Adventures in English Time and Space: Sound as Experience in Doctor Who ‘An Unearthly Child’

This paper focuses on the music and sound effects of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop for the first episode of Doctor Who, now commonly referred to as An Unearthly Child (first transmitted November, 1963). The programme’s musical effects support its visual landscaping in helping to create a grammar of strange-familiarity that both evokes the timespace of 1963-London as well as subverts it. This timespace is already mediated through the ‘common myths and historical memories’ of England (Smith 1991) and John Reith’s high-minded broadcasting values (Crisell, 1997). Yet the auditory unsettles these ideological frames by submerging the listener into an encounter where the excess and instability of timespace exhorts the listener to think difference and becoming (Deleuze 1987). I partly commit to an approach that sees sound as a referral mechanism to notions of site-specificity and narrative-timespace, underlining the importance of incidental music as prompting emotional connections to the narrative, visual iconography and setting of the programme [...] But I also hijack this approach by promoting the validity of the phenomenological response [see for example Voegelin, 2011]... [The] hiatus between listening and viewing Doctor Who, at the very least, reorders the conventional sense hierarchy and demands we re-evaluate the significance of aural perception. The resulting partnership of seeing and (a heightened agency in) listening, signifies in the context of Doctor Who, I argue, an unstable code of Englishness that is always materialising and dematerialising: one that is immediately recognisably conservative and yet discordant, jarring, over-whelming and pointing to a new paradigm for identity construction.

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