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.

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.

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.

41 - Delta and the Bannermen

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Much of this story is set in Wales in 1959 ("the rock 'n' roll years!"), so '50s rock and earlier tunes that were popular at the time feature heavily. This being DW, aliens also feature prominently, and for scenes of extra-terrestrial mayhem the order of the day is bombastic synth foolery in a very similar vein to the previous two musical scores. Keff McCulloch was approached to work on this story as well as Time and the Rani; in fact, he was required to work on this story before/during filming as well as in post-production, as we will shortly see. However, the sudden commission to provide the music for Paradise Towers complicated matters and left McCulloch with (at a guess) less than a month before transmission to finish the Delta and the Bannermen score.

Musical notes

• A substantial part of McCulloch's contribution to this story was recording covers of various vocal and instrumental pieces of 1950s music for diegetic use; producing new versions of these tunes presumably saved the production office a small fortune in royalty fees. The vocal items were recorded by "The Lorells", a studio ensemble whose backing singers, the Wilson Sisters, included McCulloch's fiancée. McCulloch himself played the Fender Stratocaster electric guitar, the instrument made famous by Buddy Holly. Some of these songs were required for the filming of Part One itself, in which "The Lorells" (and McCulloch!) appear in character behind Billy the singing mechanic at the Shangri-La Holiday Camp Get To Know You Dance. The Millennium Effect website has a full list of the items covered, but it's worth going through that list and pointing out the context in which each is used:
• "Singing the Blues", "Why Do Fools Fall in Love" and "Mr Sandman" are performed at the dance in Part One, with "Mr Sandman" continuing over a camp tannoy as the Doctor follows Ray to the laundry store. The band are miming, so presumably these three songs would have been recorded before filming even started. The two big questions are, were all of the vocal covers recorded up front, and were any of them actually played back on set? There's a good chance that at least one of them was, because...
• "Rock Around the Clock" plays on the Navarino tour bus sound system earlier in Part One, and the alien tourists all sing and boogie along to it.
• "Goodnight Campers", a holiday camp repurposing of "Goodnight Sweetheart", is heard over the Shangri-La tannoys early in Part Two, when Billy brings flowers to Delta's room. Presumably the vocalist is the same yellowcoat seen crooning "When the Red, Red Robin" into a microphone the next morning.
• "That'll Be the Day", "Only You" and "Lollipop" are all heard over the radio at Goronwy's house in Part Three.
• "Who's Sorry Now" seems to be playing on Billy's record player as he packs his bags in Part Three. Having said which, there's no indication that Billy or the Doctor are actually listening to the record player in that scene, and it'd be a pretty odd choice of song anyway.
• "Happy Days Are Here Again" is blaring out of the speakers of the tour bus that arrives at Shangri-La at the very end of Part Three.
• Now on to the instrumental numbers. "Calling All Workers" is heard on the radio of Hawk and Weismuller's car when we first see them in Part One. "Calling All Workers" was composed by Eric Coates as the opening and closing theme of the BBC radio programme Music While You Work, which was broadcast twice daily on working days at the time this story is set - so we know Part One is set on a weekday.
• "Puffin' Billy" is playing over the Shangri-La tannoys when the Navarino bus arrives in Part One. "Puffin' Billy", a steam-train-themed composition, was used as the theme for the Saturday morning BBC radio show Children's Favourites - it wasn't specifically composed for it, so the camp staff might well have a copy for their own use on a weekday afternoon, but there's a timing problem if we're supposed to believe they've left the PA system tuned to the BBC Light Programme. Incidentally, we haven't heard the last of this tune in DW.
• "Parade of the Tin Soldiers" plays over the tannoy immediately after this in the same scene. Composed in 1897, it was used as the theme for one of many serials on the BBC's Children's Hour radio programme, broadcast daily in the evenings at the time this story is set; but it appears here directly after another tune with no commentary in between from a DJ or continuity announcer. This further suggests that we're not hearing a radio broadcast, and the staff just happen to have copies of both records.
• "In Party Mood" can be heard playing over the PA system in the Shangri-La dining room as the campers settle down to what is presumably their tea. This was used as the theme for another BBC radio programme, Housewives' Choice, which went out on weekday mornings, but again the composition pre-dates the BBC's use of the tune, and it's easier all round to assume that this is another item taken from the holiday camp's record library.
• Finally, "The Devil's Galop" is not heard diegetically, but is worked into the incidental music as part of a chase scene in Part Three. It's teased with some rather arch horn music in Part Two, and intercut with a variety of camp "chase scene" cues in both episodes. "The Devil's Galop" was used as the theme for the BBC radio drama serial Dick Barton - Special Agent between 1946 and 1951, but is best known through its terminal overuse since then in decades of imitations and parodies. It's instantly recognisable as That Chase Scene Music. McCulloch really didn't have to use it in a chase scene in a story set in 1959, but it's not out of place.
• In among an assortment of generic pop/rock incidental cues in this story, there are definite Shadows homages in two cues: the brooding low guitar piece heard as the bounty hunter Keillor contacts Gavrok in Part One, and the more lively guitar piece with "surf" licks that plays as the Doctor drives up to parley with the Bannermen in Part Two. The key work here is "Apache", a massive breakthrough hit for the Shadows, which includes sections that resemble both of these cues. (We haven't heard the last of this piece of music either.) The Shadows' career was only just beginning in 1959, around the time this story is set, and "Apache" wasn't released until 1960, so the references are anachronistic; then again, both scenes do centre on characters from the future.
• There's another musical reference in the droll bass guitar phrase that follows Keillor's sudden death, accompanying a shot of his smoking (what else?) blue suede shoes. It sounds a little bit like a slowed and pitched down version of the lead guitar licks from the middle eight of Buddy Holly's cover of "Blue Suede Shoes", although this would be anachronistic - Holly's cover must have been recorded before his death in February 1959, but wasn't compiled and released until 1964. It's more probably a reference to Henry Mancini's theme from Peter Gunn, an American series about a jazz-loving private detective. Peter Gunn first aired in America in 1958; as far as I've been able to find out, it was broadcast in the UK but not until the '60s.
• One last anachronism worth considering is the decidedly modern rockin' electric guitar in the scene of the Doctor helping Billy to wire up the holiday camp's PA system to defeat the Bannermen in Part Three. We could excuse this one too, but it's much more of a stretch than the other, rather borderline examples. At the same time, it's not outlandish enough to be passed off as one of McCulloch's "outer space stuff" cues.
• McCulloch's final concession to the story's period setting is a cheesy doo-wop ballad that accompanies the scene of everyone farewelling Delta and Billy. It's an original composition, but as a vocal piece it features "The Lorells" in their only non-diegetic performance in this story. The Wilson Sisters do the heavy lifting with their "ooo wah wa-oooo" refrain, while the lead vocals are provided by a woman (your humble blogger suspects it's McCulloch's fiancée pulling double duty) singing "Here's to the future" and "Love is the answer" with an accent that's strangely upmarket for this type of song.
• The usual synth shennanigans are saved for scenes of alien activity, and indeed it sometimes feels as if McCulloch has saved three full episodes' worth of bombast for these cues. Some of them seem to be composed entirely out of orchestra hits, notably the cues at the start and end of Part One (pitched battle on an alien world between Bannermen and Chimerons; a green space baby hatches out of Delta's egg). It's as if he's purging them all out of his system so that he can focus on the '50s material elsewhere.

