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Home , Anthony Coburn, An Unearthly Child, Brian Hodgson, Doctor Who (season 1), Verity Lambert

The Soundscape of Dene October

An Unearthly Child aired in the late afternoon of November 23rd 1963, its haunting dissonant soundscape at once augmenting the viewer experience, immersive and generative of the aural-imaginary. The auditory space enhanced the visual and narrative elements, compensated for low budgets and the cramped space in Studio D at Lime Grove, struck terror in the hearts of the young (Fuller, 2010) and destabilised the consensus worldview already shaken in the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination the day before. For some, it was an experience that would be deferred and mediated by word-of-mouth when a national blackout left the viewing population at 4.4 million (the launch episode was repeated a week later, prior to the second installment). In either case, the reception was an uncanny one, immediately memorable and oddly familiar.

The strange-familiarity of the first transmission is experienced as an eerie echo of the programme’s conceit at offsetting the ordinary against the mysterious. The seeming banality of 1960’s cloaked the enigma of the exiled travellers , while the iconography (originally, ’s ship was to be invisible, but Newman wanted something both recognisable and easy to overlook), reflected the duality of the everyday setting, enabling producer ’s input into the graphic design and sound treatments to work effectively on the cultural dissonance. Recorded ‘as live’ in cramped Studio D, the first 25 minute episode is slow-moving, with just 132 shots, xvii dependent on static dialogue exchange and camera fetishising of props, the latter a visual hint that the ordinary should be regarded with suspicion. Sound has a vital job to do in communicating this doubling, in creating a disquietening that implicates our a priori knowledge of the sinister truth of objects that like a dream we have somehow forgotten. Although the early stories had 'only 1 or 2 minutes'xviii of incidental music, an amount dwarfed by the current series' reliance on it, there is an impressive 14-and-a-half minutes of musical effectxix in the launch episode.

Lambert wanted the ‘familiar yet different’ thread to run through the signature tune and initially enquired after Les Stuctures Sonores, avant-garde composers Jacques Lasry & Bernard Baschet, who composed on custom-made glass and metal ‘sound sculptures’. However the job was handed to well known composer Ron Grainer, who having seen a dummy of the title sequence, hurriedly penned a rough piano version, indicating timbre as ‘wind bubble’ and ‘cloud’. Grainer handed it over to the Workshop to realise, intending to mix in a backing group later, but was so astounded with the results he asked for to share co-composer credit, an idea vetoed by the BBCxx. Derbyshire constructed the piece with the help of chief engineer , using electronic valve oscillators connected to keyboards to generate sounds, which were recorded and assembled onto tape machines by individually cutting the notes to the right length and arranging them in the order required. After initial processing, Derbyshire ‘crash-synched’ the three Phillips tape machines, occasionally having to unwind the rolls to correct misalignments, spilling them out all the way along the BBC corridors in Maida Valexxi.

The resulting tune in E minor at 4/4 meter is experienced as an uncanny recognition, ‘the combination of repeated base beat and pizzicato swoop’ (Tulloch, 1983 18-19) not untypical of pop hooks at the time yet clearly radiophonic, dissonant and alien. The tum-te-tum bass repetition, the twang sound of which Derbyshire generated either on a custom electronic pickup device or a jack-bay blanking panelxxii, is already both futuristic and contemporary before it is accompanied by a wave-like swishing effect that rolls in and out of proximity, leaping up a minor sixth in the eighth bar as it is joined by the high swooping woo-ee-oo melody, which is theremin-like and reminiscent of sci-fi moviesxxiii. The theme is ‘eminently hummable’ (Niebur, 2010, 100) and fulfils the role of signature tunes to ‘establish an almost immediate familiarity’ with the audience as well as identify programme differentiation (Tulloch, 1983 18-19). But Lambert felt the overall effect was too dissonant and reinforced the ‘familiar yet different’ dictum by insisting on a second master to break up the mechanical precision and regularity, deliberately introducing human error, and giving an impression of performance to what is ‘pure’ electronic collage.

