Doctor Who and electronic music

Isn't it a lovely thing in life when your interests take a natural conversion? Last year, there was an excellent documentary on the rise of electronic music, Synth Britannia, on BBC Four. It featured artists emerged in the 1970s, such as Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, The Human League and John Foxx - basically many of my own favourite artists - and quite bizarrely, after watching it, I really fancied watching some late 70s Tom Baker-era Doctor Who!!

As a lover of Science-Fiction, with obviously, the good Doctor topping the list, I've always found that certain styles of electronic music somehow connect me back to the show. I fondly recall as a child, watching Peter Davison's episodes and listening to Jean Michel Jarre's "Oxygene". For me that was just a perfect combination! Still is!

Clearly, the original Delia Derbyshire theme tune arrangement is an electronic masterpiece; way ahead of its time, and something that still sounds unique and distinctive today. If they were to re-instate it, I'm sure it would work better than ever, not sounding at all dated. It is as well known and as big as the show itself!

Watching some of the old Hartnell episodes recently, I was impressed with the incidental music - in "The Daleks" for example, where in place of incidental music, we have a low, menacing and totally mysterious, haunting drone. For me this is far superior to any dramatic orchestral score.

And there's also the incidental music of the 70s and early 80s from Malcolm Clarke, Roger Limb and Peter Howell. Granted some of those analogue warbles sound a little dated today, yet still very appropriate and identifiable with Doctor Who.

Speaking of Peter Howell - his version of the theme tune still sounds absolutely superb today. It's probably my personal favourite version, being the one I grew up with. Yet its use on the intros of BBC DVDs, over the choice of the original, certainly says something. It just works. Totally appropriate - and, like the original, it hardly sounds dated today.

So in that sense, while the show has been updated with current trends and a modern take, I do miss the atmosphere of an electronic score, as for me, the two will forever go hand in hand.

Deconstruction of the Daleks

It has been quite surprising just how many angry, frustated and critical comments have literally flooded Doctor Who forums - particularly the DWM Facebook page, over the last week. I don't recall such a backlash in recent years, ever! All because they changed the Daleks!! Surely that proves that they are still the nation's favourite villain, and that they are still as popular today as they have ever been. They're still as big as the show itself.

And I do believe these comments are from long-time genuine fans - as I'm one of them! It's not a case of criticising for the sake of it, and nobody is deliberately being a "hater" (to coin a rather sad internet expression...). We love the Daleks and their legacy; they are as fundamental to the show as the TARDIS or the theme tune! So to see them changed in a way in which so many of us deem completely un-necessary is a bitter pill to swallow. In that case, the Doctor might as well become a transexual android!

But not liking the new Daleks doesn't mean we no longer like the show - that's just nonsense! I still believe SM is the right man for the job, and I don't miss RTD's overblown stories one jott. I applaud SM for casting Matt Smith, as for me, he feels like the most "Doctory" Doctor since McCoy or McGann. I applaud him for revamping the music, titles and TARDIS (whether for the better or not) - it's all part of the dynamism of change which has always driven the show forward.

Yet the Dalek change was one too many. In fact let me correct myself - the new colour schemes are good. The new detail, such as the guns and eyestalk, are good. What utterly ruins them and takes away the "Dalekyness" is the shape, and that dreadful hump back. Had the detail and colour simply been applied to the existing design, they would have looked superb. But start to tamper with that shape (the base isn't even as angular), and you're starting to loose the Daleks.

Despite that, I'm still excited about the rest of the series and seeing what SM has got in store for us. This was just one mistake (albeit a rather huge one). So far this series for me feels like the most true to the spirit of the show since series 1 in 2005, and I'm really looking forward to the rest.

But as a Dalek fan - this is simply unforgivable! I did meet them for real yesterday though, at a promotional event at Sheffield station for the new BBC computer game. Seeing them "in the fibreglass" did make me appreciate them a little more - but there's still nothing better than a classic Dalek; the original and best.

Victory of the Daleks

Well, something had to give somewhere. After two pretty good and original episodes for the revamped and regenerated new series of Doctor Who, the Mark Gatiss story Victory of the Daleks proved to be a huge disappointment. Although Gatiss is a lifelong fan, with numerous writing connections to the show, for me, both stories of his, have been rather crap. Victory of the Daleks was perhaps THE most rushed and fast-paced story in the show's history - blink, and you missed it. This made it difficult to follow and it spent no time at all building up any kind of tension. And not just that - the actual storyline was absolute rubbish too. The rehashed old tale of one race of Daleks beating another, all wrapped around a corny plot to get to the Doctor via implanting an android professor, claiming to have invented the Daleks, in Winston Churchill's war cabinet. I'm sorry, it just did not work. The Daleks deserve a genuinely original story - and not one that's necessarily earth-bound either. There are only so many ways you can re-tell The Dalek Invasion of Earth, and they've all been done twice over! But it gets worse. According to Steven Moffat, as just about everything else in the series has change, why not change the Daleks too? Because there's no need, that's why! The change in the Doctor, the companion and the TARDIS is all normal with a new Doctor, season and production team, but a design as genuinely classic as the Dalek? Surely people want to see Daleks which look like Daleks, not an oversized, hunchback obese Dalek. Despite some nice colour schemes and some interesting details, such as the eye-stalks, the new fat Daleks looked utterly stupid, more resembling the various mis-shapen Dalek toys that came out in the 60s, barely resembling a Dalek. This was one step too far in my book, which has undoubtedly raised my concerns for the rest of the series. I think at times the production team are so involved in the show, and wrapped up in their exclusive little Doctor Who bubble, that they easily lose focus and forget some of the most important things that just make the show work.