Vox pop
This story isn't a favourite of mine, but there's plenty of interest in McCulloch's score. In places it's horribly cheesy, and in others it's ridiculously hyperactive, but between these extremes there's some great material.
Looking ahead, it's remarkable how much more diverse and interesting McCulloch's Season 24 scores are when compared with his later DW work. It's doubly remarkable in light of the difficult circumstances under which these scores were composed - first the late nights working on Time and the Rani, then composing Paradise Towers in scarcely more than a week, and then playing catch-up on this demanding story. Did he do his best incidental composing when under pressure and deprived of sleep? Your humble blogger is inclined to think so; McCulloch himself reportedly believes that Time and the Rani was his best DW score, so there may be something to it.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story, but nearly eight and a half minutes of Keff McCulloch's music can be heard on the photo gallery.
• Five tracks from this story were included on The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album, most of them extended by doubling sections of the broadcast cues. "Gavrok's Search" is the piece that plays during the Bannermen's pursuit of Delta to the spaceport in Part One. "Burton's Escape" is a lively piece from the motorbike escape sequence in Part Three. "The Sting" is a concatenation of two pieces: the growling first part of the cue that plays when the Bannermen storm Goronwy's honey shed in Part Three, and the hard-rockin' final showdown cue. "The White Flag" is the opening cue from Part Three. And of course, "Here's to the Future" is the doo-wop song from the end of Part Three.

