tune was his first professional commission. Since scoring the last DW story of the 1980s, he's worked as a DJ, recorded several alternative electronica albums and founded No Bones Records to promote underground dance music and electronica. His music has appeared in a variety of films and TV programmes, and he provided the soundtrack for the recent radio revival of Blake's 7. Contributed to: The Mysterious Planet (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts One to Four), The Ultimate Foe (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Thirteen to Fourteen), Dragonfire, The Happiness Patrol, Survival. 
• Richard Hartley is a prolific composer and arranger of music for TV, film and theatre. One of his earliest credits was arranging Richard O'Brien's music for The Rocky Horror Show and its film adaptation. He won an Emmy for his music for the all-star 1999 NBC adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Contributed to: Mindwarp (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Five to Eight). 
• Keff McCulloch was working as a sound engineer and gigging musician when he came to John Nathan-Turner's attention through a friend-of-a-friend connection. (The fanecdote goes that Nathan-Turner spotted him when he was hired to play at a relative's wedding; About Time 6 by Tat Wood says that he was engaged to one of the chorus singers in Nathan-Turner's panto productions.) He rearranged the DW theme tune in 1987 and immediately became Nathan-Turner's go-to composer. After DW's cancellation in 1989, Nathan-Turner commissioned him to provide incidental music for the VHS release of the extant parts of Shada and the 30th anniversary Children in Need story Dimensions in Time. McCulloch created a Latin dance arrangement of the DW theme for the EP Variations on a Theme, and Nathan-Turner used part of this as the theme tune for a series of DW tie-in video releases. In 2013 he was living in Australia, working as a musician for party hire playing 1950s pop hits and Latin jazz. Contributed to: Time and the Rani, Paradise Towers, Delta and the Bannermen, Remembrance of the Daleks, Silver Nemesis, Battlefield.
• Mark Ayres worked as a sound engineer at the BBC from 1982 until 1987, when he went freelance. He approached the DW production office with a view to working for the show, and was invited to compose musical cues for a couple of extracts from the script of Remembrance of the Daleks. These audition pieces can be heard on the DVD of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. He has since scored a variety of TV shows and the film The Innocent Sleep. He also has a long association with the DW fan film company Reeltime Pictures, and has produced a number of DW-related CD releases for Silva Screen Records. In 1998 he became co-archivist, alongside Brian Hodgson, of the late BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Contributed to: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Ghost Light, The Curse of Fenric. 
• Dick Mills is the unsung hero of this blog. One of the founding members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, he worked there for 35 years as a sound engineer and creator of special sound. Early work includes sounds for Quatermass and the Pit and the now legendary "Major Bloodnok's Stomach" sound effect for the Goons. He's credited with the special sound for all the stories covered in this blog - except for a very few possible exceptions that we'll come to, every computer bleep, laser zap and buzzing door is his, as well as a lot of environmental sounds that helped to define the alien worlds of DW. He produced both of the Workshop's Doctor Who - The Music albums.