Is it time for a musical Doctor Who episode?
The new series of Doctor Who is just around the corner and expectations within fandom are high. The Devil’s Chord, the second in the series, is possibly the most hotly anticipated episode. Set in London in 1963, it will involve the Beatles as they record their first LP. The series’ trailer shows the Doctor in natty period threads singing and dancing before a dancing audience in a concert hall or nightclub. A publicity photo (above) also shows him cradling a guitar. Are these clues that this will be a full-on musical episode? And is Doctor Who ready for that?
The practice of drama series indulging in musicals has a long history in the US dating back to the 1960s. But over the last 26-ish years it’s become almost commonplace in modern (look, they’re modern to me, don’t quibble) fantasy shows. Xena: Warrior Princess had a musical episode in 1998 and then Buffy the Vampire Slayer was Emmy-nominated for its popular musical episode Once More With Feeling in 2001. Subsequently Fringe did it in 2010, both The Flash and Once Upon a Time went musical in 2017, The Magicians in 2019 and Lucifer in 2021. Just last year Strange New Worlds became the first iteration of Star Trek to stage a musical episode. And no doubt there are others examples I’m not familiar with.
In the UK, musical dramas on dramas on television have tended to be one-off mini-series. Musicals within ‘straight’ drama series never took off as a concept. But if any series can do it, it has to be Doctor Who. Famously, it is the drama that can go anywhere and any when, so the opportunities for incorporating the musical concept are surely limitless. Fans have sometime argued that the TARDIS is not a machine for exploring times and places, but genres. So why not the musical genre? Characters breaking into song is no more fantastical that much else that has happened in the series and any number of science-fictional rationales could be found for it.
Looking back over Doctor Who’s recent history, it feels as if the series has been building up to a full-on musical. That said, you have to go right back to near its start to find its earliest musical entanglements. Its first flirtation with popular music came, appropriately, at the height of Beatlemania in 1965 and involved the Fab Four themselves. Sadly, the band’s manager Brian Epstein vetoed the idea of their in-person appearance in The Chase as future old-man versions of themselves.
Instead the Doctor and friends watched a clip of the Beatles’ recent Top of the Pops performance of ‘Ticket to Ride’ on the Time and Space Visualiser. You won’t see it in the iPlayer version though, as it was edited out due to the rights issues that surround the band’s performances. For the same reason (cost, essentially), Russell T Davies has reported that despite the Beatles being depicted in The Devil’s Chord we cannot expect to hear their music in the episode. How that will work in practice is still a closely-guarded secret (unless you went to the recent premiere – and it seems my ticket must have been lost in the post).
In 1966, music (though not so ‘pop’) was more firmly integrated into The Gunfighters. After the Doctor claims his party are travelling players, companions Steven and Dodo find themselves compelled at gunpoint to belt out a tune at the piano in the Last Chance Saloon. The same song, ‘The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon’, recurs throughout the story, sung off-screen by Lynda Baron as a witty commentary on the onscreen action. It was a bold experiment but fans remain divided over its effect. Peter Purves, who played Steven, thought the song was “appalling”.
Fast forward to 1989 and with the original run of television Doctor Who drawing to a close, an ambitious stage show was launched. The Ultimate Adventure was the closest Doctor Who has yet come to an outright musical. It featured three musical numbers, including the rousing ‘Business is Business’ sung by Madame Delilah (Judith Hibbert), hostess of a bar for assorted alien mercenaries. Sadly, the Doctor (played variously by Jon Pertwee, David Banks and Colin Baker) did not join in with the songs.
When Russell T Davies revived Doctor Who in 2005, he incorporated pop music more commonly than previously, starting with his second episode, The End of the World, which featured action backed by Britney Spears’s ‘Toxic’. The series got its first full song and dance number in Daleks in Manhattan in 2007. Set in Depression-hit New York, the Doctor and Martha find themselves in a Broadway theatre, where new friend Tallulah (Amanda Raison) leads a gaggle of showgirls in the song ‘Heaven and Hell’, by series composer Murray Gold. Director James Strong photographed the dance routine in a deliberately Busby Berkeley style to give it a hint of 1930s Hollywood musical glamour.
Steven Moffat also used a song as a plot device in 2010’s A Christmas Carol, although it was not in the style of musical theatre. Again composed by Murray Gold, ‘Abigail’s Song’ was a classical piece sung by Katherine Jenkins at the climax of the episode.
Recent specials have seen the series flirt ever more strongly with song and dance. Outgoing showrunner Chris Chibnall’s The Power of the Doctor from 2022 includes a scene in which the Master (Sacha Dhawan) gleefully dances to Boney M’s kitsch 1978 hit ‘Rasputin’ (as whom he’s disguised), to the confusion of the watching Daleks and Cybermen.
When Davies re-took the reigns as showrunner in 2023, he was quick to up the ante. In The Giggle, the Toymaker (Neil Patrick Harris), dressed as a chocolate-box drum major, invades UNIT HQ in a riotous dance to the Spice Girls’ ‘Spice Up Your Life’. As he dances he turns UNIT soldiers into balloons, and their bullets into petals, for added razmataz in a slickly edited and visually impressive sequence.
The most – ahem – musical-esque of the series’ musical moments came in last Christmas’s special, The Church on Ruby Road. In an airship high above London, Ncuti Gatwa’s fifteenth Doctor and Millie Gibson as Ruby Sunday confront the Goblin King as he is about to eat a kidnapped baby, joining in with apparently improvised verses of ‘The Goblin Song’ that precedes the feeding. Both hold their own as singers. Ruby has already been established as a musician, seen playing keyboard at a pub gig earlier in the episode.
The trajectory appears clear. Song and dance is something the series does now. At least sometimes. The Doctor and Ruby are to be adventurers in time and space and music. Gatwa and Gibson certainly have the skills and the swagger to pull it off. But do we really have a full Doctor Who musical coming up? We’ll find out next weekend.
Until then, no spoilers please!
Images © BBC – thanks to The Black Archive for supply of the images
Sources
Peter Purves quote from an interview in Doctor Who Magazine issue 483
Star Trek; Strange New Worlds did a musical episode in its most recent season, too.
It did also get me thinking that whilst there are several example of musical episodes in drama, I can’t think of a single musical episode in a sitcom.
Plenty of musical sequences - Tongue Tied in Red Dwarf, Barney’s suit song in How I Met Your Mother, a sequence at the start of one episode of the US Office, a dream sequence with Martin in Frasier, the Bollywood sequence in The Big Bang Theory - but no actual full musical episodes that I can call to mind.