Ambient sound in An Unearthly Child
This month sees Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary, so I’m starting a short run of posts exploring the very first story, An Unearthly Child, from different angles - some of which I hope will be new and interesting. This time I’m looking at the story’s use of ambient sound.
It’s easy to focus on the visuals when talking about television and neglect the role of sound. Sound was particularly important in Doctor Who in the 1960s, when the series’ weird sound effects and soundscapes were arguably as notable as its (sometimes over-ambitious) pictures when it came to realising outlandish scenarios and environments.
However, even in the stories without such fantastical elements, ambient sound was still important in helping to establish locations, although this could sometimes be neglected. An Unearthly Child is an excellent example of ambient sound being used well, which can largely be attributed to director Waris Hussein, although Brian Hodgson of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop deserves credit too.
Hussein uses background sound to make each location of the story aurally distinctive. This is particularly important when a production represents a variety of outdoor locations within the dead-sounding confines of a television studio, as here. This use of sound is nothing novel as it is a regular technique of film and television, but Hussein uses it with greater consistency and subtlety than in much of the rest of Doctor Who. A great many future TARDIS landing sites will be oddly silent, but here we have a sound scheme for the whole story. This is most obvious in the episodes with the palaeolithic setting – ie from the second episode onwards.
The exterior area adjacent to the tribe’s cave has the sound of distant wind, suggestive of a wind whistling trough rocky terrain. The stony plain area where the TARDIS lands uses the same wind effect but it is augmented with the screech of birds. This signifies that this is an open space but also hints at the proximity of the forest that separates the cave area from the plain. The Cave of Skulls has a suitably ‘cavey’ ambience, with the sound of dripping water. The forest has the loudest ambience with a great variety of bird calls, confirming that this is where the local wildlife is concentrated. Only the tribe’s briefly seen main cave has an entirely dead soundscape, which singles it out from the rest.
Many (perhaps all) of these background sounds would have come from stock sound effect records. However, Brian Hodgson was tasked with creating a variety of new electronic sounds for the TARDIS scenes. Most of these – such as the sounds of the doors and dematerialisation – are spot sound effects so shouldn’t concern us here, but he also provided the background hum that became the standard ambience of the machine. Notably, however, this (and some of the spot effects) are different in the pilot version of the first episode. It may be their familiarity making me biased, but the final versions certainly seem superior. The ultimate choice of sounds would have been Hussein’s and the instruction to remake the first episode gave him the opportunity to rejig and refine the TARDIS soundscape, establishing a sound palette that would last for years, notably that background hum.
Returning to the start of the adventure, the contemporary-set first episodes gives Hussein less opportunity to deploy ambient sound than the rest of the story. However, the pilot features one aural embellishment sadly missing from the final recording. As Ian and Barbara approach the junkyard, we hear a train pass on a nearby line. It’s a minor detail but it complements the visuals in suggesting the characters have strayed into one of London’s less respectable neighbourhoods (overground railway lines don’t typically run through London’s plusher residential areas).
Additionally, the very first shot of the story includes the sound of a clock striking three; a rare example of background sound establishing time rather than place. Again, it works with the visuals: the low lighting tells us it’s three in the morning, not the afternoon.
Although it’s easily missed when we think about television direction in visual terms, Waris Hussein’s creative use of ambient sound across An Unearthly Child helps economically establish the setting of each scene. This illustrates the attention to detail Hussein brought to the assignment and that effective direction reaches well beyond what is simply shown on screen.
Images © BBC