Composer Murray Gold has been presented with the 2012 International Film Music Critics Association Award for Best Original Score for a Television Series for Doctor Who by IFMCA member Jon Broxton.
This is Gold’s first win from four nominations, all of which were for his work on the Doctor Who series. The other nominees in the television category were Downton Abbey by John Lunn, Green Lantern: The Animated Series by Frederik Wiedmann, Isabel by Federico Jusid, and Priceless by Naoki Sato.
Doctor Who is the BBC’s lavish reincarnation of the classic British science fiction show, which originally began in 1963, and was brought back to screens in 2005 to entertain a whole new generation of fans enchanted by the adventures of the time-traveling Doctor and his battles across time and space with Daleks, Cybermen, and dozens of other alien monsters and inter-stellar megalomaniacs. Gold’s music is large, bold, and theme-filled, and performed with consummate gusto by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under the capable baton of conductor Ben Foster. Series 7, in which the Doctor is portrayed by Matt Smith, gave Gold the opportunity to build further on his multiple themes for the main characters, and produce even more brilliant, exciting music.
English composer Gold was born in Portsmouth in 1969, attended the University of Cambridge, and began his career in film music in the late 1990s. He first came to prominence following his acclaimed, BAFTA-nominated score for the BBC costume drama Vanity Fair in 1998, and he subsequently worked on such popular TV projects as Queer as Folk (1999), Randall & Hopkirk Deceased (2000), Clocking Off (2000), Shameless (2004) and Casanova (2005), as well as feature films such as Beautiful Creatures (2000) and Hawking (2004). Gold joined the crew of Doctor Who when it returned to screens in 2005, and he has since scored all 102 episodes of the show to date, including all episodes featuring Christopher Ecclestone, David Tennant and Matt Smith as the Doctor; he also wrote a new arrangement of the show’s famous theme, originally composed by Ron Grainer. While working on Who, Gold has continued to stretch his musical horizons by writing music for other projects, including TV shows such as Last Tango in Halifax and the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood, as well as movies such as Alien Autopsy (2006), Death at a Funeral (2007), and Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil (2011).
As a writer, Gold won the Michael Imison Memorial Prize for Best New Radio Play in 2002 for Electricity, which was produced at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. His other plays include 50 Revolutions performed by the Oxford Stage Company at the Whitehall Theatre, London in 2000 and Resolution, which was staged at Battersea Arts Centre in 1994. Gold also wrote the radio play Kafka the Musical which was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Easter Sunday 2011, and won the 2013 Tinniswood Award for the Best Original Radio Drama.
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