39 - Time and the Rani

Composer: Keff McCulloch
Director: Andrew Morgan

What's the score?
Brace yourselves - here comes Keff McCulloch. A controversial figure among orthodox DW fandom, he here presents the first of six DW scores. Three of them run in succession in this season of DW, making McCulloch the only composer apart from Dudley Simpson, Murray Gold and Segun Akinola to provide the incidental music for three consecutive stories. His arrangement of the theme tune also debuts in this story.
McCulloch seems to have tackled the theme arrangement as a one-off job. At the time he was approached to compose the incidentals for Time and the Rani, he had other commercial work on the go. He recalls on his website that he continued to focus on his other commitments by day and worked on Time and the Rani in a series of caffeine-fuelled night shifts. So begins an unfolding saga of sleep deprivation for Keff McCulloch in the summer of 1987.
It may be revealing to note that the two major elements of McCulloch's current concert repertoire are classic pop/rock and Latin jazz - these seem to have been passions of his in the '80s as well, and fun can be had spotting the moments when they poke through in his work, even when the story doesn't require it. Contemporary synth pop is clearly a heavy influence on his work for DW. He also uses much of the same musical equipment as German electronica pioneers Tangerine Dream - the similarity in the timbre of certain synth voices in his and their work is obvious, even to listeners who aren't interested in the specific brand names - but it's not immediately clear whether they're a compositional influence on him.

McCulloch favours rhythmically four-square cues with a firm beat, high-pitched drones and synth choir (quite the hot sound in the late '80s and '90s), horns and as much percussion as he can muster, and the skitterish sorts of sound that scream "computer!" to anyone who grew up in the '80s. He's rather fond of using high synth stabs (or "orchestra hits") to punctuate his cues or to emphasise moments of sudden physical activity on-screen.

Musical notes

• For reasons that remain unclear, McCulloch provided several sound effects for Time and the Rani. (Fanecdotal accounts variously suggest a misunderstanding, or that Dick Mills was unable to do all the sound effects and McCulloch had to fill in.) These include the cluster of sounds that accompany the opening effects shots as the Rani attacks the TARDIS, which are listed as musical cues in the BBC's Programme-as-Completed documentation. The P-as-C also suggests the "Screen" background and "Klaxon" heard in Part Three and the sounds of the Rani's "Supernova" demonstration in Part Four were McCulloch's.
• Next, the Doctor's regeneration. McCulloch starts as he means to go on, with a bold and slightly discordant phrase in mid-range piano and high twinkling synths; this leads into a pile-up of rising chords that's strangely reminiscent of Roger Limb's regeneration cue from The Caves of Androzani. There's no clear sign that McCulloch was a fan or long-term viewer of DW before he worked on this story, and it's anyone's guess whether John Nathan-Turner might have specifically pointed him towards the earlier regeneration scene in preparation for this, but it's certainly remarkable that both composers took such a similar approach to these similar events. It leads directly into the opening theme music.
• And so at last to the new theme arrangement, and here several changes are apparent. For a start, it's in the key of A minor, higher than any other arrangement before or since. The new title sequence is about a third longer than its predecessors, so McCulloch has had to move the furniture around somewhat. To stretch it out a bit, the "middle eight" section has been restored to the opening titles for the first time since the 1960s. However, to cut the length of the theme back down to fit, the intro bars have gone, and the theme now opens cold after the initial sonic and visual explosion. There's now an explosion and white-out to lead into the episode, but no explosion at the end of the closing titles, which instead fade out with an echo of metallic clashes as the chrome DW logo drifts off into the distance. The bassline is steady - stately, even - with the main melody picked out in slinky mid-range and jangly high-pitched synth voices; it sounds a little as though McCulloch is trying to emulate the sounds of the Derbyshire arrangement using only the presets on his modern synthesizer. Finishing touches are added by Dick Mills, who provides an assortment of whooshes to match the graphics of various objects being hurled across the screen.
• This blog has made a point of highlighting DW theme references in other composers' work, and this is the entry we've been building towards. Although McCulloch is far from the only or first DW composer to use the theme itself as material for his incidental music, in Season 24 he goes a lot further with it than anyone else, producing cues that could almost be considered new arrangements in their own right. He hardly touches it in the next two seasons - fanecdotal evidence suggests that he was warned off it for fear of having to pay royalties to Ron Grainer if the theme was overused, but I'm unable to point to a source for this. 
• Time and the Rani features two notable lengthy theme references. The first, a favourite of mine, is a quizzical and rather weary sounding version of the theme melody over an echoing drum that plays as the Doctor starts to wake up in his new body in Part One. The "hangover version", I like to call it. The other is an extended riff on the famous bassline in Part Four, as the Doctor runs around trying to foil the Rani's plans. A couple of other recurring elements of the score - a whistling air that accompanies outdoor scenes on the surface of the planet Lakertya and the sustained dischords that represent the giant Brain the Rani has created - are incorporated into this latter cue, reinforcing the feeling of the Doctor's plan bringing everything together. Less lengthy but notable in its own right is the theme reference that intrudes into the mournful scene in Part Two of Faroon discovering the skeleton of her daughter Sarn. The Doctor wasn't involved and is nowhere near that scene - what's the reference doing there? It's picked up again in Part Three when Sarn is mentioned in another scene that doesn't feature the Doctor.
• McCulloch really goes to town in embroidering the Doctor's costume change scene in Part One. Those character moments in full:
  
