47 - Battlefield

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Michael Kerrigan

What's the score?
For the final time, Keff McCulloch provides the music for the season opener, and indeed this is his last DW score. Well, his last until the charity skit Dimensions in Time and the video release of Shada. Once again he's given the story with heavy martial overtones - UNIT and Arthurian knights this time - so naturally there's some common ground between this score and his work on the previous year's Dalek and Cyberman stories. Having said which, his choice of sound palette has undergone something of a shift, with synth strings and woodwind providing the backbone of this score. Percussion and horns are still prominent, but less so than in his earlier work, and his beloved orchestra hits hardly get a look-in. The synth choir does put in an appearance, though.

Musical notes

• As with McCulloch's two scores in the previous season, solid foursquare beats are the order of the day, but that doesn't stop McCulloch from having a little fun with the rhythm. There's actually a touch of swing in the battle scenes in Part One, which isn't a big help when the scenes themselves are so leisurely. The stand-out funky cue, however, must be the one that accompanies the scene of Mordred summoning Morgaine in Part Two - a regular beat underpins a pleasingly jumpy synth string melody.
• As ever, McCulloch favours character sounds over themes or motifs, and Battlefield has a few to offer. Ancelyn is represented with an upward electric guitar whine in his first (armoured) appearance, and repeatedly thereafter during the story - he may be the "good guy" knight, but McCulloch obviously thinks he's a bit of a badass. Parts One and Three feature some upward violin scratching for Morgaine, although this isn't a consistent feature of her scenes. The sword Excalibur, in its cutaway appearances in Part One, is heralded by high synth and faint organ notes, not entirely unlike the material used in Silver Nemesis on shots of the Nemesis asteroid in space. The use of martial snare drum rolls to represent UNIT should be obvious to everyone.
• The tick-tock harpsichord rhythm from Silver Nemesis makes a surprise reappearance at the start of Part Two when the Doctor, a.k.a. "Merlin", stares down Mordred. It wasn't used to represent the Doctor in the previous story, but as a motif for magical time-travellers from England's past - it's not a bad match for "Merlin" in that sense, then, although nobody at King Arthur's court would have played the harpsichord. 
• The reveal of Bessie, the Doctor's vintage car, in Part Three is heralded with a charming old-fashioned violin piece capped off with an "oo-wee-oo". Cherish this "oo-wee-oo", folks, because it's the last of McCulloch's long line of DW theme references.
• Readers who've been playing the Spot the Latin Music Moment game should take particular note of the big fight scene near the start of Part Four. Unless your humble blogger has missed something, this is the only musical cue in 1980s DW to feature the cowbell.
• When the Destroyer, unleashed, prepares to devour the world in Part Four, there's a sound that reminds your humble blogger of the siren of an ambulance. And what should we hear in the tail end of the climactic scene in which the Doctor persuades Morgaine not to start a nuclear war? Why, it's an up-and-down sound reminiscent of an ambulance siren - not the same cue, but similar enough to be worth mentioning. Perhaps McCulloch and/or director Michael Kerrigan have shrewdly picked up on the subtextual connection - apparently intended by the scriptwriter - between the world-eating demon and UNIT's nuclear missile.
• There's a lovely moment in Part Four when Ancelyn and Mordred are about to launch into a swordfight and the Doctor casually strolls between them - the music pauses and double-takes along with the knights.
• McCulloch is not averse to ending a DW score with a cheesy walkdown - ample proof can be found in Season 24 - and this story ends with the cheesiest of them all. A lengthy piece of lounge piano plays over the final scene at the Brigadier's country house, leading into a jaunty wrap-up in pizzicato strings and woodwind as the ladies take the Doctor's car for a joyride. And they call this Sylvester McCoy's "dark" season.

Vox pop
This is Keff McCulloch at his most reined-in. We lost the wild invention of Season 24, now we've lost most of the bombast of Season 25 - what we're left with is pleasant, but a bit too smooth. This score veers closest of all McCulloch's scores to what I've referred to before as the sound of daytime/lifestyle TV - for that matter, there are several cues in Battlefield that wouldn't sound out of place in a corporate training video (most notably, the first exterior shot of the Gore Crow Hotel in Part One). This is certainly the safest of McCulloch's scores, but I wouldn't say that playing safe is one of his strengths as a composer, or something I look for in a DW score.
And so, farewell, Keff McCulloch. I still maintain that he's a varied and interesting composer, undeservedly overlooked by too many DW fans. His work is of its time, but the same can be said of his contemporaries Glynn and Ayres, and there's less distance between the three of them than a lot of fans might care to admit.

