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.

0 - Fanfare

This is the 50th anniversary year of Doctor Who (DW), and it seems like a pretty good excuse for a blog. There are a lot of projects underway at the moment to celebrate DW's big five-oh, up to and including a hopefully memorable TV episode. My own contribution is this, a series of rambling considerations of the electronic incidental music that featured in DW during the 1980s.

Doctor Who - The Music was one of the first albums of electronic music I heard, and it had a huge impact on me. It was released by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as part of DW's 20th anniversary celebrations in 1983, and was followed by a second album in 1985.
The staff of the Radiophonic Workshop were commissioned to create all the incidental music for DW starting in 1980 as part of a bold series of changes implemented by the show's new producer, John Nathan-Turner. Prior to this, much of the show's incidental music had been composed by Dudley Simpson (exclusively, for the previous four seasons) or taken from library stock, and was usually performed on conventional instruments, although there had been a few electronic scores.
The Radiophonic Workshop themselves had contributed incidental scores prior to 1980 - Brian Hodgson had provided music as well as special sounds for The Wheel in Space (1968) and Malcolm Clarke had created a highly experimental score for The Sea Devils (1972). Louis Niebur, writing in Time and Relative Dissertations in Space, makes a persuasive argument to the effect that Brian Hodgson's contributions to The Dominators (1968) also do the work of incidental music. More recently, Silva Screen released a CD of Hodgson's special sound from The Krotons (1968) with liner notes by Mark Ayres emphasising its musicality. Dudley Simpson sometimes collaborated with the Radiophonic Workshop, using their apparatus to completely "electronify" some of his Pertwee-era scores or to add impact to some cues in Tom Baker's stories. But 1980 was when radiophonic music became the norm for DW.
Later, in 1986, Nathan-Turner looked to freelance composers to take on the job of creating DW's incidental music, with the Radiophonic Workshop continuing to provide special sound. The music, however, remained electronic until DW's demise (temporary, as it turned out) in 1989. 1986 was when I started watching DW, and this more pop-influenced electronic music also had an impact on me.
John Nathan-Turner produced 50 DW stories between 1980 and 1989 (assuming that you count The Trial of a Time Lord as four stories - which, musically, it is). I aim to tackle one a week with a pair of bookend posts (including this one), making 52 in total.  50 stories for DW's 50th birthday... it seemed to fit the bill.

Somebody or other once observed that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", but what the hell, I'd do that too, if there was enough demand for it. It'd be something for us all to look forward to.

What this blog is not

• A technical catalogue of the hardware used to create DW's incidental music in the 1980s. I am not a scientist or a highly skilled synth geek, and know nothing of specific models of synthesizer beyond what I can find out (and understand) on the Internet. My ability to identify particular sounds within the music will pretty much be limited to my ability to describe them in terms of other sounds. This approach should offer obvious benefits to readers who share my lack of technical expertise.
• A thorough analysis of the compositional techniques of the artists behind the music. I am not a B.Mus. and know nothing of musical theory. I hope to be able to pick out motifs, references to other musical works, easy things like that, and occasionally to be able to make an insightful comment about some part of the music. I can't guarantee that, though. It's my hope that readers will point out any major points that I've missed by submitting comments to the blog.
• An outlet for bootleg copies of the incidental music under discussion. Although I plan to use sound files of 15 seconds or less to illustrate particular points here and there, it certainly isn't my intention to give out entire musical cues, much less entire scores. I'm assuming many readers of this blog will already be familiar with the compositions and/or the stories in which they appear, and I'm hoping those who aren't will be encouraged to track down the stories and discover them for themselves. If you're not keen on buying your own copies of the DVD releases, or if you want to try before you buy, check with your local library - there's a good chance they'll have a copy you can borrow for a small fee. If you don't want to pay a library fee to watch the DVDs, ask your DW-loving friends if you can borrow theirs.

What this blog is

• A celebration of the electronic music that defined the sound of DW in the 1980s, and a celebration of DW itself in this, its 50th anniversary year.
• A bit of fun.
• An exercise in getting me to write to a fixed schedule, in the hope that this'll encourage me to write more in general. Write more by writing more. So, we'll just see how that works out...