40 - Paradise Towers

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Nicholas Mallett

What's the score?
David Snell was originally commissioned to provide the incidental music for this story on the basis of some sample cues that had met with producer John Nathan-Turner's approval. However, when the music for the last two episodes was delivered, Nathan-Turner had a change of heart and rejected the score. Thanks to the efforts of those involved in putting together the DVD release of this story, we can at last hear Snell's score for ourselves... and I'm with Nathan-Turner on this one. It doesn't help that Snell seems to have used just two synth voices throughout the entire thing. But then electronic composition isn't his usual medium - he's an orchestral composer/arranger first and foremost, and if we imagine the rejected score being performed by a chamber ensemble in the Dudley Simpson style, it makes a lot more sense. Unfortunately, there's no way DW's budget at this time would have stretched to hiring that many extra musicians.
Nathan-Turner now turned to Keff McCulloch, his go-to composer in a fix. McCulloch recalls in an interview on the DVD that he was told to put on hold his work for Delta and the Bannermen, which he had begun at this point, and to focus on composing a new score for Paradise Towers in the alarmingly short time available to him. He claims to have completed the task in about a week, working as near to non-stop as he could, while the DVD production subtitles assert that the final score was delivered just two days before Part One was broadcast. By way of comparison, DW composers might ordinarily expect to have upwards of a week to compose and record the music for a single episode.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the sound palette for this score is very similar to that used for Time and the Rani, with some moments even copied across directly (the sound used for Tetrap point-of-view shots in the previous story is recycled here as underpinning for a couple of sinister moments in Part Two). McCulloch still manages to provide a lot of engaging new content, but as Part Four rolls around, the round-the-clock toil seems to be taking its toll, with an increasing proportion of the music sounding as though it was created on the spot in direct reaction to what happens on screen.

Musical notes

• Perhaps the most memorable piece of incidental music from this story is the theme used for the Cleaner robots in Parts One and Two. It's an ebullient, knockabout piece in synth horns - it's often criticised by DW fans for being over-the-top, but aesthetically it's of a piece with the bright, chunky robot props themselves. Your humble blogger is happy to accept the premise that the Cleaners are supposed to look like that, and to accept the musical cue accordingly. In Parts Three and Four, however, it is usurped by another theme...
• The theme used throughout for the Caretakers is a weary succession of soft chords over an uneven beat in 7/4 time, with light percussion ornamentation. Like the Caretakers themselves, it sounds dogged but dog-tired. Variations of it with more ornamentation pop up here and there - there's one in Part Four that adds a curious selection of metallic sounds to punctuate the gestures of a stalking party of Kangs. It's also heard over the first scene of a robotic Cleaner in Part Three, following which it's an even bet whether the Cleaners will get the Caretaker theme or an entirely different bit of music in any given scene. There's no Caretaker in that scene in Part Three - not even a dead one sticking out of the Cleaner's skip attachment. Did McCulloch forget he had that other theme ready, in the general rush to get the score completed? Was it the result of sleep deprivation? Or did he simply lose confidence in the Cleaner theme, too late to remove it from the first two episodes?
• It's more than usually easy to spot - or think you've spotted - the influence of pop music in this score. The merest hint of Go West's "We Close Our Eyes" (1985) in the Cleaner theme? Or, for an even further stretch of the imagination, the chord progressions of Michael Jackson's "Rock With You" (1979) in the hyperactive piece that plays over the denouement as Pex steels himself to barge the Chief Caretaker into a room full of explosives? Who knows what might have been going through McCulloch's mind towards the end of that week? But the most striking likeness is to another TV show - listen to the shambling 7/4 of the Caretaker theme in Part One, as the ill-fated Caretaker #345/12 sub3 walks his beat with walkie-talkie in hand, and you're sure to think of the theme tune from hit ITV cop series The Bill. (Later versions of The Bill's theme are even more McCulloch-friendly - the 2003 version even includes his beloved orchestra hits - but the versions in force between 1984 and 1987 show that off-kilter beat just as clearly.) 
• Two diegetic pieces are featured in Part Three. The first is the strings-and-flute-led tune used as background music for the Paradise Towers promotional video brochure that the Doctor is seen watching at various points; it has the earnestness typical of this sort of promotional film. The other is the calming lounge muzak, all high, stretched-out synth chords and smug piano, heard in the swimming pool zone when Mel and Pex finally arrive there. It's also briefly and quietly heard near the start of Part Four, just before the Pool Cleaner attacks Mel.
• Once again, McCulloch plays around with the DW theme tune, referencing it extensively in this score. The first and biggest of these references is the pair of cues that frame the lengthy scene in Part Two of the Doctor being held prisoner by the Caretakers. It's an airy muzak arrangement of the theme - although there's no suggestion that it's supposed to play diegetically as muzak - quite fitting for this scene of characters forced to wait around at length, and quite lovely. Later in Part Two there's a more "action shot" use of the bassline and a brief "oo-wee-oo" in a scene of the Doctor escaping down a corridor. Lastly, the final cue of Part Four quotes the melody of the theme tune in a wistful way as the Doctor and Mel sneak off to the TARDIS.