Availability

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

46 - The Greatest Show in the Galaxy

Composer: Mark Ayres
Director: Alan Wareing

What's the score?
So here, at last, is Mark Ayres, last of the Sylvester McCoy era's Big Three of DW composers. Ayres secured this particular gig on the strength of two test cues he composed after being passed the script for Part One of Remembrance of the Daleks. These were later included in his album of DW spin-off related music, Myths and Other Legends, as "Terror in Totter's Lane" (the appearance and destruction of a Dalek in the junkyard) and "The Headmaster" (the Doctor and Ace first meet Coal Hill School's Headmaster and observe that he's being mind-controlled). They can be heard in context, slightly crushed to fit the scenes as finally shot, as an extra on the DVD release of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.
Ayres provides a massive 70 minutes of music for Greatest Show - his score for The Curse of Fenric is similarly large, while even the score for the three-part Ghost Light tops 50 minutes. Whereas Dominic Glynn likes to build a score around a few strong repeated themes and a selection of story-specific sounds, and Keff McCulloch generally uses a small palette of favourite sounds to react in the moment to whatever's happening on screen, Ayres uses signature character sounds and occasional motifs in a very deliberate and information-heavy way to retell the story through his music - this is true of all his DW scores, but particularly of this one. In keeping with the circus theme of the story, the soundtrack is peppered with beats on the big bass drum, cymbal swells and crashes, snare drum rolls (for example, when Nord does his weightlifting act), and plenty of calliope music in the background.

Musical notes

• Signature sounds for everyone! In addition to the frequent use of high synths and tinging bells for exterior scenes on the planet Segonax, we have the following:
  • a snarling electric guitar for Nord, Vandal of the Roads
  • a pipe organ for the Chief Clown's hearse
  • dramatic stabbing sounds for the footsteps of the robotic Bus Conductor
  • pompous horns for the boorish explorer Captain Cook
  • a hissing, gasping sound (actually an electronically distorted sample of Ayres' own voice) for Mags, intended to hint at her later unmasking as a werewolf
  • a collection of percussive knocks, snaps and ratchets for the troupe of anonymous robot clowns
  • a lazy, spaced-out guitar for the burnt-out Deadbeat
  • a somewhat higher guitar and tinging bells for Bellboy
  Rather than providing specific themes for the characters, Ayres uses these sounds as the basis for a score that varies in response to whoever's on screen in a given scene. The character sounds can even be heard arguing with each other at certain points in the story - for instance, when Captain Cook deflects the murderous approach of the Bus Conductor in Part One, or when Deadbeat baits a caged Nord in Part Two.
• One cue that is repeated is the love theme for Bellboy and Flowerchild, heard in their scene together Part One and again in Part Three when Bellboy reminisces to Ace. It's a heartstring-tugger in a sad guitar and flute, and worth the repeating - DW (pre-2005, at least) doesn't often present composers with the opportunity for love themes, and Ayres rises to the occasion.
• The dark powers behind the Psychic Circus have their own set of signature sounds: two beats on the bass drum in any cue announce that something sinister is about to happen; there's a downward hollow sound for scenes of the eye at the bottom of the ancient well behind the big top; and echoing, grinding footsteps in the later episodes signal the acceleration of events and the increase of the Gods' power. When the Gods are revealed, Ayres accompanies the shots of their glowing eyes with a sustained high ringing sound.
