Director: Alan Wareing
What's the score?
This is the last of Mark Ayres' three DW scores to be composed - and the last story of this season to be recorded - but the second to be transmitted. Once again Ayres uses character sounds to "narrate" the story, although not to the extent that he did with The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. But in a sense, the use of incidental music as a narrative device is here taken to a different extreme, with Ayres' music brought up so high in the audio mix and the studio dialogue turned down so low that in many scenes the music is left carrying the burden of having to lead the viewer through. The story goes that director Alan Wareing had so little confidence that viewers would be able to follow the script that he deliberately skewed the sound balance in post-production in order to drown out the dialogue - whether there's any truth to this anecdote is moot.
In the liner notes for the recent CD release, Ayres recalls that he was on a tight schedule to complete this score owing to the fact that it had been filmed so late but was to be transmitted so early in the season. A false start on the music for Part One left him working on Ghost Light up until the week before Part One was due to be broadcast, but the extra time allowed him to come up with the orchestra-on-a-budget sound that producer John Nathan-Turner had wanted. Harp and violin sounds do much of the heavy lifting in this score, with scattered cello and woodwind sounds and a healthy dose of unorthodox electronic effects.
Musical notes
- Ayres' CD liner notes mention a distorted dinner gong sound for Mrs Pritchard, but it's pretty hard to spot this. There's certainly a faint cymbal-like noise in the background of some of her cues, but it's hardly a prominent element and really no more so than anywhere else in the score. The signature sound for Mrs Pritchard would surely have to be the sustained, discordant organ notes heard in Parts One and Two, for example in the early scene in which she stares down Rev Matthews.
- If your humble blogger had to pick out one element of this score that sounds like a distorted sample of a gong, it'd have to be the alarming metallic noise that represents Control, most prominently in her scenes in the "lower observatory" in Part One. There's a decidedly knife-like quality to this sound - Ayres seems to be positioning Control as the most sinister character in the story, certainly the most alien character. Although to begin with this sinister use of sound is just backing up the script, it continues after the script's bluff has been called and Control has been revealed as a friendly character.
- Nimrod the Neanderthal butler has an interesting signature sound (sadly, one that's not easy to pick out in the mix or, consequently, to illustrate with audio clips). It's a kind of wobbly "oo" sound wedded to something a bit like the sound of the workings of an old clock. Something similar but less polished - a much more raw, simian "oo" sound - can be heard in the scene in Part Two in which Rev Matthews de-evolves into an ape-like form (again, it's too low in the mix to be easily illustrated here). We might assume that Ayres is making a connection between the two, but given the subtlety of the sounds, it's likely to pass the listener by.
- Redvers Fenn-Cooper, the quintessential image of the white colonial explorer, has plundered the African continent for his sounds. Percussive, wooden and pipe sounds are heard in several substantial cues featuring Fenn-Cooper - I wouldn't like to guess whether these are meant to be generic "ethnic" instruments or specific to a particular country, but well-informed readers are welcome to leave a comment on the subject.
- Organ music - more tuneful than Mrs Pritchard's sinister notes - is used for scenes in the "lower observatory", where Light sleeps and Nimrod prays to him. Once Light appears in person in Part Three, the organ is joined by bells, clashing cymbals and a hushed performance from the synth choir.
- The BBC's Programme-as-Completed documentation attributes "That's the Way to the Zoo", the comical piece Gwendoline performs on the piano while Rev Matthews is regressing, to Irish balladeer JF Mitchell some time around 1883. (It's played "out of vision" by pianist Alasdair Nicolson.) Ayres cannily reprises the melody of the chorus from this song, in tinny music-box tones, when we see Gwendoline preparing to send the ape-Matthews "to Java" later in Part Two. Later again in the same episode, there's a snatch of one phrase of the melody when Ace uncovers Matthews' display case. Less pertinently, the music-box melody crops up in Part Three when Josiah tells Gwendoline to send an unregressed Ace "to Java".
- The cues for Ayres' first attempt at Part One are included on the 2013 soundtrack CD as bonus tracks. The producer had lamented that he'd wanted an authentic acoustic score for this story but couldn't afford it; Ayres' stated intention was to emulate the sound of the family/chamber ensemble typical of the Victorian period. The problem evidently wasn't in selecting the appropriate synth voices, but in making the result muscular enough to carry a DW story - the main run of the draft score is led by the flute, clarinet and harp, with relatively little string accompaniment and some surprising moments of silence, and overall this feels rather more coy and less sinister than the story requires. Ayres' final version, with a much fuller string section and a stronger element of percussion, fits the bill nicely. It's worth noting, though, that the less orthodox elements of the score - including Control's sting and Redvers' African music, as well as the organ music for the crypt - are already present in the draft cues.
Vox pop
Another delightful score from Mark Ayres, although I find it harder to pick out favourite bits than I do with The Greatest Show in the Galaxy - this one's more concerned with atmosphere than with incident, which does of course make it the right choice for such an atmospheric story. For all that the use of period instrumentation (or a good synth imitation) is appropriate, I think it's the unearthly sounds and animalistic noises that add the sinister edge that really makes this score.
Availability
- The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.
- Silva Screen Records issued a soundtrack CD for this story in 1993; an updated version was released in 2013.
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