Vox pop
This is an incidental score that I remember from first transmission - the repeated Cleaner and Caretaker themes stuck with me for some time afterwards - and it still gives me enormous pleasure. Considered in hindsight next to the other scores of Season 24, it's much less polished, and for obvious reasons. Still, there's something to be said for musical rawness as an accompaniment to this particular story.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story, although it does include the option to watch the broadcast episodes with David Snell's score instead of Keff McCulloch's. The photo gallery features only four and a half minutes of McCulloch's music.
• The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album included six tracks taken from Paradise Towers. "Towers El Paradiso" is the muzak heard in the swimming pool in Part Three. "Drinksmat Dawning" is the piece heard in Part Two as the Doctor introduces the Red Kangs to fizzy pop ("soda", if you're American). "Newsreel Past" is the background music from the Paradise Towers promotional brochure. "Guards of Silence" features a burst of the Cleaner theme followed by the DW theme pastiche heard in the scene of the Doctor in custody in Part Two. "The Making of Pex" is the boisterous cue from the scene in Part Four in which Pex sacrifices himself. Lastly, "Goodbye Doctor", the final cue of the story.

39 - Time and the Rani

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Andrew Morgan

What's the score?
Brace yourselves - here comes Keff McCulloch. A controversial figure among orthodox DW fandom, he here presents the first of six DW scores. Three of them run in succession in this season of DW, making McCulloch the only composer apart from Dudley Simpson, Murray Gold and Segun Akinola to provide the incidental music for three consecutive stories. His arrangement of the theme tune also debuts in this story.
McCulloch seems to have tackled the theme arrangement as a one-off job. At the time he was approached to compose the incidentals for Time and the Rani, he had other commercial work on the go. He recalls on his website that he continued to focus on his other commitments by day and worked on Time and the Rani in a series of caffeine-fuelled night shifts. So begins an unfolding saga of sleep deprivation for Keff McCulloch in the summer of 1987.
It may be revealing to note that the two major elements of McCulloch's current concert repertoire are classic pop/rock and Latin jazz - these seem to have been passions of his in the '80s as well, and fun can be had spotting the moments when they poke through in his work, even when the story doesn't require it. Contemporary synth pop is clearly a heavy influence on his work for DW. He also uses much of the same musical equipment as German electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream - the similarity in the timbre of certain synth voices in his and their work is obvious, even to listeners who aren't interested in the specific brand names - but it's not immediately clear whether they're a compositional influence on him.