  • First, a drunken phrase in Gallic accordion for the Napoleonic tunic and hat. So far, so obvious.
  • A trumpet fanfare for the same tunic with a bearskin hat of the type worn by British Foot Guards.
  • A peal of bells for the mortarboard and schoolmaster's cloak - presumably meant to evoke a school bell, except that these change pitch and sound more like the bells of a clocktower.
  • A skittish burst of xylophone for Tom Baker's old costume from Season 18 - it captures some of Big Tom's eccentricity, certainly, but it's not necessarily the ideal complement for the costume from his gloomiest and most subdued year on the show. Perversely, a bit of pompous Dudley Simpson spoofing might have been a better fit (cf the VHS release of Shada).
  • An arch phrase in harpsichord for the Jon Pertwee costume, with its exaggerated frills.
  • A comedy "smashed window" sound effect for the moment when the Doctor poses with the Fifth Doctor's cricket bat.
  • Finally, a flourish on what sounds like a banjo as the Doctor appears wearing his Panama hat and the Second Doctor's large fur coat. As the DVD production subtitles suggest, the intended reference is probably to the music hall, as the Doctor at this particular moment looks uncannily like Bud Flanagan about to sing "Underneath the Arches". McCulloch uses the banjo again as a motif for the Doctor in the final farewell cue in Part Four, but doesn't carry this over into any subsequent stories.
• Diegetic music is nothing new in DW's incidental music, but it becomes quite a big thing in the Sylvester McCoy era - specifically, diegetic muzak, as piped through the imagined speakers and PA systems of alien worlds. McCulloch starts the ball rolling here with the background music that plays in the Lakertyan Centre of Leisure in Part Three. High hollow knocking percussion and twinkling synths provide the support for a reedy melody that sounds as if it's been extrapolated from a sample of somebody saying "Doh". There's a feeling here of the new composer pulling out the stops and showing off what his machinery can do, as there was with Peter Howell's unexpected sequencer moment in The Leisure Hive.
• McCulloch opens 'er up and lets 'er rip again in Part Four, with a plaintive fluting sound as the Lakertyans mourn the reprisal killing of one of their number in the Centre of Leisure. It isn't the sound of the pan pipes - it's the sound of a long Japanese bamboo pipe called the shakuhachi. Specifically, it's an electronic sample of a shakuhachi that was included as a preset on the E-Mu Emulator II synthesizer (it says here). Even more specifically, it's the exact same sample that Tangerine Dream used on their 1985 tune "Yellowstone Park". The shakuhachi sample had made a low-key appearance in 1986 on Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer", and would enjoy prominent mainstream exposure in 1990 on Enigma's "Sadeness (Part I)".

Vox pop
The chief objection DW fans tend to raise against Keff McCulloch's music is that it's "inappropriate". Your humble blogger regards this suggestion with frank disdain. McCulloch's cartoonish bombast is entirely appropriate to the comic-book aesthetic that script editor Andrew Cartmel wanted to introduce into the show at this time; it's also entirely in keeping with the kind of music British viewers would have heard on other TV programmes of the day. In this regard, it's no more out of place than Dudley Simpson's acoustic quartets in the '70s, or the Radiophonic Workshop's compositions on analogue and early digital synths in the early '80s. Of course, the commonality of this kind of sound at the time can lead to unfortunate comparisons - several of the cues in this score and the next are more reminiscent of contemporary daytime/lifestyle TV than of contemporary children's or dramatic programming. Then again, the scenes of the Rani carving up a sheet of plastic in her TARDIS workshop sound like something from a school science programme, an association which is just about perfect.
Really, the problem here isn't that McCulloch's score is too lurid for the story (just check out the visuals, for goodness' sake), it's that the plot isn't sufficiently engaging to keep the viewer's attention from wandering. Divorced from any narrative requirements, the music and the images would make a fair 90-minute pop video. Listened to in isolation (the bits that are available, anyway), I find the music fun and invigorating - there's just so much going on in there.

Availability

• The BBC DVD release does not include the isolated score for this story. The DVD photo gallery features a little over eight minutes of Keff McCulloch's music.
• In 1988, BBC Records released The Doctor Who 25th Anniversary Album as a showcase for McCulloch's incidental music, alongside the various theme arrangements to date. Two tracks from Time and the Rani were featured on this album: "Future Pleasure", the full three-minute version of the "doh" music heard inside the Centre of Leisure; and "The Brain", an extended reworking of the final cue from Part Three.