37 - Terror of the Vervoids (The Trial of a Time Lord, Parts Nine to Twelve)

Composer: Malcolm Clarke
Director: Chris Clough

What's the score?
Here, then, is the Radiophonic Workshop's last stand. Malcolm Clarke is the last Workshop member to compose incidental music for DW on TV, although Dick Mills will continue to provide special sound for the rest of the classic series. The Terror of the Vervoids score isn't a radical departure from his previous work on DW - the cliffhanger cues are more restrained, and there's more of a tendency overall towards tunefulness with the most discordant moments reserved for the monsters, but it's recognisably Clarke.

Musical notes

• Clarke can generally be relied upon to deliver the appropriate signature sound for a monster, provided the monster is sufficiently distinctive. Presented with bipedal vegetables, he produces a sound that can best be described as "planty". It's a sort of strained, high-pitched, fibrous sound, like someone wincing through a grass reed, with some woody ticks and pocks added for emphasis. It isn't heard until Part Two, after the Vervoids have emerged from their pods, but it's heard over most of their scenes thereafter. A couple of frailer clicks and knocks punctuate the dying gasps of the Vervoids in the penultimate cue of Part Four.
• Other signature sounds include: ethereal washes for scenes of the Hyperion III floating through space; bassoon meanderings and persistent knocking sounds for anyone creeping around where they shouldn't be; and high fluting phrases for Mel, who gets plenty to do in this story and gets plenty of music to go with it. Clarke doesn't continue here his earlier use (in The Twin Dilemma and Attack of the Cybermen) of the harpsichord for the Doctor, who gets mid-range reed instrument sounds if he gets anything.
• In general, the music is saved for scenes of the Doctor's adventure on the Hyperion III, with very little spared for the courtroom scenes. The only notable courtroom cues, apart from the very last cue of Part Four, are the high, anxious phrases that play in Parts One and Three when the Doctor complains that the recorded evidence has been tampered with but is forced to withdraw the accusation. 
• The cue that plays when an anonymous infiltrator aboard the Hyperion III sends the Doctor a distress signal in Part One is a repeated series of rising notes in a rather plasticky mid-range synth voice. When we hear this cue again in the next scene, as the signal is picked up inside the TARDIS, it's muted, as though the incidental music is being diegetically relayed through the TARDIS console's speakers. Readers may recall that Clarke did something very similar in Part One of Earthshock; we might also call to mind Peter Howell's "inside the room, outside the room" game in Part Three of Planet of Fire.
• Clarke makes a bold guess at the sound of the aerobics music of the future - he seems to have taken his inspiration from the tinny tunes of the Japanese video games of the mid-80s. By an extraordinary coincidence, whichever of Mel or the Doctor was responsible for acquiring the horrible piece the Doctor exercises to inside the TARDIS in Part One seems to have shopped at the same place as whoever stocked the Hyperion III's gym.

Vox pop
This isn't a bad score, nor is it a stand-out - it's simply OK. Malcolm Clarke gives a fair account of himself, but this isn't the triumphant high note the BBC Radiophonic Workshop might have gone out on. It isn't even the magnificent return to form we might have expected from Clarke after the partial upswing of his Attack of the Cybermen score. It's ordinary, but for me the problem isn't so much its ordinariness as the absence of anything really fresh. The Workshop has provided incidental music for DW for six years at this point - leaving aside the question of relative costs, it would be reasonable for viewers (and the producer) to expect the show's musical repertoire to move with the times. (Notwithstanding Dudley Simpson's near-residency prior to 1980, or the approach taken with DW's incidental music since 2005...) Penned in by the shiny new work of freelance composers, this score only feels more dated.
On which petulant note, this blog says farewell to Malcolm Clarke. Some fans criticise his early DW scores for being too challenging to the casual TV viewer, but for me that's their strength - they've got something to say about the story they're attached to, they want to be heard, and they won't take no for an answer. He was at his best when indulging his experimental tastes, and I think he's best remembered that way.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story; the photo gallery features nearly six minutes of Clarke's music.