McCulloch favours rhythmically four-square cues with a firm beat, high-pitched drones and synth choir (quite the hot sound in the late '80s and '90s), horns and as much percussion as he can muster, and the skitterish sorts of sound that scream "computer!" to anyone who grew up in the '80s. He's rather fond of using high synth stabs (or "orchestra hits") to punctuate his cues or to emphasise moments of sudden physical activity on-screen.

Musical notes

• For reasons that remain unclear, McCulloch provided several sound effects for Time and the Rani. (Fanecdotal accounts variously suggest a misunderstanding, or that Dick Mills was unable to do all the sound effects and McCulloch had to fill in.) These include the cluster of sounds that accompany the opening effects shots as the Rani attacks the TARDIS, which are listed as musical cues in the BBC's Programme-as-Completed documentation. The P-as-C also suggests the "Screen" background and "Klaxon" heard in Part Three and the sounds of the Rani's "Supernova" demonstration in Part Four were McCulloch's.
• Next, the Doctor's regeneration. McCulloch starts as he means to go on, with a bold and slightly discordant phrase in mid-range piano and high twinkling synths; this leads into a pile-up of rising chords that's strangely reminiscent of Roger Limb's regeneration cue from The Caves of Androzani. There's no clear sign that McCulloch was a fan or long-term viewer of DW before he worked on this story, and it's anyone's guess whether John Nathan-Turner might have specifically pointed him towards the earlier regeneration scene in preparation for this, but it's certainly remarkable that both composers took such a similar approach to these similar events. It leads directly into the opening theme music.
• And so at last to the new theme arrangement, and here several changes are apparent. For a start, it's in the key of A minor, higher than any other arrangement before or since. The new title sequence is about a third longer than its predecessors, so McCulloch has had to move the furniture around somewhat. To stretch it out a bit, the "middle eight" section has been restored to the opening titles for the first time since the 1960s. However, to cut the length of the theme back down to fit, the intro bars have gone, and the theme now opens cold after the initial sonic and visual explosion. There's now an explosion and white-out to lead into the episode, but no explosion at the end of the closing titles, which instead fade out with an echo of metallic clashes as the chrome DW logo drifts off into the distance. The bassline is steady - stately, even - with the main melody picked out in slinky mid-range and jangly high-pitched synth voices; it sounds a little as though McCulloch is trying to emulate the sounds of the Derbyshire arrangement using only the presets on his modern synthesizer. Finishing touches are added by Dick Mills, who provides an assortment of whooshes to match the graphics of various objects being hurled across the screen.
• This blog has made a point of highlighting DW theme references in other composers' work, and this is the entry we've been building towards. Although McCulloch is far from the only or first DW composer to use the theme itself as material for his incidental music, in Season 24 he goes a lot further with it than anyone else, producing cues that could almost be considered new arrangements in their own right. He hardly touches it in the next two seasons - fanecdotal evidence suggests that he was warned off it for fear of having to pay royalties to Ron Grainer if the theme was overused, but I'm unable to point to a source for this. 
• Time and the Rani features two notable lengthy theme references. The first, a favourite of mine, is a quizzical and rather weary sounding version of the theme melody over an echoing drum that plays as the Doctor starts to wake up in his new body in Part One. The "hangover version", I like to call it. The other is an extended riff on the famous bassline in Part Four, as the Doctor runs around trying to foil the Rani's plans. A couple of other recurring elements of the score - a whistling air that accompanies outdoor scenes on the surface of the planet Lakertya and the sustained dischords that represent the giant Brain the Rani has created - are incorporated into this latter cue, reinforcing the feeling of the Doctor's plan bringing everything together. Less lengthy but notable in its own right is the theme reference that intrudes into the mournful scene in Part Two of Faroon discovering the skeleton of her daughter Sarn. The Doctor wasn't involved and is nowhere near that scene - what's the reference doing there? It's picked up again in Part Three when Sarn is mentioned in another scene that doesn't feature the Doctor.
• McCulloch really goes to town in embroidering the Doctor's costume change scene in Part One. Those character moments in full:
  
