Doctor Who – New Dawn

Essays on the Jodie Whittaker era

Brigid Cherry, Matthew Hills, Andrew O'Day, Brigid Cherry, Matthew Hills, Andrew O'Day

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526151865
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

Doctor Who – new dawn explores the latest cultural moment in this long-running BBC TV series: the casting of a female lead. Analysing showrunner Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker's era means considering contemporary Doctor Who as an inclusive, regendered brand. Featuring original interview material with cast members, this edited collection also includes an in-depth discussion with Segun Akinola, composer of the iconic theme tune's current version. The book critically address the series' representations of diversity, as well as fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via the likes of memes, cosplay and even translation into Spanish as a grammatically gendered language. In addition, concluding essays look at how this moment of Who has been merchandised, especially via the 'experience economy', and how official/unofficial reactions to UK lockdown helped the show to further re-emphasise its public-service potential.

Part I

Creating Thirteen

1

Variations on a theme: temporal and cultural diversity in Segun Akinola’s music for Doctor Who

David Butler

One of the most striking ways in which the Jodie Whittaker era of Doctor Who is distinct from its predecessors is through its music. Doctors come and Doctors go, as have companions, nemeses, showrunners, producers, directors, and writers. Yet there has been one constant throughout the eras of the ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth Doctors: Murray Gold, the composer for every story in the live-action television show since its revival in 2005 until Peter Capaldi’s final adventure in 2017. The only other composer in the show’s history with a comparable run to Murray Gold is Dudley Simpson. It is difficult to summarize concisely the scores for ten series and multiple ‘specials’ but Gold’s music, with strong melodic writing and a frequently joyous fusion of large-scale orchestra, electronics and popular idioms, has been characterized by Matt Hills as ‘Hollywood fantasy-epic’ (2010: 198) with Gold acknowledging the influence of Hollywood composers like Danny Elfman (Bell, 2007), often heightening emotion through emphasizing melodramatic and comic moments. Segun Akinola, Gold’s successor as composer for the televised adventures of the thirteenth Doctor, has brought a fresh perspective to the music of Doctor Who and a set of scores that have explored new possibilities for the show’s music whilst also embracing its rich sonic and musical heritage. Via an original interview with Akinola, which took place on 23 March 2020 following the broadcast of the final episode of series 12, this chapter explores the ‘fantastic’ encounters between past, present, and more diverse musical worlds in the music for series 11 and 12, focusing in particular on Akinola’s arrangements of Ron Grainer’s famous main title theme for Doctor Who.

Akinola came to prominence with his music for David Olusoga’s acclaimed documentary series Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016), receiving a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit award the following year. His scores for Doctor Who have revelled in the potential for a system of leitmotifs to advance comprehension of the show’s over-arching narrative and the evolving relationships of the central characters (the Doctor, Ryan, Graham, and Yaz), which furthers Gold’s use of leitmotifs throughout his tenure as composer (see Hurst, 2015, for an extended study of the use of leitmotifs in Gold’s music). But although fulsome in his praise for Gold’s work – which, for Akinola, ‘changed British TV music in a way’ – Akinola has also taken inspiration from the close involvement of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the ‘classic’ eras of Doctor Who, a partnership that goes back to the origins of the show and the innovations of Delia Derbyshire, Brian Hodgson, and Dick Mills. The long-standing association of the Radiophonic Workshop with Doctor Who was consciously avoided by the initial producers of the revived show, with Gold noting that there ‘was only one type of music they specifically didn’t want, and that was Radiophonic Workshop-style electronic stuff’ (Bell, 2007), although that unease around substantial electronic sounds would ease, particularly in the Peter Capaldi era. Akinola, however, has enthusiastically endorsed the ethos of the Radiophonic Workshop and the freedom to be creative with sound, noting that there is ‘a direct correlation’ between what is perceived to be a modern and contemporary approach to film music in something like Steven Price’s award-winning score for Gravity (2013), which incorporates manipulations of found sound and processed orchestral recordings, and the approach of the Radiophonic Workshop fifty years ago. Having studied the Radiophonic Workshop at school and electroacoustic music at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire, Akinola has integrated his love of melody and thematic development, reminiscent of Murray Gold’s approach, with the spirit of experimentalism and sonic invention that informed the music and sound design of the Radiophonic Workshop, a spirit most audible in his delight in creating his own synths – one of Akinola’s ‘cornerstone sounds’, as he puts it, to make the music for the series sound cohesive is a synth generated from a plucked piano string.

