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.