The new master incorporated a hiss sound at the beginning, giving auditory weight to the first feathering of the altocumulus cloud shapes that appear in the title sequence. Associate Producer Mervyn Pinfield approached another BBC specialist service, formed to research the potential of electronic graphic effects. The group had experimented with ‘howlround’ graphics, images created by positive feedback (that is, by optically feeding a camera’s output back into itself by filming the monitor)xxiv. Bernard Lodge was given the job of integrating the abstract effect with the logo. The distorted graphics capture Lambert’s brief, odd and abstract, but vaguely figurative, so much so that updates to the sequence clarify the random plumes into columns of a space/time vortex through which TARDIS and logo speed towards the viewer. To 1960s viewers, the effect would have been more profoundly strange than familiar, given the convention for still images and scrolling credits. The combination of sound and video, or sound on video since this is its impression, was fresh and startling, and prefigured both the unusual sound treatments and mystery to follow, ensuring they too would be experienced eerily.

The opening sequence is the first of several visual clichés of English life. Here a sole policeman on his night beatxxv checks the premises along a typical fogbound East London street. It is a difficult first scene, pulling the viewer into a darkness that immediately puts him on edge, straining his eyes to make out what is going on, asking him to rely for cues on familiar references to programmes like Dixon of Dock Green (1955 - 1976). This standard fictional caricature of fog-bound London is then undermined by the strangeness of the theme musicxxvi. While sound is often called upon to compensate for poor visuals (Donnelly, 2007: 198) here the struggle for visibility is aided only by the theme music which has mysteriously run on passed the title sequence. It only fades out with the introduction of the first sound effect, that of Brian Hodgson’s TARDIS hum. In the intervening period, the encoding of suspense and mystery is pursued rigorously, even at the expense of realism, as the gates to ‘I M Foreman Scrap Merchant’ open by themselves, despite having apparently been checked by the policeman. In retrospect it is perhaps the most surprising event in the entire transmission, but one the viewer tolerates as part an unfolding mystery, perhaps erroneously suspecting an unearthly cause, and in any case having been carried away by the travelling camera, unable to pause and question itxxvii. ’s pilot script elides any exposition, leaving the suggestion that the gate may have creaked open (Coburn, 1963: 2), but in the transmission it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this is a conscious breaching of the fourth wall. The unexplained strategy is the first of many unresolved mysteries, the next of which is already upon us as, having dispensed with the need to explain the shift in POV, the camera conveys the viewer through the dark junkyard, settling before the familiar sight of a police telephone box, strangely out of place, a fact accented by its unfamiliar hum.

Again, we are not given much opportunity to reflect on the electronic sound, for as the camera hones in on the ‘Police Advice and Assistance’ notice, the POV blurs and fades, cutting to a school sign, the odd humming sound replaced by the familiar one of the class bell. In spite of its status as a comprehensive school, an education system not fully rolled out in England until 1965, ‘Coal Hill’ relocates the viewer in the everyday, and provides the rationale for the introduction of and Barbara Wright, science and history teachers, as the main focus for audience identification as well as instruments of the Reithian pursuit of quality educational programming. It is through the perspective of these teachers’ aroused suspicions that is constructed as an enigma, an apparently normal teenage girl who shows signs of brilliance whilst simultaneously failing. We first encounter her listening to The Arthur Nelson Group’s ‘Three Guitar Moods 2’xxviii on a transistor radio, her dress redolent more of street fashion than school uniform, details that situate her detachment as conventionally framed by 1960s youth culture. But her modernity is given a futuristic and spacey twist when we observe Susan’s strange dance-gestures, as if her studied concentration on the music stirred somatic memories of a very different life.

Whereas Susan’s response to the diegetic music is ambiguous, the non-diegetic music she is associated with – which later recurs as a leitmotif for the mystery of the junkyard, and finally the Doctor himself – encourages a reading of her character as doubling along genre-specific lines. Norman Kay wrote the incidental music for An Unearthly Child, and would go on to compose for The Keys of Marinus (1964) and (1964), two other stories from the era. Incidental music was used to build mood, rather than back up action, due to the difficulties of setting up a correspondence with the live action in the studio (Potter, 2007: 163). The ominous tones used in establishing Susan may seem overblown, and a better fit with thrillers and even horror movies, but the rarity of radiophonic sounds (Donnelly, 2007: 201) meant 1960s audiences were rewarded in their genre recognition and were one step ahead of the teachers’ investigation of the mystery.