• There are a couple of "oo-wee-oo" moments in this score. Ayres gets the first one in early, as we cross to a scene in the TARDIS after the Ringmaster's opening rap in Part One. The second one, heard later in Part One when the Doctor and Ace approach the Stallslady on their way to the circus, carries a small extra riff on the bassline rhythm with it. It's a pretty oblique reference, but Ayres recalls at this point on the DVD commentary that he was told not to do it again, because the production office would have to pay for any extensive extra use of Ron Grainer's theme melody. This seems to confirm the scuttlebutt about Keff McCulloch's heavy riffing on the theme in Season 24, but doesn't explain why even McCulloch's most tentative post-reprimand theme reference, in Silver Nemesis, is longer than the almost-reference here.
• I can't not mention the series of cues covering the end of Part Three and the start of Part Four, during which the Doctor fends off a werewolf attack in the circus ring and the robot Bus Conductor attempts to kill Ace. (These cues were stitched into a single continuous piece on the 1992 soundtrack CD release, and I still think of them as parts of a single unit.) The werewolf cues are driven by a rhythm section of bass synth and snapping percussion with a panicky high synth keeping pace, overlaid with the expected bass drum pairs and werewolf hisses. The beat lapses into half speed and back again to follow the action in a most pleasing way. The main Bus Conductor cue, meanwhile, features an extremely cheeky "ding! ding!" motif that I'm rather fond of.
• Following the prevailing trend for providing background muzak in addition to the incidental music, Ayres rustles up three circus tunes for use in the ring, in the vestibule of the big top and in exterior scenes just outside the vestibule. Two of these are executed in calliope and snare drum, and are easily recognised as distortions of popular circus tunes. The tune heard in the ring in Part One is clearly based on an inversion of the melody of "Entry of the Gladiators" by Julius Fučík - it can also be heard in Part Four, very faintly and played backwards, when the Doctor walks across the dimensions to the ancient circus and in subsequent scenes in the vestibule. A spoof of "The Liberty Bell" by John Philip Sousa is playing in the background of scenes in the vestibule in Part Two. The third tune, heard on the junkbot's promotional video in Part One and in the ring when characters are led out to be sacrificed in Parts Three and Four, is a bit of a mystery - it sounds rather like the raucous "trombone smear" pieces made popular by the famous circus march composer Henry Fillmore, but your humble blogger can't nail down the specific inspiration for Ayres' tune. Answers on a spinning plate.
• There's one bit of diegetic music in Part Four not included in Ayres' score, and that's a stock recording of Ethelbert Nevin's "Narcissus" in the scene of the Doctor performing conjuring tricks. The DVD production subtitles reveal that the use of this tune was specified in the script. "Narcissus" is a light piano piece once popular with comedians, stage magicians and other light entertainers.
• During the troubled making of Greatest Show, members of the cast kept their spirits up by recording a song about the story. "The Psychic Circus" was produced by Ayres, featured vocals from Christopher Guard and Jessica Martin, and included a middle section in which TP McKenna does what can only be described as "the Vincent Price bit". It was offered to BBC Records, but they declined - perhaps they didn't want to crowd the market while The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album was on sale. The song can be found among the extras on the DVD.