  • First, a drunken phrase in Gallic accordion for the Napoleonic tunic and hat. So far, so obvious.
  • A trumpet fanfare for the same tunic with a bearskin hat of the type worn by British Foot Guards.
  • A peal of bells for the mortarboard and schoolmaster's cloak - presumably meant to evoke a school bell, except that these change pitch and sound more like the bells of a clocktower.
  • A skittish burst of xylophone for Tom Baker's old costume from Season 18 - it captures some of Big Tom's eccentricity, certainly, but it's not necessarily the ideal complement for the costume from his gloomiest and most subdued year on the show. Perversely, a bit of pompous Dudley Simpson spoofing might have been a better fit (cf the VHS release of Shada).
  • An arch phrase in harpsichord for the Jon Pertwee costume, with its exaggerated frills.
  • A comedy "smashed window" sound effect for the moment when the Doctor poses with the Fifth Doctor's cricket bat.
  • Finally, a flourish on what sounds like a banjo as the Doctor appears wearing his Panama hat and the Second Doctor's large fur coat. As the DVD production subtitles suggest, the intended reference is probably to the music hall, as the Doctor at this particular moment looks uncannily like Bud Flanagan about to sing "Underneath the Arches". McCulloch uses the banjo again as a motif for the Doctor in the final farewell cue in Part Four, but doesn't carry this over into any subsequent stories.
• Diegetic music is nothing new in DW's incidental music, but it becomes quite a big thing in the Sylvester McCoy era - specifically, diegetic muzak, as piped through the imagined speakers and PA systems of alien worlds. McCulloch starts the ball rolling here with the background music that plays in the Lakertyan Centre of Leisure in Part Three. High hollow knocking percussion and twinkling synths provide the support for a reedy melody that sounds as if it's been extrapolated from a sample of somebody saying "Doh". There's a feeling here of the new composer pulling out the stops and showing off what his machinery can do, as there was with Peter Howell's unexpected sequencer moment in The Leisure Hive.
• McCulloch opens 'er up and lets 'er rip again in Part Four, with a plaintive fluting sound as the Lakertyans mourn the reprisal killing of one of their number in the Centre of Leisure. It isn't the sound of the pan pipes - it's the sound of a long Japanese bamboo pipe called the shakuhachi. Specifically, it's an electronic sample of a shakuhachi that was included as a preset on the E-Mu Emulator II synthesizer (it says here). Even more specifically, it's the exact same sample that Tangerine Dream used on their 1985 tune "Yellowstone Park". The shakuhachi sample had made a low-key appearance in 1986 on Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", and would enjoy prominent mainstream exposure in 1990 on Enigma's "Sadeness (Part I)".

Vox pop
The chief objection DW fans tend to raise against Keff McCulloch's music is that it's "inappropriate". Your humble blogger regards this suggestion with frank disdain. McCulloch's cartoonish bombast is entirely appropriate to the comic-book aesthetic that script editor Andrew Cartmel wanted to introduce into the show at this time; it's also entirely in keeping with the kind of music British viewers would have heard on other TV programmes of the day. In this regard, it's no more out of place than Dudley Simpson's acoustic quartets in the '70s, or the Radiophonic Workshop's compositions on analogue and early digital synths in the early '80s. Of course, the commonality of this kind of sound at the time can lead to unfortunate comparisons - several of the cues in this score and the next are more reminiscent of contemporary daytime/lifestyle TV than of contemporary children's or dramatic programming. Then again, the scenes of the Rani carving up a sheet of plastic in her TARDIS workshop sound like something from a school science programme, an association which is just about perfect.
Really, the problem here isn't that McCulloch's score is too lurid for the story (just check out the visuals, for goodness' sake), it's that the plot isn't sufficiently engaging to keep the viewer's attention from wandering. Divorced from any narrative requirements, the music and the images would make a fair 90-minute pop video. Listened to in isolation (the bits that are available, anyway), I find the music fun and invigorating - there's just so much going on in there.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story. The DVD photo gallery features a little over eight minutes of Keff McCulloch's music.
• In 1988, BBC Records released The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album as a showcase for McCulloch's incidental music, alongside the various theme arrangements to date. Two tracks from Time and the Rani were featured on this album: "Future Pleasure", the full three-minute version of the "doh" music heard inside the Centre of Leisure; and "The Brain", an extended reworking of the final cue from Part Three.