New Dimensions of Doctor Who

Adventures in Space, Time and Television

David Mellor, Matt Hills, David Mellor, Matt Hills

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857734297
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Televisione

The Doctor may have regenerated on many occasions, but so too has Doctor Who. Moving with the times, the show has evolved across fifty years...New Dimensions of Doctor Who explores contemporary developments in Doctor Who's music, design and representations of technology, as well as issues of showrunner authority and star authorship. Putting these new dimensions in context means thinking about changes in the TV industry such as the rise of branding and transmedia storytelling. Along with its faster narrative pace, and producer/fan interaction via Twitter, 'new Who' also has a new home at Roath Lock Studios, Cardiff Bay. Studying the 'Doctor Who Experience' in its Cardiff setting, and considering audience nostalgia alongside anniversary celebrations, this book explores how current Doctor Who relates to real-world spaces and times. New Directions of Doctor Who is the scholarly equivalent of a multi-Doctor story, bringing together the authors of Triumph of a Time Lord and TARDISbound, as well as the editors of Time and Relative Dissertations in Space, Impossible Worlds, Impossible Things, Torchwood Declassified and Doctor Who, The Eleventh Hour.
It also features contributions from experts on TV brands, bioethics, transmedia and cultural icons. As 'new Who' creates ongoing mysteries and poses exciting questions, this collection demonstrates the vitality of Doctor Who studies.

I

NEW DOCTOR WHO

1

A GOOD SCORE GOES TO WAR

Multiculturalism, Monsters and Music in New Doctor Who

David Butler

When Doctor Who returned to BBC television in 2005, one of the underlying themes in the first series was the acceptance of difference and coming to terms with the alien. Rose struggles to adjust to the aliens she encounters in ‘The End of the World’ (2005) but finds it easier when she learns that she has things in common with Raffalo, the alien plumber she befriends. However, in the very next episode, ‘The Unquiet Dead’ (2005), the Doctor berates Rose for being unable to recognise the validity of another (alien) cultural practice (‘It is different yeah – it’s a different morality – get used to it or go home’) yet by the mid-season point it is Rose who calls attention to the Doctor’s inability to see beyond his own prejudices in the climax to ‘Dalek’ (2005). As new Doctor Who has continued, the programme has repeatedly portrayed the monstrous figure, one of the staple sources of fear in classic Doctor Who, as sympathetic. From the Dalek–human hybrid in ‘Evolution of the Daleks’ (2007) to the Krafayis in ‘Vincent and the Doctor’ (2010), one of the values of the new series, as Matt Hills asserts, is that ‘monstrous appearances can be deceptive and that “monsters” […] can be understood rather than narratively repressed or destroyed’.¹ All of the examples from the new series mentioned above revolve around the tension generated by the ‘problem’ of difference and its (mis)recognition, with the alien or monster operating as a metaphor for the human Other.

Following the work of Charles Taylor (1994), the concept of recognition is at the core of debates over multiculturalism, debates that have increased dramatically in the US and Britain in the years following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 in 2001 and 7/7 in 2005, respectively.² Whether one is a champion of multiculturalism such as Tariq Modood, a stern critic like Rumy Hasan or a more balanced advocate such as Anne Phillips, those engaged in the debate over multiculturalism tend to agree on the nature of the solution. Despite their opposing views, in Hasan’s³ call for intercultural fusion and Modood’s⁴ support for the benefits of a multilogical process, both scholars are united in their recommendation of the need for interaction between different cultures rather than separation and the dangers of ghettoization. But to what extent does the music for new Doctor Who ‘recognise’ the monster or alien cultures and species? If, as Matt Hills says, monstrous appearances can be deceptive then can that be extended to ‘monstrous’ sounds and music?

