Coda - We've Got Work to Do

What might Doctor Who have sounded like in the 1990s?

In discussing Survival, I suggested that Dominic Glynn's decision to combine electronic music with a guest musician (and he was hardly the first - see also The King's Demons and The Two Doctors, and we may as well mention Paddy Kingsland's steadfast use of his own electric guitar here) showed a possible way forward for DW incidental music, if the series had continued into the 1990s. The use of stock period music in Black Orchid and 1950s covers in Delta and the Bannermen - and the influence of that music in the composers' electronic scores - also showed a balance between newer and older musical styles, and an awareness of the different atmospheric requirements of stories with historical settings as distinct from those set on alien worlds, that would have stood later composers in good stead.

Over most of its half-century run so far, DW has tended towards one or other musical extreme, (nearly) all synth or (nearly) all orchestral/traditional, when a judicious mixture of the two might have better suited the stories' requirements. The Hartnell era, with its patchwork of commissioned compositions and traditional or futuristic music taken from library stock, actually shows a better balance of musical styles than any other period in the show's history. Using Dudley Simpson or the Radiophonic Workshop as "in-house" composers in later years presumably gave the production office (and the composers!) a certain amount of stability and security, but at the cost of this balance.

What's happened since 1989, not just in DW but in general, isn't so much a drive towards harmony between orchestral and synth sounds as a drive to make synthesizers imitate orchestral sounds as closely as possible, and to use real orchestras whenever possible. I have enough orchestra friends that I can't really consider this a terrible thing. Professional players need to pay the bills, and rank amateurs like m'self need something more interesting than "Clair de lune" to play in our village halls - from that perspective, orchestral science fiction scores are to be welcomed. But electronic sound has a beauty of its own, and it has a place in science fiction that can't easily be filled by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Crouch End Festival Chorus.

Electronic sounds have been rare in DW's soundtracks since 2006 - since, that is to say, the BBC recognised the show as a marketable success and gave the production office the budget to bring in a roomful of real musicians and get Ben Foster to orchestrate Murray Gold's compositions, which is after all what Gold and Russell T Davies wanted in the first place. Is DW - are we - better off for it? I mean, consider the theme Gold composed for the Face of Boe's return appearances. We have the luxury of being able to use this theme to compare and contrast the two musical styles: it can be heard in its pre-Ben Foster form on the CD of soundtrack highlights from Series 1 and 2, and in its fully orchestrated form on the Series 3 soundtrack CD. The version heard in New Earth at the start of Series 2, sparsely performed on piano and high synths and overlaid with weird sighing noises, conveys something of the isolation, alienness and strange beauty of this gigantic face in a jar. The version heard in Gridlock in Series 3, performed by a full choir and the massed strings of the BBC NO of W, arguably fits in the context of a scene of the citizens of New New York ascending into the sunlight, but it's hardly distinguishable from the music of any other film or TV programme. (It then disappears into two minutes of guitar and violin chunter, over which we draw a discreet veil). I put it to you, gentle reader, that we have lost something.

Of course, we do know what DW sounded like in the '90s, because it came back for one night in 1996, and it's not unreasonable to draw a line from Survival through the collaborative TV Movie score of John Debney, John Sponsler and Louis Febre - heavy on the orchestral sound, but with clear synth elements throughout - to Murray Gold's work on Series 1. But it might be more interesting to look at Christopher Franke's work on Babylon 5, a much larger body of work from around the same period. Franke, like Gold, went through a shift from predominantly synth to predominantly orchestral scores, but over a longer period and from a more firmly entrenched position as a synth composer - he was a major player in the pioneering German electronic band Tangerine Dream. He didn't have access to a full standing orchestra for B5, but called in members/sections of the "Berlin Symphonic Film Orchestra" as required, a bit like Dudley Simpson carefully selecting his four or five chamber musicians for a Tom Baker story. Listening to the soundtrack from a story in the middle of B5's five year run - well, let's say the Season 3 finale Z'ha'dum - we can hear big orchestral swells for the dramatic moments and anxious violins in the quieter parts, but also a thoroughgoing range of electronic noises that really sell the alien setting of the Shadows' homeworld and the lurking menace of the Shadows themselves. We could do worse than look to this as a cousin of the soundtrack for our imaginary '90s series of DW.

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Who might have composed incidental music for Doctor Who in the 1990s?

Well, it's tempting to speculate. The McCoy Era Three - Dominic Glynn, Keff McCulloch and Mark Ayres - would of course be shoo-ins, although with McCulloch's DW output diminishing year on year, it's possible he might have moved on. It's not hard to imagine Ayres providing a makeover for the DW theme tune - in fact it's very easy to imagine, since he's had a few goes at it for fun over the years - and his star seemed to be in the ascendant with the production office in 1989. And it'd be a sad season for Sylvester McCoy that didn't include at least one Glynn score.