Vox pop
Having character sounds pop up every time the relevant characters do seems like a somewhat over-literal approach to incidental composition, but somehow it works. This is a fantastically rich score, extremely listenable on its own and the perfect complement to the TV episodes. It's easily my favourite of Mark Ayres' three DW scores, and one of my overall favourites.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• A soundtrack CD for this story was released by Silva Screen Records in 1992. For the CD release, Ayres stripped out the background "circus muzak" from the main cues, and presented complete versions of the three muzak tunes as separate tracks.

45 - Silver Nemesis

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Keff McCulloch dishes up a somewhat similar score for the Cybermen to the one he provided for the Daleks earlier this season. (In his defence, the stories are pretty similar too, and I'm tempted to follow up my comments about Malcolm Clarke's Davison-era scores and the interchangeability of the two DW monsters.) Once again the score is characterised by the heavy use of percussion with horns for the villains, which in this case means both the Cybermen and Herr de Flores' neo-Nazis; the synth choir makes a modest reappearance in some villain scenes and a raucous comeback in the scene of the Nemesis statue awakening in Part Three. McCulloch does introduce some new sounds as well - most notable are the weird distorted synth chords and rattling noises heard in the scene in Part Three in which Ace talks to the Nemesis statue.

Musical notes

• The directors of the 1960s Cyberman stories used the take-no-prisoners brass library tune "Space Adventure" by Martin Slavin; Carey Blyton used a touch of funereal organ music in the 1970s; Malcolm Clarke set the standard for the 1980s stories by layering the sound of a metal girder being beaten over a growling synth march. How does Keff McCulloch introduce the Cybermen in Silver Nemesis? With a tinkly march that makes the metal monsters sound like clockwork soldiers. This debuts in the lead-in to the Part One cliffhanger, but isn't reprised in Part Two as an entirely different cue (one with plenty of synth choir) is substituted as a lead-in to the story's big gunfight. However, there are hints of it in several later cues.
• The other contender for McCulloch's defining Cyber-cue is the blaring two note, three note sequence introduced in Part Two in the scenes of the Cybermen relocating their spaceship. The two-three rhythm recurs in some later Cyberman cues in the story, but overall these are outnumbered by cues that use the clockwork motif.
• Lady Peinforte and Richard, the time travellers from the Caroline era, are represented throughout by the harpsichord. McCulloch provides a "ticking clock" rhythm for the scene in Part One in which they travel from 1638 to the present day in Part One. Actually, this isn't far removed from the Cybermen's clockwork motif - is McCulloch trying to suggest a connection? We get a couple of very lovely harpsichord cues later in Part One when the Doctor and Ace nip back in time to nose around Lady Peinforte's home - the second of these adds a pleasant oboe melody that seems, strangely, to include a small quote from the main theme from Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake". 
• McCulloch indulges in a couple of small theme-referencing moments in this story. The first comes in Part Two when the Doctor and Ace find the two skinheads who were earlier tied up in a field by Richard. He asks "Who did this to you?", they reply "Social workers!", and McCulloch slips out an "oo-wee-oo" over the Doctor's bemused expression. A more substantial bassline quote with two "oo-wee-oos" can be found near the end of Part Two as the Doctor observes a small tree lizard crawling out from under a leaf and deduces that the Cybermen's space fleet must be hidden from view. The ponderous tempo of the cue reflects the Doctor's laborious thought processes in this scene.
• As jazz not only features in but plays a part in this story - a recording of a jam session being used to jam the Cybermen's communications - McCulloch, with his known love of Latin jazz, would seem an obvious choice of composer. And yet there isn't much evidence of jazz influences in his score - all the actual jazz heard in the story was provided by special guest Courtney Pine and his band, either in front of the camera in Part One or on tape later in the story. (Contrary to the blurb on the back of the DVD, you will not be able to hear "the jazz styling that flummoxed the Cybermen" while listening to the isolated score.) There is, however, more than a hint in a rejected cue from Part Two, which would have seen Lady Peinforte and Richard strolling down a street in Windsor to an absurdly cheery daytime TV-esque air on synth flute. This was replaced with a more earnest, conventional piece, but the rejected cue can be heard on the photo gallery for this story's DVD release.
• It was during this story that Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred filmed the links for a two-minute trailer for Season 25, for which McCulloch composed a new piece of music. It's of interest to this blog, as the trailer music was included in The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album, under the cryptic track title of "8891 Royale". It wouldn't do much good to describe this piece in detail - it's a patchwork of wildly disparate elements, which I suppose reflects the nature of the trailer, although it's worth just mentioning the unexpected burst of upright piano in the middle - but the overall effect is of being attacked by a hyperactive child with a mallet.

Vox pop
As I've suggested, there isn't much to choose between this season's two Keff McCulloch scores. This one's probably the better of them - the action scenes aren't much different from those in Remembrance of the Daleks with their heavy percussion under synth strings and horns, but the score for Silver Nemesis distinguishes itself in other areas, notably with the harpsichord and oboe cues mentioned above and with the weird shrieking sounds used in some scenes of the active Nemesis statue. It's less even than the Remembrance score, but more interesting because of that.

Availability

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

44 - The Happiness Patrol

Composer: Dominic Glynn
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Dominic Glynn returns to provide his annual score (sadly, one a year from Glynn is all we'll get in these final years of the '80s). Musically, this is an unusual story for DW, and Glynn appears to relish the challenge - he recalls on the DVD commentary how delighted he was to be asked to score a DW story in which music played such an integral part.
Two key cultural influences are at work within this story: the blues and film noir, although the director was prevented from making very much of the latter. Glynn nods towards the film noir element with several minor key piano phrases, but musically he's able to make far more out of the blues angle, and this score is liberally seasoned with melancholic harmonica. The harmonica was played by guest musician Adam Burney, who did his best to provide something in line with Glynn's requirements that would nevertheless match up with the visible breathing and hand movements of actor Richard D Sharp in those scenes where Burney was required to dub diegetic material.

