Clive Webster’s time to shine. “A new discovery enables space craft to visit distant regions of the universe within weeks instead of years. But while the dummy run is in progress a mysterious outbreak of illness, sometimes fatal, occurs among the scientists concerned.” Electronic sound and music by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
Six-part sci-fi serial rebroadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 2020 and 2022. Widely available online (YouTube, Internet Archive and various podcasts). The story explores the concern at the time that astronauts might bring back a disease or other hostile microbe from space. The opening and closing musical contributions are of the abstract kind – high-pitched scrapings and indistinct guttural scrapping which are also used to represent the threat of the disease and the alien lifeform’s attempts to escape their containment. The addition of a single deep and jangly piano note lays on that extra bit of doom required. This is the trick of using effects as a theme1.
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/d5d766a97e030eb0d4bf8aa156843a62
- See also War Of Worlds (David Cain) ↩︎
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