The original run of Doctor Who (1963–89) was often reliant on music and sound design to enhance the realisation of the multitude of alien worlds visited by the Doctor and the various species that inhabited (or invaded) them. As Kevin Donnelly has noted, ‘sound and music had to carry out a lot of the “imagining” for a programme beset with cheap sets, basic lighting and unconvincing special effects’.⁵ Alien worlds and monstrous invaders were often accompanied by the prominent use of electronic timbres and music rejecting the more conventional techniques of mainstream approaches to scoring narrative fictions. In this respect, much of the music for the alien and monstrous in ‘classic’ Doctor Who corresponds with the third and fourth of five phases of science fiction film music identified by Philip Hayward, emphasising discordant, atonal and experimental aspects of orchestration and instrumentation.⁶ Murray Gold’s scores for new Doctor Who, however, have moved the programme’s overriding sound into Hayward’s fifth phase: the prominence of classic Hollywood-derived orchestral scores fused with popular idioms. Gold’s musical style is part of what Matt Hills characterises as an overall ‘anti-science-fictional’ shift in the programme.⁷ This chapter argues that one of the effects of this shift has been a homogenisation of the musical cultures and soundworlds encountered by the Doctor and a condensation of the range of music featured in the programme, privileging the human at the loss of the alien. The programme’s sound champions a fusion of classical and popular genres of music with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales grounding the predominant sound in the traditions of Western tonality and the European classical concert hall. If the extensive electronics of classic-era scores such as ‘The Sea Devils’ (1972), ‘Earthshock’ (1982) and ‘Revelation of the Daleks’ (1985) suggest that their respective hostile species have taken over our sound waves as well as the diegesis, the music of the aliens and monsters in new Doctor Who tends to assimilate these species into the symphony orchestra and renders them, in the words of the Cybermen, ‘like us’. Analysing this new dimension of music that’s associated with the alien/monstrous in BBC Wales’ Doctor Who, I focus in particular on ‘The End of the World’ (2005) and two linked Silurian episodes: ‘The Hungry Earth’ and ‘Cold Blood’ (both 2010). By selecting these episodes, I hope to avoid the pitfalls identified by Piers Britton when cultural historians studying Doctor Who ‘treat contemporary ideological referents as the natural, even inescapable, basis for finding irreducible meaning in the Who texts’.⁸ Rather than projecting subtext onto a Doctor Who story, each of my case studies focuses explicitly on the tensions created by encounters with cultural difference. The Silurian episodes, in particular, address the problem of recognition and coexistence. In a story about the need for two races, humans and Silurians, to share their planet and learn to live together, whether one endorses Hasan’s intercultural fusion or Modood’s multilogue, is there evidence for mixing and cultural exchange within Gold’s scores for ‘The Hungry Earth’ and ‘Cold Blood’?

The Problem of Recognition

Why has the ‘politics of recognition’ proven so contentious within debates about multiculturalism? When multiculturalism first began to emerge in public discourse in the West during the late 1960s and early 1970s, one of its principal concerns was the need to secure justice for minority rights. As Anne Phillips summarises, by the end of the 1990s it was widely accepted that: ‘states can harm their citizens by trivialising or ignoring their cultural identities, and that this harm (commonly described, following Charles Taylor’s work, as a failure of recognition) can be as damaging to people as denying them their civil or political rights.’⁹ That recognition of difference, however, was not without potential and equally damaging consequences. Critics of multiculturalism in the West have argued that by recognising and tolerating cultural practices that are at odds with the dominant culture (the examples most often mentioned tend to include forced marriages, honour killings and female circumcision via genital mutilation), the result has been that certain minority cultures have become ghettoised rather than integrating more fully within mainstream society. In this understanding, the implications of multiculturalism go far beyond the localised problems of a minority culture being distanced from wider society. Multiculturalism’s opponents perceive it as being illiberal and inegalitarian, ‘undermining social cohesion, dissipating national identity, and emptying citizenship of much of its content’¹⁰ but as Tariq Modood, one of the leading defenders of multiculturalism in Britain alongside figures such as Bhikhu Parekh, counters:

Multiculturalism is much more than toleration or the co-presence of mutually indifferent communities. Dialogue necessarily implies openness and the possibility of mutual learning but not uncritical acceptance […]. Parekh emphasizes that the ultimate value of multiculturalism lies in cross-cultural and cross-civilizational understanding through which we simultaneously appreciate the varied ways to be human whilst more profoundly understanding our own distinctive location.¹¹