Musical notes

• As part of the incidental music, the harmonica is heard almost immediately in Part One, wailing and snarling as Silas P moves to entrap a miserable woman on the streets of Terra Alpha. The first bit of diegetic harmonica turns up about halfway through the episode, when Earl Sigma is first seen strolling down an otherwise empty street. It's at this point that the score's main harmonica theme is introduced, a relatively straightforward upward and then downward sequence of notes. Variations on this are heard through the rest of the story, including several provided by Glynn's synths - there's a particularly lovely flute version in Part One when Susan Q helps Ace to escape from the Happiness Patrol's headquarters. A full orchestral swell backs up the harmonica in the final cues of Part Three.
• As with Dragonfire, Glynn produces no fewer than three pieces of muzak to give some variety to the sounds of Radio Terra Alpha. The most prominent (and horribly earwormy) of these is a hyperactive xylophone tune over airy synth chords with muted trumpet accents. It's playing in the Forum Square when the TARDIS arrives in Part One, and pops up frequently thereafter - Earl Sigma even mimics it on the harmonica when he's surprised by the Happiness Patrol. A sort of synth calypso tune is very briefly heard just before the TARDIS' arrival, and is heard at greater length in the Waiting Zone in Part Three. The third piece, which plays in the Waiting Zone while the Doctor and Ace are there in Part One, is a slow, cowboy-esque tune in synth violins and a kind of whistling sound. It's strangely mournful; you can practically hear the howling of small dogs in it - however did it get past Terra Alpha's censors?
• Time for the obligatory mention of a DW theme reference - there's a burst of the theme tune's bassline in Part One as the Doctor and Ace are escorted into the Waiting Zone. 
• The Kandy Man has a special theme of his own, a fairgroundy oom-pa-pa in an eerie high-pitched glassy synth voice. It's first heard before he appears, in the scene in which Helen A and Gilbert M discuss what he's cooking up for that night's public execution. Glynn serves up a particularly grandiose version with trumpets and violins for the scene in which the Kandy Man first appears in his Kandy Kitchen, arranging the execution in Part One, and again in Part Three when he's killed in the pipes with his own fondant.
• One odd element of the soundtrack: for the scenes of the factory Drones marching through the streets in Parts Two and Three, there's a literal humming drone. At one point, this humming seems to take on a variant melody of the main harmonica theme.

Vox pop
This is a real high point for Dominic Glynn, and while I'd be hard pressed to say that it's the best of the Sylvester McCoy era scores (although that's a measure of the general high quality of this era's music, not a slight against Glynn), it's as good an example as any we've had of the incidental music working in partnership with the story. More than this, it's a rare instance of the music taking up the slack from other areas of the story's production that were compromised by time and budgetary constraints. With his perky, saccharine muzak, Glynn helps to build the world of Terra Alpha; with his sinister piano cues, he nails the director's vision of a DW film noir; with Adam Burney's harmonica, he provides the heart of the story. That this score is so enjoyable in isolation is just the icing on the Kandy cake.

Availability

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

43 - Remembrance of the Daleks

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Andrew Morgan

What's the score?
Once again Keff McCulloch is assigned to compose the music for the season opener (and he'll do the same next season as well). This is a very percussion-heavy score, as we might perhaps expect for a story featuring the British Army versus the Daleks. McCulloch leans heavily on the synth drum fills - this is a bit of a risky move for a lover of Latin music, and the scene of the Doctor and Ace escaping from the Renegade Daleks in Ratcliffe's yard in Part Three veers perilously close to carnival territory. A more positive result of all this percussiveness is that the score meshes well with the sound effects, to the extent that a lot of the battle scene cues sound a bit bare without Dalek gunfire and explosions going off in the middle of them.
Other prominent elements of this score include the synth choir and horns, some anxious flute and xylophone, sinister violins and a fair amount of pitchbending (most notably in the Part Two cliffhanger).

