Music and Sound Design in Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–)
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Copyright by Emily Anne Kausalik 2015 The Dissertation Committee for Emily Anne Kausalik Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Time Signatures: Music and Sound Design in Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–) Committee: James Buhler, Co-Supervisor Byron Almén, Co-Supervisor Charles Carson Frank Felice Hannah Lewis Time Signatures: Music and Sound Design in Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–) by Emily Anne Kausalik, B.A., M.M. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December 2015 Dedication To my family and friends. Yes, all of you. Thank you. Acknowledgements I would like to start by thanking my supervisors, Dr. Jim Buhler and Dr. Byron Almén, for all of their support and guidance throughout my time at the University of Texas at Austin and through this dissertation process. I don’t have the words to adequately describe how much I appreciated their patience and support as I completed this document and my degree, so I will simply say: thank you. I would also like to thank my wonderful committee, Dr. Charles Carson, Dr. Hannah Lewis, and Dr. Frank Felice, for their constructive feedback, compassion, support, and assistance throughout this dissertation process. There are many people that have influenced the formulation of this research, including the wonderful people I’ve met through Doctor Who fandom and the Gallifrey One convention, all of whom have cheered me on, offered recommendations and guidance, and kept me motivated. To my colleagues from my time at UT, my colleagues at work, my boyfriend, my parents, and extended family: I would have never made it this far without your support. I would put in a trophy emoji here if I could, because you all deserve it. Doctor Who and all associated still imagery are the property of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). v Time Signatures: Music and Sound Design in Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996, 2005–) Emily Anne Kausalik, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2015 Supervisors: James Buhler, Byron Almén On November 23, 1963, the British Broadcast Corporation (BBC) premiered a small, low-budget science fiction series titled Doctor Who. The BBC foresaw the program as a tea-time filler on Saturday evenings. Much to their surprise, the show went on to be one of the most popular and influential British television series in the BBC’s history, running with little interruption for nearly thirty years. One of the most striking features of the show is its sound design, something so impressive that many avid viewers recorded the sound of the early episodes during broadcast. Thanks to these viewers’ recordings it is possible to glean a rather complete picture of the aural history of Doctor Who, even in the face of the missing episodes from the 1960s that were wiped or lost by the BBC. This study aims to address the sound design, musical composition, and industrial practices of Doctor Who during its initial run from 1963–1989 on BBC Television, a previously underexplored area of film and television music research. The focus will be on the program’s musical aims in a historical stylistic analysis; how the sound design has been constructed and deployed, why constraints in production standards affect the type of music the program uses, how the highly variable narrative with nearly infinite genre possibilities allows for seemingly infinite approaches to representation through sound, and ultimately the different sounds of the program as well as how the program “sounds.” And at the core vi of these considerations is the central tenet of the familiar vs. unfamiliar, a focus instilled by producer Verity Lambert that the program relies upon as a unifying concept. In doing so, reinforcement of continuity, expectations of television sound, science fiction sound, British television sound, and perhaps even television sound in Western culture, can be addressed throughout a fifty-year span of television through a single program. vii Table of Contents List of Tables ......................................................................................................... ix List of Figures ..........................................................................................................x Chapter 1: Doctor Who? .........................................................................................1 Chapter Overview .........................................................................................17 Why Doctor Who? ........................................................................................23 Chapter 2: “Tea Time Travel,” The Early Years, 1963–69 ...................................27 From Memo to Screen ..................................................................................36 Defining Doctor Who: The Title Sequence ..................................................42 Appealing to a Contemporary Audience .......................................................62 Changing Faces, Changing Sounds ...............................................................72 Chapter 3: “Coming of Age,” The Transition Years, 1970–1979 .........................99 Doctor Who’s New Era ...............................................................................102 Mars Probe 7 ...............................................................................................117 Doctor Who’s “Other” Composers .............................................................130 The Dudley Simpson Show ........................................................................154 Chapter 4: “Synthesizing Starfields,” The John Nathan-Turner Years, 1979–1989...................................................................................................177 A New Approach ........................................................................................181 Synthesized Melodrama ..............................................................................196 The Five Doctors .........................................................................................210 Independent Composers and the End of an Era ..........................................224 Chapter 5: “To Days to Come,” Doctor Who into the Twenty-First Century .....241 Regenerations ..............................................................................................246 Bibliography ........................................................................................................268 viii List of Tables Table 2.1: List of stock music tracks used in “Tomb of the Cybermen.” ..........88 Table 2.2: List of Doctor Who serials with missing episodes. ...........................95 Table 3.1: Soundtrack summary of “Doctor Who and The Silurians,” episode one. .....................................................................................133 Table 3.2: Soundtrack summary of “The Ambassadors of Death,” episode one. .....................................................................................134 Table 3.3: Serials with Dudley Simpson as provider of incidental music, 1964– 1975.................................................................................................156 Table 3.4: Serials with Dudley Simpson as provider of incidental music, 1975–80...........................................................................................167 Table 4.1: Soundtrack summary for episode one of “The Leisure Hive.” .......192 Table 4.2: Soundtrack summary for episode two of “The Leisure Hive.” .......192 Table 4.3: Serials with Peter Howell as provider of incidental music .............198 ix List of Figures Figure 1.1: Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor (L) with Tom Baker as “The Curator” in the Doctor Who Fiftieth-Anniversary Special “The Day of the Doctor.” .............................................................................1 Figure 2.1: The Doctor (William Hartnell) and Steven (Peter Purves) in Paris 1572 during a summer of religious tension in “The Massacre of St. Bartholomew’s Eve” (1965). ...................................................27 Figure 2.2: An illustration of Susan Foreman as she appears in “An Unearthly Child,” found in “Doctor Who: An Adventure in Time and Space” fanzine. ..............................................................................................33 Figure 2.3: Left, a “scary door” from The Twilight Zone. Right, frenzied frequency wavelengths envelope The Outer Limits. ........................44 Figure 2.4: (L) Delia Derbyshire works at the Leevers-Rich 8-track supervised by Desmond Briscoe. (R) Derbyshire at the controls of the mixing desk in Room 12. ..............................................................................46 Figure 2.5: Stills from the opening sequence of Doctor Who as seen in “An Unearthly Child.” ..............................................................................48 Figure 2.6: Grainer’s originally-composed theme tune for Doctor Who, mm. 1–20. .........................................................................................51 Figure 2.7: Timeline representation of the soundtrack elements of “An Unearthly Child.” ..............................................................................58 Figure 2.8. Timeline representation of the sound design of “A Cave of Skulls,” second episode of Doctor Who’s first serial. ....................................60 x Figure 2.9: Timeline representation of the sound design in “The Dead Planet,” the