The ominous motif continues to comingle with everyday sounds as the teachers follow Susan ‘home’ to the junkyard, the sound of the car ‘pulling up’ one of the many audio-natural effects deployed to turn the crammed studio into a dynamic space. As they wait, the teachers provide us with a back-story on Susan. The 'as live' production restricted the narrative to a largely chronological storytelling with expensive edits, for actor-led flashbacks, used rarely. In An Unearthly Child, the flashbacks are told in real time from the point-of-view of the teachers who cannot be featured since they are physically elsewhere in the studio (Potter, 2007: 164-5). Film inserts were also infrequent due to time constraints, thus the confines of the studio space typically meant a discursive style of ‘tell-don’t-show’ storytelling. These were tough conditions for a programme promoting the spectacle of infinite time and space, yet the practicalities influenced the philosophy and aesthetic of the programme, and the practices continued up until the more action-orientated Jon Pertwee stories. It was up to the incidental music and effects to establish the time and space in the minds of the viewer.

The consistency of sound treatments enabled the establishing of characters, as well as the identity of the programme, confirming its genre, and expanding its limited spatial fields along audio-imaginary lines. The recurring aural motif of Susan as enigma and the electronic hum of TARDIS, also ensure that, by the time the junkyard set is revisited, the vague feeling of familiarity has reached a sensorial overload as eerie recognition. As we follow the teachers through Foreman’s gates, it is Chesterton this time who has the torch. The ominous motif replaces the signature tune heralding, after 15 minutes of absence, the entrance of the Doctor. Rather than resolving the anxiety, his presence only confirms the mystery that has been constructed in his absence, a puzzle that the repetition of sound treatments continues to work on. The characterisation of the Doctor as a puzzle – Doctor Who? – is one that clearly cannot afford to be hastily unravelled, and the two sounds which signify him, necessarily qualify his narrative role as enigmatic Other, an unknown in whose presence lies an absence. In episode, he is played by Hartnell as arrogant and aggressive, but after Newman’s intervention and corrections, subsequently redrawn as a figure of oppositions, much more along the lines Lambert had envisaged him, full of brilliance and humanity one moment, then ‘suspicious and capable of sudden malignance’ the nextxxix, a duality fully supported by the soundtrack.

Although the new series makes much more of the notion of TARDIS as a character, even suggesting a specific gender affiliation, here the character development is acoustic, marking TARDIS as both aural space and primary figure. ‘It’s alive’ Chesterton says, responding to its sound by touching it. Once the teachers force their way inside, a new pallet of Brian Hodgson’s electronic effects is used to construct the ‘impossible’ interior in a more clearly scientific register. The interior hum deepens, a non-diegetic sound we now firmly associate with its analogue. But not all of the effects are either clearly diegetic or non-diegetic. Having been kidnapped by the Doctor, who is concerned the authorities will be on to him, the teachers make a run for it. This is accompanied by another sound alert, a sudden electronic bubbling rising in pitch. But whereas the former ominous motif clearly requires no analogue, it is ambiguous whether or not this sound has one, whether, that is, it is intended as a diegetic sound. Does it emanate from the console with its array of buttons and levers, all potential triggers for diegetic effects? Is the alarm one that sounds for the audience only, a signifier of the danger and prefiguring of the long dematerialisation sequence about to begin? A third possibility – one that draws evidence from the Radiophonic Workshop’s experience in radio drama where ‘special sound’ was a means of conveying interior states of mind – is that the sound is ‘extra-diegetic’, an aural diagram of the panic that the characters and viewers have been thrown into. Finally, if we are given to the notion of TARDIS as character – a retrospective reading the new series makes plausible – could the alarm represent TARDIS as thinking, trying to make moral sense out of the Doctor’s hostile actions?

Brian Hodgson’s impressive repertoire of radiophonic effects for TARDIS, in particular the dematerialisation treatment, demonstrate its core importance to the programme, not simply as the ship that conveys its crew from a to b, but, iconically and philosophically, as home to the crew, the base to which they consistently return no matter how far and wide they travel. While its hum in this episode is encoded as science fiction and mysterious, by the time the crew are fighting for their lives against the , two stories along, it will bring connotations of stability and comfortxxx. On hand, this home is a relational one, a surrogate of the one left behind, the space of refuge and ‘family-ness’. Home is characterised by (Derrida's) différance, particularly for the viewers who are both ‘at home’ and simultaneously transported through home-as-hiatus, a liminal doorway between concrete space and fantasy, acoustically unsteady, both heimliche and unheimliche.

