"around £60 I think"

Music This extensive interview with composer David Arnold manages to include a question about his work on the Eighth Doctor theme which has recently returned to the audio releases:

You did the Eighth Doctor’s theme for Big Finnish Productions’ “Doctor Who.” What goes into doing a theme for a character with such a deep musical legacy and such high expectations? What influences did you look to and was there anything about the least famous Doctor character that spoke to you?

Arnold: I did this when Doctor Who was off air and had been for many years. No one really expected it to come back and this was for a limited edition CD run of audio stories of Dr Who. it was a low key, low budget (around £60 I think ) favor I was doing for Mark Gatiss whom I’d known for a while. I loved the show when it was on TV and watched it religiously as a child. My favourite was Patrick Troughton. It was great to be able to go back to how I felt about watching the show. I wasn’t interested in re-inventing really… more revisiting….so I stuck closely to the classic Derbyshire version. It was always Doctor Who so in a way the actor didn’t matter; I was still writing for The Doctor.

One of the reasons I returned to the show was that version of the theme introducing Storm Warning, Eighth's first adventure. It sounded so strange and alien and yet also comfortingly nostalgic and close to the original, which is just what those first audios ended up being.