Ken "Prof" Freeman? Workhorse of the original recording of Jeff Wayne's Musical War of the Worlds and late of the BBC adaptation of The Tripods. A world in which DW continued to air in 1990 might well also have seen the expected third series of The Tripods, but that would have been over by 1987, so he would have been available. Those in the know at BBC TV Centre must surely have been going wild over his theme tune for Casualty around the time Season 24 was being planned - it's kind of surprising he wasn't approached, really. Readers are advised to track down his Tripods soundtrack album (or just watch the DVD, for that matter).

Howard Goodall? Another surprising oversight. He'd been working on BBC TV shows since the early '80s, and composed the music for every single episode of Red Dwarf starting in 1988 (although readers might get a better idea of how he might have scored DW by rewatching the "future" section of Blackadder's Christmas Carol). He's also composed several classical choral pieces and presented a number of programmes about the history of music, so there can be no doubting his range and credentials. An obvious choice for stories with a contemporary or historical setting.

Christopher Franke? No, that's just being silly.

Adrian Pack and Michael Fillis? Also known as Cybertech, the duo who slipped John Nathan-Turner a demo tape during filming of Dimensions in Time in 1993 (left it a bit late there, lads) and ended up providing the theme arrangement for the charity skit. They went on to produce two CDs of music inspired by classic DW scores and, narratively, by some of the spin-off novels. (On a side note, the first of these was the first CD I ever bought.) Their rave version of the DW theme is an acquired taste, to be sure, but the rest of the material on their CDs suggested they would have fitted right in as 1990s DW composers. Their Cyberman theme could have been a contender.

Orbital? The Hartnoll brothers are confirmed fans, and they've worked on a number of film soundtracks since 1997, something that had apparently long been an ambition of theirs. Their rave version of the DW theme, performed at gigs since way back when, is a taste more easily acquired than Cybertech's, and was even picked up for use on an official 40th anniversary promo trailer included on several DW DVDs in 2003. They were just starting out around the turn of 1990 and didn't become a big ticket act until the mid '90s, so they would have been affordable. At the very least they'd have been the ideal choice for any DW story set at a rave, and after seeing Mags the punk/goth werewolf in 1988, that's not something I would have ruled out.

Kate Bush? Well, she did write Kinda, after all.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop? Come back, all is forgiven? And why not? Presumably Dick Mills would have continued to provide the special sound (at least, until leaving the Workshop in 1993), so it would have been easy enough to arrange, if John Nathan-Turner had wanted to repeat the mix-and-match experiment of Season 23. Peter Howell and Liz Parker were both still working there until the late '90s - another score from either of them would have been more than welcome. And if JNT had insisted on sticking with freelancers, there was always Paddy Kingsland.

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And so, as Sylvester McCoy and Sophie Aldred stroll off into the woods on Horsenden Hill and the McCulloch arrangement of the DW theme tune plays out the 1980s, it's time to thank people. Thanks to everybody who made the music discussed in this blog, and everybody who made the TV show that caused the music to be made. Thanks to everybody reading this blog, too! Thanks to Mark Ayres for archiving all that Radiophonic music and for handling the audio remastering on all those DVDs. And thanks to Silva Screen Records for resuming their classic series soundtrack releases.

I'd like to give special thanks to Bruce Ngataierua, who lent me several of the DVDs that I don't own - specifically, the ones with no isolated score. The ones that required careful and repeated viewing just to spot where all the musical cues were. Huge thanks to Bruce for his generosity and patience with that.

Of course, I wouldn't want to lean too heavily on friendship, nor would I want to see my local libraries go under for want of custom, so thanks also to the Lower Hutt War Memorial and Wellington Central libraries for their extensive collections of DW DVDs and affordable lending fees. In fact, I should probably thank Anne Olsen for Lower Hutt's range, as I suspect she's responsible for a lot of it.

And obviously, thanks to Jo for staying in the room with me while I was watching Time-Flight. It's a lot to ask of anyone.

We may have reached the end of this project, but we've still got work to do. One of the unstated aims of this blog was to provoke wider discussion of music in DW, and while that's more ambitious than my modest reader base will allow, it's still an aim. Or rather, it's my hope that DW's incidental music will be more widely discussed, and if this blog doesn't contribute directly to that, it should at least be thought of as a sort of cosmic ordering. At least one chunky, erudite small press book of essays about DW music in all its forms - is that too much to wish for? But it's going to take more knowledgeable and better-connected people than me to make it happen. Fandom, it's over to you.