Rematerialization

TV series such as Doctor Who are located within and enabled by a number of intersecting vectors, traditions and institutional contexts. Most obviously, the series has antecedence in television, film and (to a lesser extent) radio science fiction (SF) drama and the broad literary tradition of the genre. Contextually, the series draws on, replicates and extends the creative origination and production practices of its institutional enabler, the BBC, and the corporation’s specialist services, such as the Radiophonic Workshop. These, in turn, reflect the particular nature of the British broadcasting system and the missions and aesthetics of the respective organizations involved. In the program’s movement through a media landscape that has rapidly developed since its inauguration in 1963 (as a black and white studio-based program) through to its present incarnation (2005–2012), it has been accompanied by the rise of new audio-visual genres (such as the music video) and, more recently, of a plethora of audio-visual forms and practices associated with the internet and various digital production tools and media. This chapter examines one particular facet of the series’ interpretation and extension—the textual engagements of a group of musicians and music video makers. ¹ Commencing with various pop musicians in the early to mid-1960s, the chapter surveys the successive engagements of rock musicians in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the influential contribution of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty (working under the moniker of “The Timelords”) in 1988 and the work of techno acts such as Orbital and a series of electronic musicians who have produced further audio-visual treatments. As with Doctor Who, the musicians involved have also emerged from particular vectors, traditions and contexts, many of which have also had a substantial degree of interactive engagement with British televisual and radio practice and, specifically, its presentation and promotion of particular types of music. As befitting a period in which modernism, postmodernism and whatever can be deemed to have succeeded the latter have intertwined, the texts concerned encompass a range of approaches including homage, parody, pastiche and the contemporary collage practice known as “mash-up.” In this manner, the series has provided a thematic core to an encircling cloud of musical practitioners who have extended the series’ reach into popular culture and established it as an enduring and serially modified audio-visual entity.