17 - Mawdryn Undead

Composer: Paddy Kingsland
Director: Peter Moffatt

What's the score?
This is the first of two scores Paddy Kingsland composed for DW after he left the Radiophonic Workshop and set up his own PK Studios. Despite this, I don't really think of him as the first of the freelance '80s composers - he isn't so much leading the charge of the new wave as doing a gig for his old employer while he establishes his freelance business.
The score for Mawdryn Undead is a fairly conventional affair, picked out in mid-range synths and Kingsland's trusty guitar.

Musical notes

• Turlough is introduced with a rather smug tune picked out in guitar and cheesy lounge synth. It leads into an outrageously jaunty piece of music in the early scene in Part One in which Turlough TWOCs the Brigadier's vintage car; it's heard again when Ibbotson visits him in the school sanatorium in Part One and when he returns there in Part Two. It's reprised in Part Four when the Brigadiers are dropped off in 1977 and in 1983, suggesting that it's a theme for Brendon Public School rather than a character theme. (Perhaps it's the school song, although that suggests the peculiar image of the choirmaster in a white tuxedo sat at a Bontempi organ.) It's a bit of a shame that this didn't become a recurring theme for the weaselly Turlough - instead he's overshadowed by...
• The Black Guardian's theme, a four-note minor key phrase repeated throughout this story and picked up in the next. It's generally played slowly and comes across as mysterious - although the Black Guardian isn't the most mysterious of villains, we might wonder at the motivation of Turlough as his agent.
• Scenes aboard Mawdryn's ship have a theme of their own, a descending pair of descending pairs of notes. The notes have something of a dreary sound to them; the theme itself is heavily repeated (with variations and embellishments), and the nested structure of the phrase amplifies that repetition. All of this plays up to the ship's portrayal as a sort of alien 'Flying Dutchman', doomed to drift on through eternity. Mawdryn himself is represented by a descending set of three notes.
• There's also a theme for the Brigadier - or rather, for both Brigadiers. It's varied throughout the story - sometimes it's little more than an alternation between two chords, sometimes it fills out to something more like a march, complete with snare drum ornamentation. The 1983 Brigadier gets rising chords; the 1977 Brigadier gets the inverse arrangement.
• The cue that plays over the 1983 Brigadier's flashback in Part Two is particularly lovely, and includes hints of the bass line and "oo-wee-oo" elements of the DW theme. There's another little "oo-wee-oo" in Part Four when the Doctor agrees to help Mawdryn and his fellow mutants, even though it means the loss of his own ability to regenerate.

Vox pop
As ordinary as this score is, it's nice to hear some straightforward melodic material after the heavy experimentation of Earthshock and Snakedance, not to mention the three least appealing Roger Limb scores. It is, however, extremely repetitive; the real issue may not be the frequency of repetition (well, not only that) so much as the simplicity of the motifs, which makes their repetition more obvious and more wearing. One might argue that it's appropriate for a story in which immortal characters talk about their endless suffering, but even so.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release includes the full isolated score as an audio option.