The players

• Peter Howell started out as a folk musician working in collaboration with John Ferdinando. He joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1974 and stayed there for 23 years. His first musical contribution to DW was providing electronic supplements to Carey Blyton's chamber orchestral score for Revenge of the Cybermen in 1975. In addition to arranging the theme in 1980 (with tweaks in 1985) and composing for ten stories, he provided the music for the 1981 spin-off K9 and Company and the Jon Pertwee DW radio plays The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space. Besides composing for TV and radio programmes, he released an original album through the Radiophonic Workshop in 1978. In 2013, he was lecturing at the National Film and Television School. Contributed to: The Leisure Hive, Meglos, Warriors' Gate, Kinda, Snakedance, The King's Demons, The Five Doctors, The Awakening, Planet of Fire, The Two Doctors. 
• Paddy Kingsland composed TV and radio theme tunes and incidental music at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1970 to 1981. He notably provided the theme and soundtrack for The Changes, special sound for Fits One and Seven to Twelve of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series and incidental music for the Hitchhiker's Guide TV series. He left the BBC to start his own studio, PK Studios, which he was still running in 2013 with his son Matthew. However, he continued to compose incidental music for BBC programmes, including DW as well as Michael Palin's programmes Around the World in 80 Days and Pole to Pole. Contributed to: Meglos, Full Circle, State of Decay, Logopolis, Castrovalva, The Visitation, Mawdryn Undead, Frontios. 
• Roger Limb joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1972, having previously been a newsreader for the BBC World Service. His work over 23 years at the Workshop included music for The Box of Delights and a whole lot of material for the children's programmes You and Me and Look and Read. However, his first love seems to have been jazz, and in 2013 he was the musical director, producer, arranger and pianist for Aydenne Simone's Jazz Culture Band. Contributed to: The Keeper of Traken, Four to Doomsday, Black Orchid, Time-Flight, Arc of Infinity, Terminus, The Caves of Androzani, Revelation of the Daleks. 
• Malcolm Clarke is the most senior of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers covered here, having joined in 1969. He (in)famously declared that radiophonic composition should be treated as an art form, and surprised all concerned with his incidental music for The Sea Devils. His most highly regarded work outside DW was the sound he contributed to August 4th 2026, a 1976 radio adaptation of Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains". Clarke died on December 11th, 2003. Contributed to: Earthshock, Enlightenment, Resurrection of the Daleks, The Twin Dilemma, Attack of the Cybermen, Terror of the Vervoids (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Nine to Twelve). 
• Jonathan Gibbs had an extremely short tenure at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, lasting only from 1983 to 1986. His last work for DW was providing incidental music for the 1985 radio serial Slipback. However, his career at the BBC spanned a full 20 years, and he left in the 2000s to go into business. In 2013 he was working as the governor of a school he founded in Hertfordshire. Contributed to: The King's Demons, Warriors of the Deep, Vengeance on Varos, The Mark of the Rani. 
• Elizabeth Parker started working with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1978 and was the last member standing at the time of the Workshop's closure in 1998. She only composed music for one DW story (and provided special sound for another, not covered by this blog), but has a huge portfolio of compositions for other TV and radio programmes. Notable credits include the theme tunes for Points of View and Horizon, a lot of music for BBC Natural History programmes including David Attenborough's The Living Planet, and the special sound for two and a half seasons of Blake's 7. She was still composing in 2013. Contributed to: Timelash. 
• Dominic Glynn's 1986 arrangement of the DW theme tune was his first professional commission. Since scoring the last DW story of the 1980s, he's worked as a DJ, recorded several alternative electronica albums and founded No Bones Records to promote underground dance music and electronica. His music has appeared in a variety of films and TV programmes, and he provided the soundtrack for the recent radio revival of Blake's 7. Contributed to: The Mysterious Planet (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts One to Four), The Ultimate Foe (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Thirteen to Fourteen), Dragonfire, The Happiness Patrol, Survival. 
• Richard Hartley is a prolific composer and arranger of music for TV, film and theatre. One of his earliest credits was arranging Richard O'Brien's music for The Rocky Horror Show and its film adaptation. He won an Emmy for his music for the all-star 1999 NBC adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. Contributed to: Mindwarp (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Five to Eight). 
• Keff McCulloch was working as a sound engineer and gigging musician when he came to John Nathan-Turner's attention through a friend-of-a-friend connection. (The fanecdote goes that Nathan-Turner spotted him when he was hired to play at a relative's wedding; About Time 6 by Tat Wood says that he was engaged to one of the chorus singers in Nathan-Turner's panto productions.) He rearranged the DW theme tune in 1987 and immediately became Nathan-Turner's go-to composer. After DW's cancellation in 1989, Nathan-Turner commissioned him to provide incidental music for the VHS release of the extant parts of Shada and the 30th anniversary Children in Need story Dimensions in Time. McCulloch created a Latin dance arrangement of the DW theme for the EP Variations on a Theme, and Nathan-Turner used part of this as the theme tune for a series of DW tie-in video releases. In 2013 he was living in Australia, working as a musician for party hire playing 1950s pop hits and Latin jazz. Contributed to: Time and the Rani, Paradise Towers, Delta and the Bannermen, Remembrance of the Daleks, Silver Nemesis, Battlefield.
• Mark Ayres worked as a sound engineer at the BBC from 1982 until 1987, when he went freelance. He approached the DW production office with a view to working for the show, and was invited to compose musical cues for a couple of extracts from the script of Remembrance of the Daleks. These audition pieces can be heard on the DVD of The Greatest Show in the Galaxy. He has since scored a variety of TV shows and the film The Innocent Sleep. He also has a long association with the DW fan film company Reeltime Pictures, and has produced a number of DW-related CD releases for Silva Screen Records. In 1998 he became co-archivist, alongside Brian Hodgson, of the late BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Contributed to: The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, Ghost Light, The Curse of Fenric. 
• Dick Mills is the unsung hero of this blog. One of the founding members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, he worked there for 35 years as a sound engineer and creator of special sound. Early work includes sounds for Quatermass and the Pit and the now legendary "Major Bloodnok's Stomach" sound effect for the Goons. He's credited with the special sound for all the stories covered in this blog - except for a very few possible exceptions that we'll come to, every computer bleep, laser zap and buzzing door is his, as well as a lot of environmental sounds that helped to define the alien worlds of DW. He produced both of the Workshop's Doctor Who - The Music albums.