14 - Time-Flight

Composer: Roger Limb
Director: Ron Jones

What's the score?
Roger Limb takes his familiar sound palette and changes the pitch up. Droning and buzzing synths are in evidence again, along with some trumpet-like sounds, but most of the score is taken up with extremely high-pitched jangling and echoey sounds, generally to accompany scenes of the ethereal Xeraphin or Kalid's supernatural shenanigans.

Musical notes

• Part One contains an astonishingly long gap between cues, more than eight minutes between the disappearance of Concorde #1, Golf Victor Foxtrot, and the flight crew preparing to board Concorde #2, Golf Alpha Charlie. Incidental silences of this length are almost unheard of (so to speak) in the electronic 80s; this is almost certainly the longest example, with Peter Howell's score for Part One of Planet of Fire providing a distant second place with a six minute silence.
• Presumably copyright restrictions prevented any use or spoofing of British Airways' marketing jingle, "We'll Take More Care of You", during the story. Limb provides a distant cousin to the tune in Part One - a triumphal mid-range synth fanfare - when Golf Alpha Charlie apparently lands safely back at Heathrow.
• The only other notably tuneful bit of the score - a march that starts in an earnest minor key but soon turns jolly - plays in Part Four when the flight crew are making repairs to Golf Alpha Charlie's landing gear. According to the production notes on the DVD, it was during the shooting of this scene that the real "We'll Take More Care of You" was played on the studio floor, to the amusement of all.
• There's a really good bit about halfway through when Captain Stapley is caught listening to "Better the Devil You Know" by Kylie Minogue on his headphones. Oh no, wait, that's the parody version. I wish, I wish I was watching the parody version instead of the real one.

Vox pop
There's an interesting question to be pondered here: Does my opinion of a story affect my opinion of its soundtrack, or vice versa? Time-Flight is a story that I actually find it draining to watch - were it but for this project, I wouldn't have pushed my way through to the last episode again, and I could have spared myself the physical sensation of having wall cavity insulation pumped into my skull. It's a solid dud. I'm reasonably sure that the combined efforts of Bernard Herrmann, Wendy Carlos and the sainted Delia Derbyshire couldn't have made it look good. Would Time-Flight have made a great composer sound bad? Could a better story have made Roger Limb's score sound better?
In fairness, there's more going on in Limb's score for Time-Flight than I've given him credit for above. It's probably on a par with Four to Doomsday's score in terms of content - the thing is, it's much less varied and less appealing in terms of timbre, and it's hard to pull out notable features from all that shrilling. As much as my opinion of the story itself might have reflected onto the music, I don't think Limb does himself any favours here. There are points of interest around the score, as noted above, but none within the score itself.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the full isolated score, but the DVD photo gallery features eight minutes of Roger Limb's music.