The Beast Below

The Beast Below was an original and unusual story for Doctor Who; more of a message about humanity and looking after endangered species than your usual villain on the loose romp, which made a change.

However I felt that there was perhaps too many things happening at once. The "Smilers" were very creepy indeed, although sadly underused. They could have made much more of them.

Starship UK was brilliantly realised though, making for not only one of the most original ideas in the revived series' history, but also one of the most stunning CGI visuals.

Only the second episode and the days of David Tennant's tenth Doctor seem an unusually long time ago, with Matt Smith perfectly settling into the role. I find it somewhat interesting that for a somebody of his age who grew up without the show on TV, has brought so much "Doctorishness" to the role. Hints of Peter Davison's Doctor came through in a few pleasing moments.

Just two episodes in and already this season feels much closer to the original spirit of the show, which had gradually gone away over the last couple of years. Although I'm unsure it was a wise move to bring the Daleks back (again), or stick cute little Union Jack flags on their domes, but I'm sure next week's Mark Gatiss story is going to be a interesting one...

The Eleventh Hour

The Eleventh Hour was, in short, a triumph. The success of modern day Doctor Who had over the last few years, perhaps taken the show to a level that was too difficult to handle, with the quality of the storytelling ultimately suffering, with David Tennant's last two seasons being both predictable and repetitive.

Any debut story for a new Doctor (and in many cases production team) have to deliver on many levels. It has to introduce a new Doctor; introduce a new companion; tell a story; and all usually wrapped up in new music, with a new title sequence at either end. The Eleventh Hour managed to hit all of those targets, despite the new theme tune arrangement being a huge mistake. But more of that later.

Matt Smith's Doctor is going to be brilliant. I may have had my doubts at the casting of a Doctor younger than myself, but he pulled it off. Matt has an interesting face, he oozes charisma, as any great Doctor should, and just as he can look like a fresh-faced 20-something year old, he can also look mysteriously older. Smith clearly has both the madness and other-worldlyness about him that defined such great Doctors as Tom Baker's and Jon Pertwee's takes on the time lord.

The story itself, focussed on introducing new companion Amy Pond, combined with some rather large eyeballs paying a visit to Earth, in search of "Prisoner Zero"; a CGI snake-like monster that transformed itself into coma patients or anybody else (including Pam Batchelor from Look Around You).

There was probably as much emphasis on the grown-up Amy, played by Karen Gillan, as there was on Matt Smith's Doctor. I found the character of Amy to be instantly likeable and absolutely ideal for the Eleventh Doctor's companion.

With the Doctor's visits to Amy as a child and his typically Doctor-ish lateness in returning as promised, there was a hint of Girl in the Fireplace to that aspect of the story, but it worked well regardless. The rest of the adventure was well-paced, well acted and well directed, for all of it's engaging 63 minutes. It may not have been the most original debut story, but it was for me, the most thrilling new Doctor adventure in a long while - dare I say since "Rose" in 2005.

With all the RTD campness and overblown storylines now a thing of the past, this felt like really solid Doctor Who.

I was thrilled to see that the tired title sequence had finally been re-designed, but sadly, it was rather rubbish, with tacky lightning bolts firing the TARDIS down what looked like a close-up of somebody's naval. This felt like a missed opportunity to do something original and bring back the dark and mysterious kind of distinctive title sequence the show boasted in the 1960s and 1970s. As it stands, it's a lightening fast zoom, almost like they can't be bothered to do anything spectacular, in favour of getting into the action. Fair enough, but for me, the title sequence has always been every bit as important as the story itself, and the same goes for the theme tune.

Again a big hurrah when a new drone swirled in, heralding the start of a new arrangement... Unfortunately, it was barely recognisable as the all-important Doctor Who theme tune, with the famous bassline lost underneath the cheesy orchestrations of the previous version of the theme.

The Doctor Who theme music is one of the most, if not THE most famous UK television series theme music, with the original electronic Delia Derbyshire version still sounding exciting today. There have been, in recent years, some superb and highly underrated new interpretations of the theme music from the likes of Orbital and David Arnold - yet instead we are faced with this new version which has almost completely lost its identity. Given that Mr Moffatt (which I still can't spell) is a lifelong fan, I'm surprised this got past his ears.

The new series has a much more fantastical and almost fairytale approach in parts, and I felt the incidental music should have reflected that. Instead, Murray Gold's incidental music just sounded like a repeat of the repetitive and predictable score that has been used for the last five years.

The final missed opportunity was the new TARDIS interior. Again, kudos to the production team for keeping to the tradition of change and revamping the inside, but quite frankly, it looks like a junkyard, with the console being the central pile of junk. And with the lighting so similar to the previous set, at a glance, it barely looked like anything had changed.

Although this has much more of the home-made time machine look that we saw in the two Peter Cushing films of the 1960s (not unlike Smith's bowtie and tweed jacket...), it does feel a little twee, and I was hoping for something very different. Maybe something more futuristic to nicely contrast the beautiful exterior of the new TARDIS prop.

But I suppose those are minor gripes. After all I don't watch the show to see what the inside of the TARDIS looks like or how the titles have changed - although for me, it's all part of the overall picture.

But The Eleventh Hour itself was overall, a brilliant episode. It felt new and refreshing, and revitalised, thanks to the new team behind it. And going by the look of the "coming soon" trailer, things are just going to get bigger and better from here.

Welcome back, Doctor...