Musical notes

• One thing every viewer is sure to notice is the repeated music-box motif that plays whenever the sinister schoolgirl is seen watching other characters. It follows the tune of the song she sings to herself while playing hopscotch early on in Part One - it's not "One, two, buckle my shoe", but it's in a similar vein. The actual tune used is the familiar nyah-nyah-nee-nyah-nyah playground chant, often rendered as "I know something you don't know" - and sure enough, she does know something the other characters don't know...
• As mentioned above, synth choir plays a large part in this score. The ultimate expression of this is the all-out screaming, augmented with synth strings, that plays over the Dalek point-of-view shots in Part One. Could this be considered a forerunner of the choral chanting used in Murray Gold's scores for post-2005 Dalek stories?
• It's possible to pick out a theme for the Daleks, or something very like one, in the scenes of Imperial Daleks arriving on the transmat in the school basement in Part Two - a few growling bass synth notes over some understated drum beats. It's ponderous but business-like - stately, perhaps. Variants pop up in Part Three when Ratcliffe delivers the Hand of Omega to the Renegade Daleks, and with added orchestra hits when the Daleks then emerge from their hiding place and kill Ratcliffe's men. A similar but more triumphant piece with synth horns can be heard in Part Four when the Imperial Special Weapons Dalek makes its presence felt in the fray, and again as the Imperial Daleks, having captured the Hand of Omega, take their prize back to their shuttle. 
• There's a lovely piece in church organ and airy synths, punctuated by a tolling bell, as the Doctor supervises the burial of the Hand of Omega in Part Two. It's reprised as the final cue of the story in Part Four, with everyone filing into the church for Mike's funeral, but the reprise doesn't include the "oo-wee-oo" theme reference in a high, fluting synth that appears in the Part Two cue over a comment about the Doctor having regenerated.
• It's worth mentioning the piece that accompanies the scene of the Headmaster and Mike wrestling in the churchyard in Part Two, as this cue has seen some rather unusual exposure. An earnest opening section in strings with a steady beat and some churchyardy chain and bell accents leads into a frenetic middle section of string and xylophone synths over an extended drum fill; with a wail, it moves into a slower section with sustained organ notes and some more bell accents as the Headmaster is left for dead. Not only was this cue picked for inclusion in The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album, it was featured in The Making of Doctor Who, an American documentary actually about the 25th anniversary story Silver Nemesis. Here McCulloch can be seen (about 10 minutes and 50 seconds in) demonstrating what happens when he replaces the main synth melody from the middle section with party sounds.
• The light orchestral composition "Puffin' Billy" (remember it from Delta and the Bannermen?) is heard - apparently diegetically - when Ace turns on the guest house TV set in Part Two, shortly before a BBC continuity announcer gives the time as 5:15pm and introduces a certain brand-new science fiction drama serial. As previously noted, this bit of music was used as the theme for a popular BBC radio programme, but it seems strange and unlikely that it should have been played on TV over a BBC ident to kill three minutes of airtime at the end of a Saturday afternoon's sports coverage. Your humble blogger can't be sure, however, and welcomes comment from anyone who actually remembers watching TV in Britain in 1963. It may be meant for our ears only, to set up the post-war "old days" moment of Ace discovering the racist sign hanging in Mrs Smith's window.
• There are a number of less puzzling diegetic pieces included in the score. The burst of taped hard rock issuing from Ace's ghetto blaster at the start of Part One is McCulloch's work, as is the jazzy percussion stuff the ghetto blaster picks up in Part Two when Ace scrambles the tuner after accidentally picking up some Dalek radio transmissions. The cover of the Elvis Presley hit "Return to Sender" playing on the jukebox in Harry's café in Part One was recorded by McCulloch with a session vocalist, while the cover of The Shadows' "Apache" heard in Part Three is all his own work. All of these are included in the DVD's isolated music track, except for "Return to Sender" - could there have been a rights issue with the vocalist, or even with Presley's estate?
• Songs by the Beatles heard in Harry's café in the broadcast episodes and on the Special Edition DVD - "Do You Want to Know a Secret" in Part One and "A Taste of Honey" in Part Three - are the originals, and not included in the isolated score for obvious reasons. (On the original DVD release and international pressings of the Special Edition, they were replaced altogether with sound-alike library tunes.) Amusingly, neither song was released by the Beatles as a single in the UK, so what they're doing on Harry's jukebox is anyone's guess.

Vox pop
The Daleks are a bombastic DW monster, Keff McCulloch is a bombastic composer - this ought to be a shoo-in. There's hardly anyone better qualified to compose for this story, and by any reasonable standard this score is certainly a success. But it's missing the colour and the wildness of his Season 24 scores - McCulloch's retained and accentuated the solid beats, but toned everything else down. Perversely, that makes this score more popular with DW fans who are otherwise disparaging of his work, but for me it's a bit disappointing. This is where McCulloch stops being the voice of the weird knockabout caper and becomes the voice of the gung-ho pitched-battle action story, and I can't say I'm as fond of the latter as I am of the former.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
• The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album included two tracks from this story: "Cemetery Chase", an extended version of the piece from Part Two that McCulloch played on the American documentary; and "A Child's Return", a cue from the denouement in Part Four of the Doctor talking the Black Dalek to death and the schoolgirl collapsing.