Hodgson’s dematerialisation effect generates a sound architecture that similarly shifts and steadies, seeming to concretise before flowing away, always in a state of becoming that is never finally still. Hodgson 'wanted a sound that seemed to be travelling in two directions at once; coming and going at the same time' (Marshall, accessed 2013). The sound was created by scraping a key across dismantled piano strings, recording it with tape echo, reversing it, then treating it to notes created on the ‘wobbulator’. Although identified as a sound effect, like many radiophonic sounds, it produces an atmospheric integrity hard to hear as anything but music. Hodgson used this ‘special sound’ to create a ‘more ‘musical’ backdrop for each episode’ adding a unique electronic element to combine with stock stores ‘wrapping listeners in a cocoon of alien sounds and atmospheres’ (Nieber, 2007: 205). The BBC reclassified the effect as music in 1973, even crediting Hodgson as the author (Howe et al 1994 in Donnelly, 2007: 190).

The first dematerialisation is visually rendered as a montage of extreme close ups to foster the sense of movement and establish the take-off scenario in the minds of the viewer. On a monitor, a still graphic of a London overhead scene is treated to a series of reductions, giving the impression of TARDIS rising above the city. The central column of TARDIS rises and falls, flooded in light. While Chesterton and Wright sway and stumble, as if describing a slow motion ballet, ECUs of the Doctor and his granddaughter depict a stoic tension as though tolerating the now familiar G-force, graphic cloud effects overlaid across the strain on their facesxxxi. The sequence lasts two minutes but is a one-time-only event that future episodes reduce to a short burst of light and sound, the spectacle obviated by audience experience. The synchretic relationship between TARDIS sound and analogue having been forged, the latter could be dispensed with where necessary, for example when budgets were tight, since the ship’s arrival and departure was ‘seen’ via the aural architecture.

As TARDIS comes to rest, the only sound, its insistent hum, seems to fill the space entirely, and then this too is lost as the viewer is thrown outside, no longer a participant, but forced into the detached role of observer: the now sitting at a tilt in a dark and barren alien landscape accompanied by the chilling audionaturalism of wind noise. After the long sequence of visual and aural overload, this sound intensifies rather than dissipates the anxiety, creating an anempathetic effect (Chion, 1994: 8). In the silence of electronic sound, the audience ejection is experienced as sudden sensory deprivation, making the impression of das unheimliche the dominant one. Again the fourth wall is breached, this time a figure cuts between us and the ship, carrying a spear rather than a torch, his shadow lengthening impossibly across the landscape towards TARDIS. When the end titles and signature start up, the eerie recognition threatens to become full blown horror as if the music, having transported us here, is now leaving us to face an awakening of our repressed pasts. Next week, the titles inform us, THE CAVE OF SKULLS.

The entire sequence is perhaps the most impressive in the history of the programme, partly as a consequence of its limited budget. It is the culmination of ‘an artful and intelligent marshalling of resources’ (Potter, 2007: 161-2). The pattern of cramped and discursive storytelling, that the practicalities of live recording in tiny demanded, is suddenly and startlingly replaced by the still and painterly vista of the landing site, filmed (at greater expense) at the larger Ealing Studios. The cramped storytelling surely finds its corollary in the family living room experience of viewers. Viewing experience in the early sixties invariably meant sharing one television set with the entire family gathered together in the living room (Bignell, 2007: 45). The monochrome sets took a while to warm up and were prone to breakdown, although reception was generally good when there was a roof aerial, and a close transmitter, but the picture was not always sharp, partly as a result of signal interference and the 405-lines screen set up (377 of actual image) which had remained since development in 1934xxxii

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Doctor Who Day is a reminder of the prominence of the programme in so many of our lives. So many talented artistic and video fan skills will be on display through social media. I also wanted to celebrate using the gifts I have, thus by giving away a piece of my own writing.

I have reproduced the section above from a previously published essay but for copyright reasons used an early draft format. If you want to read the entire chapter, it is called Adventures in English space and time: Sound as experience in Doctor Who (An Unearthly Child) and can be found in the book Mad Dogs and Englishness: popular music and English identities. Bloomsbury, London. ISBN 9781501311277 Thanks for any feedback you care to give.