For Akinola, this blend is unique to Doctor Who: ‘I can’t think of another series on TV for which one could be quite so traditional in the approach to themes and motif … and yet room to be so experimental’. In this respect, Akinola’s music appears to correspond with Emilie Hurst’s thesis that the music of Doctor Who is ‘emblematic’ of the show’s ‘contradictory tendencies’ that see it ‘continually caught between the tension of the old and the new, the need to repeat and the need to differ’ (2015: 3). Where Akinola is concerned, however, he was actively encouraged by the executive producers, Chris Chibnall and Matt Strevens, to differ from the approach of his predecessor: ‘My remit was simply to bring myself to the series. That was it. Don’t do what’s been done previously … not because it isn’t great, that was great but we were doing something new.’

Akinola’s music has certainly broken new ground for Doctor Who, particularly in his exceptional score for ‘Demons of the Punjab’ informed by research into Hindustani music and a collaboration with musicians of South Asian heritage. In his discussion of the music for science fiction film and TV, Jeremy Barham notes the difficulty for science fiction on screen to escape the ‘romanticizing’ of the genre and ‘society of the spectacle’ in the wake of Star Wars (1977) and its sequels, citing Annette Kuhn’s 1990 vision of a radical form of science fiction cinema that would ‘celebrate and empower the multiplicity of the marginalized, the colonized’ (Barham, 2009: 269). Barham reflects that it ‘remains to be seen’ how the genre might meaningfully take up Kuhn’s call in sound and image (ibid.). Musically, Doctor Who has tended not to answer Kuhn’s call. I have written elsewhere about the overriding Eurocentric nature of the vast majority of the music of Doctor Who, including the show’s post-2005 revival with its emphasis on ‘Western tonality’ and the post-romantic flourishes of the large-scale orchestra being at odds with the show’s potential to travel all of space and time (Butler, 2013). Segun Akinola’s music for Jodie Whittaker’s era has provided the first sustained decentring of that tendency and, in doing so, this chapter argues that Akinola’s music also provides the most extensive engagement with the fantastic premise of Doctor Who through its movement across cultures, eras, and genres. By fantastic, I am referring to Bliss Cua Lim’s definition of the term, in her postcolonial study of the relationship between fantastic cinema and temporality, as

a narrative that juxtaposes two (or more) radically different worlds. This encounter with a forked world is registered within the narrative as an experience of limits, whether these be limits of epistemological certainty, cultural transparency, or historical understanding. Because the unfamiliar world most often takes the form of a supernatural realm in which the linear chronological time of clock and calendar does not hold, the fantastic has a propensity to foreground a sense of temporal discrepancy. (Lim, 2009: 28)

For Lim, this juxtaposition of worlds gives the fantastic the potential to destabilize assumptions about the perceived status quo of the reality and society we live in, exposing the imposed and constructed nature of what might otherwise have seemed ‘natural’ institutions and ideologies (Lim’s work focuses on the dominance of homogeneous, linear time). An encounter with the past – typically through the presence of a ghost or, where Doctor Who is concerned, a traveller from another time – can encourage us to think differently about the present and stimulate ‘a radicalized historical consciousness’ that is more aware of ‘the past’s entanglement with immediate concerns’ (Lim, 2009: 160). Akinola’s scores repeatedly generate sonic encounters between different musical worlds and temporalities, travelling in time (e.g. using Baroque string quartet for the seventeenth-century setting of ‘The Witchfinders’ or the evocation of Aaron Copland’s mid-twentieth-century Americana in ‘Rosa’), space (e.g. the use of Hindustani music for ‘Demons of the Punjab’ or traditional Irish music in ‘Ascension of the Cybermen’) and genre (e.g. the John Barry or James Bond inspired cues in ‘Spyfall’) and are thus genuinely postcolonial scores, reinforced by Akinola’s perspective as a British-Nigerian composer.

