Season 1 incidentals...

We've got a wide variety of styles and approachs to the music of season 1.

There's Norman Kay with his spooky and odd scores for An Unearthly Child, The Keys of Marinus and The Sensorites. Then we have the electronic score of Tristram Carey on The Daleks along with a more conventional score for Marco Polo. Richard Rodney Bennett does some very pretty music for The Aztecs and Humphrey Searle does the very French music for The Reign of Terror. All that and the spooky stock score for Edge of Destruction.

So what do you like? What don't you like? What works and what doesn't?

The absolute stand-out one is the score for The Daleks. The sound design on that serial is head and shoulders above all the others, with the weird metallic noise of the city interiors, the spooky wind in the jungle, and the amazing music that was so good they often re-used bits of it later in the series. And of course the electronic heartbeat of the Dalek control room that has been heard in almost every other Dalek story right up until the present day!

The Daleks music confused me at first beacuse it sounded so much like sound effects and not the "music" I'd grown to used to on Doctor Who. It's grown on me over the years, as it's really effective for setting the mood of the story (and for The Ark and Power of the Daleks...) and adds to the weird atmosphere of Skaro. It makes alien and very uneasy...

Otherwise, it's Norman Kay for me. His scores are a little samey for the three stories he did, but he was very good at writing spooky mood music. An Unearthly Child wouldn't be so good without his music.

Those incidentals that they used for Season 1 were so good, that they kept being used as far as Season 4!

Or was that just for budgetary reasons? :p

I think it was mix of both Ant. :)

The Daleks set the scene, and a high standard, for the use of radiophonic scores that would be there, good or bad, on and off, til the end of the original run, and into the BFs. On top of which this series had the brilliant score for the Aztecs, which did the same for the more what would have been standard scores for the day.