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.