Available Now on Streaming, FLAC/MP3, CD and Vinyl.

Class will be remembered by most sci fi fans and BBC viewers as a short-lived 8 episode romp that was fleetingly available on BBC3 online before having late night showings on BBC1. Despite positive reviews, the show was undone by lacklustre viewing figures and an unwillingness by the higher ups at the BBC to provide another chance.

This album comes two years after the final transmission of Class on mainstream TV and is a veritable goldmine of musical atmosphere.

Main CD

I can happily report that not only does this CD meet expectations, it also goes on to exceed them. From the rousing opening of The Shadow Kin, to the hauntingly chilling cliffhanger of Governors Revealed, the forty-plus collection of music forms a very compelling and re-playable primary CD in the set.

Along the way comes the 'weird but wonderful' Strands From The Rift, the crowd pleasing Here She Comes in a Ruddy Great Bus, and the especially exciting (and unsettling) Asteroid track - which would hold its head high in an X Files or Outer Limits soundtrack collection.

Furthermore, the final brace of audio wonderment for the season conclusion (and sadly the series proper) cover all the necessary emotions, thoughts, and attachments to the core characters one can hope for. The CD culminates in Fight till your Last Breath and Souls Released with the auditory skill of Blair Mowat living up to such notable titles. 

**

Many other tracks are worth the listener's time. These include:

Rhodia; with the use of the first modern 'Doctor's Theme' from the parent show that Murray Gold used to such striking effect.

Time Has Looked At Your Faces; containing good multiple instruments and vocals 'as instruments' in a manner reminiscent of Enya.

Chasing The Dragon; here be rock vibes that evoke many a teenager's choice of allegiance when it comes to musical taste.

Dragon Attack has a sense of real adventure and character growth, as Charlie, April, Ram and Tanya all come under threat.

April's Past; adding further emotive pull to a character of much good writing and acting (such that she is my personal favourite of the teenage gang.

Heavy Petal; a chilling and foreboding concoction, ma­de further memorable still by the pounding drum backbeat as it comes to its conclusion.

To Share A Heart; this fits the bizarre but brilliant premise of the show's mid-season two- parter.

(And Finally) Charlie's Angry, Charlie's Winning; a multilayered effort from Mowat that helped with Detained being so intense and compelling. 

The only drawback is the lack of opening credits music, especially as the closing riffs of Track 43 are there to round off the album. But any such disappointment is somewhat negated by the [Song For] The Lost , which would not be out of place at a mediaeval monarch's court, and easily is one of the top 3 tracks.

Bonus CD

These tunes are not to be dismissed as mere 'best of the rest' but can be enjoyed repeatedly on their own, or even as part of a specific playlist to get the best possible reminder of given episodes.  The darkness and creepiness factor is ratcheted up to a great degree in many of these tracks, so for those that enjoyed Class for its horror aspects there is much to enjoy here.

At the same time a welcome change of pace comes in the form of several songs:

Nightvisitors – Tanya's Dad is a full-on song (as compared to the other CD's subtler vocals) that uses guitar and a male solo to intriguingly tell the 'point of view' of the alien visitors to various class mates in the show's third episode.

Black Is the Colour works as a good song in its own right, which also perfectly fit the overall feel of Class. It concerns fraught emotions, and unlike the track immediately analysed has a number of different singers to help give extra gravitas to the show's poignant endgame.

Previews of Episodes 3,4,5,6,7 and 8 form the tail end of this bonus disc and convincingly remind us how they added punch to viewers' initial desire to see further episodes.

To recap then, this release provides a solid couple of hours of arrestingly emotive and memorable music, and reminds the listener that Class (while surviving on through Big Finish) should have been allowed a couple more 'terms' at school at the very least.

Music By Murray Gold

Released by Silva Screen Records Ltd - April 27, 2018

Available from Amazon UK

It has been a while since I picked up a Doctor Who Soundtrack.  Not really for any reason in particular, I just stopped keeping up with them after the Series 5 Soundtrack.  I had really loved Murray Gold's work in the RTD Era, but while still shined through in the Series 5 set, I just found there were less tracks I needed to listen to over and over.  I mainly liked the big themes, and I was less enthused by the run of the mill incidental music of a standard episode. I even started to go back and delete tracks of previous soundtracks as well. There is just too much music of a television series to keep up with.  I like certain pieces of music quite a bit, but I don't need every single piece of background music from a decade's worth of TV. 

And so, we come to the soundtrack for Series 9...and there is 63 tracks spread over four discs.  For comparison, the first Murray Gold soundtrack, which was for Series 1 and 2, was just 31 tracks. And that was covering two whole series!  This is just overkill in my opinion. If you are a completist, I can understand the appeal of having every single piece of incidental music the show has ever had on screen...but that has got to be a niche audience I would think.

In listening to this set, my initial plan was to listen to it all through, to not skip around and find what I liked as I have in the past. This time I was reviewing it, I couldn't just find the bits I liked and deleted everything else. And yet, there are so many bits of music that, while not awful, just didn't grab my attention that I just started to skip and skim, find bits that jumped out at me and forget the rest. I couldn't help myself. There are too many bits of music on this that so clearly feel as if they were in the show purely as atmosphere for the episode...but lacking the accompanying visuals, and the music isn't nearly as interesting. 

That said, there are some great pieces of music in here, and I don't want this to be a knock on Gold, because I really have loved the music he has provided the show over the last decade plus. As a guy whose task it is to write a ton of different music for wildly different episodes week in and week out, the guy is just tremendous. The problem is less in the quality of some of the music, and more in the selection process for what ended up on the disc.  There are bound to be pieces of music that were placed behind the Doctor and Clara walking down a hallway.  And the music maybe added that layer the show needed in that moment, but it isn't terribly interesting on it's own.  So why include that here?  As I've said, probably for the completists. 