Modood rejects the sanitised notion of multiculturalism as being a fuzzy ‘mutual admiration’ society and calls instead for a more plural and ‘multilogical process’. Yet the challenge facing the dominant culture, if it aims to remain unified, is, as Rumy Hasan notes, how to ensure that ‘oppressive beliefs and practices’ are abandoned ‘from wherever they emanate’ while, in critiquing certain practices, the dominant culture risks the charge of being intolerant and disrespectful.¹²

Hasan complicates the assumption in the work of C. W. Watson that there are two choices for multiculturalism:

destroy multiculturalism and transform society into being mono-cultural, or celebrate and encourage multiculturalism so that all cultures are endorsed by the state and thus risk an unequal state in which certain oppressive practices are allowed to continue when they would be strongly discouraged (and perhaps even result in criminal proceedings) if practiced within the dominant culture.¹³

The related potential consequence here is of ghettoization, whereby the tolerance shown to all cultures means that integration and interaction might be less likely. For Hasan, however, there is a third, more preferable option whereby ‘ethnic minorities adopt significant elements of the dominant culture while the indigenous majority society adopts aspects of minority cultures to bring about cultural fusion and transformation’.¹⁴ For Hasan, then, this process is not a one-way hierarchical route in which the minority culture is inevitably assimilated into the dominant culture at the expense of its cultural distinctiveness. Hasan thus echoes aspects of Roy Jenkins’s 1966 speech as British Home Secretary in which Jenkins defined integration ‘not as a flattening process of assimilation but as equal opportunity, coupled with cultural diversity,’ a diversity which would avoid the melting pot that would ‘turn everybody out in a common mould, as one of a series of carbon copies of someone’s misplaced vision of the stereotyped Englishman’.¹⁵ Hasan is quick to challenge the assumption that cultures are fixed and that ‘fixity is an unalloyed good’ as opposed to being open to the possibility of change.¹⁶ Instead, a genuine process of mixing and exchange would result in something new thanks to:

… meaningful contacts between different people of cultural and racial groups, which stimulates the creation of new cultural patterns and altered identities by the absorption of parts of more than one culture […] bringing in its wake the existence of ‘new people’, that is, those of ‘mixed heritage’.¹⁷

Applying Hasan’s ideas to BBC Wales’ Doctor Who, it is apparent that visually the series provides ‘positive’ examples of cultural and ‘racial’ mixing, from Mickey and Rose to Brannigan and Valerie (cat-person and human) in ‘Gridlock’ (2007) or Madame Vastra and Jenny (reptile and human) who join the Doctor’s band alongside a Sontaran nurse in ‘A Good Man Goes to War’ (2011), returning to assist him in later episodes. But are there equivalent prominent examples of cultural and racial mixing in the music for new Doctor Who? In order to better understand the principal approach to scoring, and so by extension recognising cultural difference in the new Doctor Who, it is necessary to establish first how Murray Gold’s music for the series relates to other traditions in film and television music and the scoring of science fiction in particular.

Scoring the Alien

One of the core functions of music in mainstream screen fictions is, as Claudia Gorbman states in her influential list of the principles of classical film music, to provide ‘narrative cueing’ in order to help establish setting and character.¹⁸ Simon Frith notes how film music often has to quickly establish a specific mood or situation by employing ‘musical shorthand’ through the use of generic conventions.¹⁹ This shorthand often relies on and ensures the perpetuation of stereotypes, especially in terms of ethnicity – a quick burst of bagpipes and (assuming we are familiar with the cultural code at work) we know we are in Scotland, an accordion means we’re probably in Paris, brass bands Yorkshire – which, at worst, can result in a cultural or ‘racial’ essentialism (all Scots like bagpipes, all African Americans love the blues and have innate natural rhythm and so on). When science fiction began to flourish as a Hollywood genre in the 1950s, it soon acquired a musical shorthand of its own....

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Doctor Who Studies?
• PART I NEW DOCTOR WHO
• PART II NEW TELEVISION, NEW MEDIA
• PART III NEW SPACES AND TIMES
• Further Reading
• Back Cover