21 - The Five Doctors

Composer: Peter Howell
Director: Peter Moffatt (1995 edition overseen by Paul Vanezis)

What's the score?
And so the gap between Seasons 20 and 21 is broken by the appearance of a special feature-length story to celebrate DW's 20th anniversary. With hindsight Peter Howell, responsible for the contemporary arrangement of the theme tune, seems an obvious choice to compose the incidental music.
Twelve years later, Howell was asked to compose for the story again! 1995 saw the release on VHS of a new special edition of The Five Doctors (and for the sake of convenience, let's hereafter refer to the 1983 version of the story as the Original Edition and the 1995 version as the Special Edition). Several scenes were extended, added in from the cutting room floor or moved around for aesthetic reasons, and this necessitated a rescore. Howell agreed to adapt the original musical cues as necessary and to provide new cues for some of the new scenes. (He also took the opportunity to retouch details such as Rassilon's harp - with the benefit of more advanced synthesizers, it sounds a lot more harp-like in the Special Edition than it did in the Original Edition.) So you're getting two scores for the price of one this week, you lucky readers.
Howell's score is somewhat sparser than the average for 90 minutes of DW - less than 30 minutes in total (around 35 minutes for the longer Special Edition). A typical four-part DW story made in the '80s, running to a little over 90 minutes, will contain between 45 and 60 minutes of music. But then this isn't a four-part story, it is in effect a one-parter, and 30 minutes of music might actually have seemed generous for a single piece of television at the time.

Musical notes

• In the Original Edition, the opening theme continues as if, uniquely during the period 1981-86, it's going to launch into the middle eight (the "mouse chorus" section); instead it diverts directly into the opening cue over a scene inside the TARDIS. In the Special Edition, this scene was replaced with some establishing shots of the Tower of Rassilon, and the musical transition was lost.
• In fact, as Special Edition producer Paul Vanezis notes, the opening theme presented a rather special problem, since Vanezis wanted stereo title music and the only stereo mix Howell had to hand was "the radio version" (presumably the version included on the Doctor Who - The Music album, which had recently been used on the 1993 radio play The Paradise of Death). Missing from this mix was the washing sound that had heralded the appearance of the DW logo on screen - presumably not considered necessary without the accompanying visuals, but required for The Five Doctors. For the Special Edition, Howell added in an extra specially thunderous logo sound. It sounds almost as if he's trying to outdo the sound he added to the theme tune for Colin Baker's run - but let's not get ahead of ourselves...
• The cue that introduces the tranquil Eye of Orion is broadly similar in both editions, but in the Original Edition it included what sounded remarkably like a cheeky lift from Dudley Simpson's Blake's 7 theme tune. (A crafty way of acknowledging Simpson's enormous contribution to DW in earlier years?) Someone must have mentioned it to Howell, because in the Special Edition the cue has been rewritten without it.
• A persistent ticking sound appears in cues that play over scenes in the Timescoop control room, and later when the assembled Doctors are resisting the villainous Borusa's attempt at mind control. Your humble blogger can't decide whether it's brilliant or a bit over-literal to represent the President of the Time Lords with the sound of clockwork. 
• One of the new cues in the Special Edition is a stately harp-based piece for the establishing interior shot of the Capitol. Given the importance of Rassilon's harp later in the story, the choice of the harp here is a canny one, a nice set-up for the eventual revelation. It should be pointed out, though, that this cue doesn't bear any resemblance to the actual tune the Doctor will later pluck out on the instrument in question. 
• The first multiple Doctor scene, when the First Doctor finds and enters the Fifth Doctor's TARDIS, is accompanied by a twanging sound reminiscent of the bass line from the original arrangement of the DW theme tune. It starts out fast and on a relatively high note (the Fifth Doctor out cold on the floor), then switches to a lower note and a slower speed (the First Doctor arrives on the scene); the notes don't match up, but it could be a reference to the difference in pitch and speed between the 1981 and 1963 arrangements of the theme tune. This isn't the only theme tune reference in the score - needless to say there's an "oo-wee-oo" or two to be found, with a prominent example early on when the Third Doctor thinks he's outrun the Timescoop.
• The cues used for the Cybermen vary depending on which Doctor is appearing in their scene. When the Second Doctor and the Brigadier run across one, we get a rasping, oscillating sound very much like something Brian Hodgson might have put together in the '60s. Elsewhere, when the Cybermen confront the Fifth Doctor, Howell employs a metallic march in clear tribute to Malcolm Clarke. The only cue that connects the Cybermen to the First Doctor is the stepped bass build-up that plays as they march into a death trap inside the Tower - is it too fanciful to look for echoes of Martin Slavin's "Space Adventure" in there? (There's no precedent for the Third Doctor, who never had a Cyberman story to call his own, so we default to the '80s style with him. It may be worth noting that Howell contributed electronic music to the only '70s Cyberman story, so I guess he gets the final say in the matter.)
• The cue that plays as the Second Doctor and the Brigadier find the cave entrance to the Tower has been changed for the Special Edition: it now includes a whistling reprise of the "Above, Between, Below" nursery rhyme the Doctor sang earlier when he was telling the Brigadier about the various ways to enter the Tower.
• Fans have long joked about the Master's musical staircase: after the First Doctor and Tegan have left the chessboard room and entered the main body of the Tower, the Master is seen sneaking down a staircase behind them, and the incidental music in the TV soundtrack appears to punctuate his steps. (This effect may not have been Howell's intention, but if it were, it would be in a long and noble tradition of musical staircases stretching back to Max Steiner's music for King Kong.) But if we're talking amusing collisions of visuals and music, I prefer President Borusa's harmonica: after Borusa has told the rest of the High Council that he wants to be left alone, he puts his hands together and huffs into them, and in the Special Edition this coincides nicely with a blast from Rassilon's horn.
• The Five Doctors famously ends with the original Delia Derbyshire arrangement of the theme tune, the pitch and speed altered to bring it into line with Howell's arrangement, which takes over around the transition into the "mouse chorus".
• Fun fact: Peter Howell has said in interview that the Horn of Rassilon was a treated library sample of the Queen Mary cruise liner's horn.

Vox pop
Peter Howell has been getting experimental lately, but this of all stories demands a conventional score with one eye on the past, and Howell duly obliges. There's still opportunity enough for him to flex his musical muscles, and the result is a score that can hardly fail to please. And like the best birthday presents, it can be enjoyed time and again after the celebratory event itself.

Availability

• The BBC DVD special edition includes the full isolated scores for both versions of the story.
• Doctor Who - The Music II included a suite of music from this story.