The highlights on this big set include "Clara's Diner" (which is an electric guitar version of "Clara's Theme"), "The Bootstrap Paradox," and my personal favorite track from the set, "The Shepherd's Boy" which also accompanied the fantastic climax of my favorite episode of this particular season, Heaven Sent.  In fact most of the music that connects to that episode is pretty good, but "The Shepherd's Boy" is the lone track in all 63 tracks that I can't stop listening to. I didn't realize it until now, but as much as that episode was Capaldi's tour de force, Gold was putting in some excellent work as well.

But again...this soundtrack is too big for me. I will probably delete several tracks off of my computer, keeping some highlights.  I will definitely listen to "The Shepherd's Boy" many more times.  If you are a big time collector of the music and really do want every little piece of music from the show, you will not be disappointed in how comprehensive this set it. But the more casual fans of the show's music may find it overwhelming, and will just want to sift through for the highlights.

Writer: Gerry Davies, Kitt Pedler
Director: Derek Martinus
Producer: Innes Lloyd
Starring: William Hartnell, Robert Beatty, Dudley Jones, David Dodimead, Anneke Wills, Michael Craze

Doctor Who novelisations are endlessly fascinating due to their continued necessity. Before Home Video, there were books to let viewers know what amazing adventures they missed. For Who viewers too young to have witnessed the original transmissions of stories featuring earlier Doctors, those previous incarnations were mere myths. If it weren't for the novels, who knows if those Doctors would have been anything more than fading, black and white memories?

In a world where we can pull up any existing Doctor Who episode we want with the push of a button, the novelisations remain just as vital. Thanks to the expense of tape in the early days of the series, far too many William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton stories were destroyed in favor of other programs. Although there have been attempts to give some the animated, or the audio drama, treatment nothing is as crucial to the survival of these stories than the novelisations.

Although I’ve seen the existing clips of The Tenth Planet, I have never known the full story, until listening to this audiobook. I have to imagine that this may be the ultimate way to experience Bill Hartnell’s swan song. Few things can place you right in the center of a tale like a novel, and nothing does it better than an audiobook.

From our earliest years, stories are told to us. Parents and teachers read us books. Friends recount experiences. Stories are best shared through speaking. This particular audiobook, complete with haunting, droning music, crackling sound effects, Nicholas Briggs’ unnerving Cybermen voices, and Anneke Wills’ superb narration, communicates everything to you beyond what can be achieved in prose. Your imagination holds no budgetary constraints, so the bounds of cheap set design can’t restrict you, and the perfectly timed touches of sound give you all the help you need in envisioning the atmosphere crafted within the novel’s pages.

While listening to the reveal of the Cybermen moving through the snow, killing the men in their way, I couldn’t help but think, “What were kids thinking when they saw this in ‘66? They must’ve been terrified!” The coldness of their surroundings, matched with the lack of empathy is wonderfully depicted in the book, making this jaded listener a little nervous, wondering what these monsters I’ve seen numerous times before might be capable of.

I’ve come to place Doctor Who stories into categories. You’ve got the historical, the base under siege, invasion stories, horror stories, and romps. Often times these categories intermingle. You might get a historical horror story, a base under siege  horror story, a historical romp, and so on. The Tenth Planet blends base under siege, invasion, and horror. What we’re witnessing is a small element to the larger story at play. A handful of frightening Cybermen are invading this base and killing the men inside, while all over the world more Cybermen are doing the same thing, AND there’s a whole new planet in the sky draining Earth of all its energy!

This is epic storytelling on par with anything the current series would do. You don’t need to see the fleet of Cyberships, armies marching through cities, or the Mondas sucking up all our energy, because you feel it. We know the Doctor, Ben, and Polly, we’ve just met the faculty of the base, and their reactions to the situation are enough to inform the massive scale of what’s going on elsewhere.

That being said, there is a downside. A few too many sentences are spent detailing Polly’s long legs and the reaction aroused in men upon viewing her form. The tendency of summing up a character by their ethnicity is more than tad dated and simplistic. Miss. Wills’ American accent, with all those hard R’s, can get a bit grating, but those are nitpicks. True, I would have preferred if such things were omitted, but the novel is what it is.

The majority of The Tenth Planet is devoted to the men spending their careers in a bunker below the frozen surface of the South Pole. This is something utterly unique to Classic Who. The Doctor may be the title character, Ben and Polly may be his friends and second leads, but the stories aren’t about them. Classic Who stories are about the people the Doctor saves. One would imagine that a show like Doctor Who would deal with WHO this Doctor person is and why they do what they do. Superman isn’t about the various citizens of Metropolis going about their day and being saved by the Blue Boy Scout. Why would Doctor Who be about the people he encounters, rather than the Doctor himself?

The answer, I believe, has to do with another reason the novelisations are so important to the survival of Doctor Who. This is a literary show. They’re not simply interested in giving you a cool new monster. The creators of the show are building a world and a world is populated with lots and lots of people. While making the Doctor the point of view character for every adventure would result in a thrilling good time, it wouldn’t construct a believable world. By experiencing the space these military men and scientists inhabit, getting small insights into their background and personalities (however shallow) and how they treat each other sets the scene for the terror about to unfold. The Cybermen are a scary concept, sure, but what makes them effective is that we know the people in danger. We’re set up to understand who these people are, thus making the threat of invaders that much more menacing. That is a trope you find more in literary storytelling than a visual medium like television.