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.
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