Before I ever had a CD player, I
had two Doctor Who CDs: The Five Doctors
and Earthshock, soundtrack CDs from
the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It seemed like an eternity before a small Sharp
ghetto-blaster arrived in my bedroom and oh, what sounds greeted me!
Despite the infuriating lack of
Paddy Kingsland (Hello, Logopolis
soundtrack! Where are you?), the likes of Malcolm Clarke, Peter Howell and
Roger Limb were plenty for a young mind to immerse themselves in. Favourites
included the Janissary Band from Snakedance,
that Five Doctors Gallifreyan horn, Warriors of the Deep (the music of which
is easily the best aspect of the whole production) and those exotic howls of
the desert Planet of Fire. Earthshock’s March of the Cybermen was
also an oft-repeated track in that little attic bedroom. My early Doctor Who
experience is steeped in the aura of these two CDs. When I think of the time
spent reading the books, magazines and comics of my youth, they’re entrenched
in electronica. I even came to like Exploring
the Lab from Four to Doomsday.
My Dad was a private gardener
when I was young and would often come home with nick-nacks gifted to him by his
usually well-off clients. One day, he brought home a tape recorder. No mic was
needed to record one’s voice, just some empty C90s and the ability to press two
buttons at once. It was probably more of an early Dictaphone. But the recorder,
along with the music and the issues of Classic Comics I’d been collecting meant
for one thing: my brothers and I could record our own Doctor Who Audio
Adventures! When I think back, this being well before the days of Big Finish
and with only The Pescatons, The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space to epitomise the
auditory landscape, we must have been veritable pioneers.
I was always the Doctor because I
was the eldest and most selfish. James, second eldest but with a ridiculously
high voice, played the main villains: his Extortioner was to die for. The youngest brothers, the twins, played the
minor parts but usually one of them quit halfway through production after
repeated failed attempts at the same couple of lines. Favourite scripts
included Death Flower, The Urgrakks
and the Troughton epic with the big spiders: “Die hideous creature, die!”
Always, we used those two CDs as soundtracks to our adventures. Meglos, with its rattling screech, we
had a particular fondness towards so it was nice to see a similar approach to
music adopted by Steven Moffat and Richard Curtis’s team on The Curse of Fatal Death.
Sound effects was the major area
in which we were decidedly inefficient although the feminists would have had a
problem with our all-male casts despite there being only one female in the
house (and Mum was not remotely interested). We tried desperately in the
recording of Death Flower to make the
sound of a twig snapping. We broke pencils in half over and over again, but the
mic simply didn’t pick them up. In the end, we resorted to one of us actually saying, “Snap!” We joke squirmingly
about this over dinner parties to this day.
My personal favourite production
was a script I’d written myself: The Game
Show of Death in which the Doctor, Jo Grant and the Brigadier were invited
onto a panel show whose losers were killed. The cliff-hanger to my young ears
sounded amazing. One of us screamed, “No Brigadier!” then we used the sound of
Viner getting shot in The Tomb of the
Cybermen and the music cut in, Spearhead
from Space-style, without sting, all of a sudden. It was a ludicrously
satisfying moment of childhood creativity. I do still love those Spearhead cliff-hangers just as much as
I love a sting. And remain irrationally irritated when the sting criminally
fades in. It’s nice to have a couple of shots over the top. The Robots
of Death Part Two or even The Woman
Who Fell to Earth are classic examples of how to do the sting well.
Being fascinated by the
electronic music of Doctor Who - as close as humankind is likely to get to the
music of the spheres - I am currently thrilling at composer Segun Akinola’s
move towards incidental atmospherics as opposed to recognisable tunes. Look at
his Ghost Monument score: the first
seven minutes of the episode take a good while to form into solidly
recognisable music, industrial clanging and an electronic bassline building and
building to generate tension almost unnoticeably. By the time the spaceship is
crashing, those alien drums are pounding. I so hope this is indicative of the
rest of this season. Weird, synthetic musical confusion has been missing from
the show since its return, apart from a few moments in Forest of the Dead and Heaven
Sent, which remain orchestral for the most part. I must give a passing
mention to Into the Dalek too here:
that was a strikingly different score with plenty of 1980s electronic
overtones.
Someone noted recently that
electronic scores are what a programme is granted before it has the money to find an orchestra. Doctor Who did things
the other way round. Twice. JNT’s introduction of the Radiophonic Workshop
mirrors Chris Chibnall’s appointment of Segun Akinola at the musical helm of
our favourite show. I hope one day, somewhere in another little attic bedroom,
some other children are finding their own ways to adapt the music of Doctor
Who: to create new worlds and times, to act and imagine and live inside the
rapture of the show, to make the show their own through the electronic majesty
of its wondrous music.
JH
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