Regenerating the main title theme

Perhaps the most prominent example of different sonic worlds interacting and an encounter with the past is Segun Akinola’s arrangement of the main title theme for Doctor Who. Composed originally by Ron Grainer but realized by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the assistance of Dick Mills, variations of Derbyshire’s arrangement accompanied the opening and closing of televised Doctor Who from 1963 until 1980. The theme tune has been arranged subsequently by Peter Howell (1980–85), Dominic Glynn (1986), Keff McCulloch (1987–89), and John Debney (1996) followed by a series of different arrangements by Murray Gold across 2005–17. It is the Derbyshire arrangement, however, that remains the most celebrated and has had a major impact on the British public’s awareness and understanding of electronic music. Combining electronically generated sound, through various oscillators and white noise, with tape manipulation of recorded sound informed by Derbyshire’s expertise with musique concrète techniques, the arrangement is, as Murray Gold puts it, a complete ‘piece of electronic art’ (Bell, 2007), fusing popular culture – in the form of a prime-time family adventure series and theme tune with a clear melody and propulsive bassline (released by Decca as a commercial record in 1964) – and methods of creating music more familiar at the time to experimental and avant-garde composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Akinola’s arrangement combines tradition and innovation by repurposing elements of Derbyshire’s editions, applying some of the principles of sonic invention practised by Derbyshire and her Radiophonic Workshop colleagues but also introducing techniques not heard in previous interpretations of Grainer’s composition. This decision to use elements of Derbyshire’s arrangements came from both Akinola and Chris Chibnall. Akinola had already composed the themes for the main characters, including the thirteenth Doctor’s theme, before he began work on the title music, feeling that it was important to establish the show’s overall soundworld first so that the main theme arrangement could be more integrated with that core approach. When the time came to work on the main title theme, Mark Ayres, composer and archivist of the Radiophonic Workshop, supplied Akinola with digital copies of the isolated components of Derbyshire’s arrangements as he had done for Murray Gold when the show was revived in 2005. Gold’s initial arrangement incorporated Derbyshire’s version of the central melody, the bassline and ‘scream’ that ran into the 1970s closing titles alongside grandiose orchestral embellishments and driving timpani that became more prominent in later Gold mixes as the Derbyshire elements were gradually phased out. The tone of Akinola’s arrangement is more mysterious, in keeping with the original, darker and pared back, now emphasizing electronica.

This is not a straightforward, nostalgic sampling of Derbyshire’s material, as tended to be the case with Gold’s iterations of the theme tune in his first four series, but a genuine engagement with the show’s Radiophonic roots and methods rather than pastiche. Akinola processes found sound (i.e. the isolated elements from Derbyshire’s arrangements) through similar approaches to sonic manipulation: stretching, pitch-shifting, filtering, and looping sounds and pre-existing recordings of music just as Derbyshire had done with her work for productions like Amor Dei (1964) and Tutankhamun’s Egypt (1972), both of which transform recordings of music. The arrangement thus creates a strong sense of continuum between past and present and kinship between Derbyshire and Akinola due to their shared methodology as well as shared sounds. As Akinola explains:

Other than the actual melody, every other sound you don’t hear it in its original form – so I’ve messed around with it a lot, I’ve really done all sorts of things to it! Other than the main melody, which I’ve done less to, to kind of retain a sense of cohesion and obviously a link to the past as well. … It was a daunting task but at some point you have to just let go of the fact that it’s Doctor Who and just play around with it and try and come up with something that’s your own, so that’s what I tried to do.

These links to the past – some more recognizable than others – give Akinola’s arrangement of the Doctor Who theme a potent hauntological dimension. Sound is particularly effective at creating a sense of being haunted, especially through the use of samples, traces and resonances of recordings from the past – perhaps with certain frequencies filtered out or reverb added to create a tension around sonic absence and presence, all of which applies to Akinola’s treatment and transformation of the elements from Derbyshire’s arrangement. As Mark Fisher has identified, music is at the core of hauntology, a concept introduced by Jacques Derrida in his book Spectres of Marx (1993), which emphasizes anachronism and the return or persistence of elements of the past (Fisher, 2012: 16), with key exponents being artists like the Caretaker and the Ghost Box label. There is something inherently hauntological about tape-based music and musique concrète, due to its construction from ‘found sounds’ and recordings, which might be augmented (filtered, sped up, reversed, pitch-shifted), spliced apart then rearranged, so that the resonances of an object are transformed, perhaps beyond recognition, but still present all the same.

If the use and transformation of Derbyshire’s elements creates a dialogue and continuum with the past then the most overt innovation of Akinola’s arrangement is the bass drop, which occurs as the title theme’s traditionally relentless and insistent bassline plunges and forward momentum is suspended, just prior to the statement of the melody. It’s a remarkable moment within the arrangement, distinct from any of its predecessors. The introduction of the bass drop connects the theme tune to developments in contemporary electronic dance music (EDM) and DJ culture which, as Ragnhild Torvanger Solberg has ...