The Body in Question | |
---|---|
Genre | Medical |
Created by | Jonathan Miller |
Written by | Jonathan Miller |
Presented by | Jonathan Miller |
Starring | Jonathan Miller |
Composer | Peter Howell "The Greenwich Chorus" (BBC Radiophonic Workshop) |
Country of origin | United Kingdom |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 1 |
No. of episodes | 13 |
Production | |
Executive producer | Karl Sabbagh |
Producer | Patrick Uden |
Running time | 60 minutes |
Production companies | ABC (Aus.), BBC, CBC, OECA, KCET-TV |
Release | |
Original network | BBC, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC Television, KCET-TV (PBS), OECA |
Original release | 6 November 1978 – 26 May 1979 |
The Body in Question is a British-based, internationally co-produced medical television series first aired in the UK in November 1978.
This is a 13-part series (1 hour episodes) on all aspects of medicine and health science, written and presented by Dr Jonathan Miller.
Miller considers the functioning of the body as a subject of private experience. He explores our attitudes towards our bodies, our ignorance of them, and our inability to read our body's signals. The first episode starts with vox populi asking where various organs in the body are located. By the final episode we are left in no doubt, as the show became the first in television history to depict the dissection of a human cadaver (i.e. post-mortem examination or autopsy).
Taking as his starting point the experience of pain, Dr. Miller analyses the elaborate social process of "falling ill", considers the physical foundations of "disease" and looks at the types of individuals humankind has historically attributed with the power of healing. The series was nominated for two 1979 BAFTAs: Best Factual Television Series and Most Original Programme/Series. [1]
The series was primarily produced by the BBC, with international co-production support from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, CBC Television, Ontario Educational Communications Authority, and KCET-TV.
This hour-long series was first aired by the BBC on 6 November 1978. It was first broadcast in Canada on CBC Television Mondays at 11:45 p.m. (Eastern time) from 26 February to 28 May 1979. It was rebroadcast on CBC in mid-1981 (3 June to 2 September).
This list is extracted from the ending credits of all the shows:
A three track single of Peter Howell's music from this single was released on 7" vinyl in 1981. These tracks were issued as bonus tracks in the Record Store Day exclusive 6-CD box set Four Albums 1968 - 1978 [2] [3] 29 August 2020.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was one of the sound effects units of the BBC, created in 1958 to produce incidental sounds and new music for radio and, later, television. The unit is known for its experimental and pioneering work in electronic music and music technology, as well as its popular scores for programmes such as Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit during the 1950s and 1960s.
John Michael Bird was an English actor, director, writer and satirist. He performed in the television satire boom of the 1960s, appearing in That Was the Week That Was. His television work included many appearances with John Fortune. Bird had an acting career in film, television, theatre and radio for over 55 years. He appeared in films including Take A Girl Like You (1970) and Jabberwocky (1977) as well as in television shows such as Joint Account, Marmalade Atkins, El C.I.D. and Chambers. He also featured in the long-running Bremner, Bird and Fortune (1999–2010), on Channel 4, which was nominated for BAFTA TV Awards.
The BBC Television Shakespeare is a series of British television adaptations of the plays of William Shakespeare, created by Cedric Messina and broadcast by BBC Television. Transmitted in the UK from 3 December 1978 to 27 April 1985, it spanned seven series and thirty-seven episodes.
Verity Ann Lambert was an English television and film producer.
Sir Jonathan Wolfe Miller CBE was an English theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician. After training in medicine and specialising in neurology in the late 1950s, he came to prominence in the early 1960s in the comedy revue Beyond the Fringe with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett.
Carnival Film & Television Limited, trading as Carnival Films, is a British production company based in London, UK, founded in 1978. It has produced television series for all the major UK networks including the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and Sky, as well as international broadcasters including PBS, A&E, HBO and NBC. Productions include single dramas, long-running television dramas, feature films, and stage productions.
The Doctor Who theme music is a piece of music written by Australian composer Ron Grainer and produced by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Created in 1963, it was one of the first electronic music signature tunes for television. It is used as the theme for the science fiction programme Doctor Who, and has been adapted and covered many times.
Paddy Kingsland is a composer of electronic music best known for his incidental music for science fiction series on BBC radio and television whilst working at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Educated at Eggar's Grammar School in Alton, Hampshire, he joined the BBC as a tape editor before moving on to become a studio manager for BBC Radio 1. In 1970 he joined the Radiophonic Workshop where he remained until 1981. His initial work was mostly signature tunes for BBC radio and TV programmes before going on to record incidental music for programmes including The Changes, two versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as well as several serials of Doctor Who. His work on the latter series included incidental music for several serials in the early 1980s.
Peter Howell is a musician and composer. He is best known for his work on Doctor Who as a member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Dudley George Simpson was an Australian composer and conductor. He was the Principal Conductor of the Royal Opera House orchestra for three years and worked as a composer on British television. He worked on the BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who, for which he composed incidental music during the 1960s and 1970s. When Simpson died aged 95 in 2017, The Guardian wrote that he was "at his most prolific as the creator of incidental music for Doctor Who in the 1960s and 1970s, contributing to 62 stories over almost 300 episodes – more than any other composer."
Elizabeth Parker is a British film and television composer who worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop from 1978 until the workshop's closure.
Through A Glass Darkly is a 1978 album by Peter Howell and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It featured six original instrumental compositions including "Through A Glass Darkly - A Lyrical Adventure", a 19-minute track which took up the whole of the first side of the record. Much of the music on the album leaned far more towards the prog rock of the 1970s than the previous output by the Radiophonic Workshop. The track "The Astronauts" later featured as the B-side to the 1980 single release of Howell's arrangement of the Doctor Who theme.
BBC Radiophonic Workshop – 21 is a compilation by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to celebrate their 21st anniversary in 1979. It was compiled as an overview of their work both old and new, showcasing the changes in the Workshop as they developed from backroom sound effects suppliers for BBC Radio to full-fledged in-house music composers for the whole of the corporation. It demonstrates the move from the musique concrète and tape-manipulation techniques used in the early days, to the synthesiser works of the 1970s. The first side of the album consisted of material from 1958 to 1971, covering their early work creating jingles, sound-effects and some incidental music. This side includes the first material by Workshop founder Desmond Briscoe to be commercially released, as well as sound effects from The Goon Show, Maddalena Fagandini's interval signal that later became "Time Beat", some of Delia Derbyshire's experimental work and the pilot episode version of the Doctor Who theme music. The second side of the record covered the period between 1971–1979, including Richard Yeoman-Clark material from popular BBC series Blake's 7 and Peter Howell's vocoder heavy "Greenwich Chorus" theme for The Body in Question. It was reissued on CD by Silva Screen Records on 22 April 2016.
The Soundhouse is a 1983 compilation released by BBC Records of music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It featured music composed at the Workshop in the period since the previous compilation, BBC Radiophonic Workshop - 21. During the gap between releases, many advances had been made in the use of computer technology to produce electronic music and this was reflected on the compilation with much of the material having been performed using the Fairlight CMI, the first digital sampling synthesiser. The album included two tracks by Paddy Kingsland used in the television version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, three electronic realisations of classical compositions and an original collaboration featuring five of the Radiophonic Workshop members entitled "Radiophonic Rock".
Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 2: New Beginnings 1970–1980 is the second in a series of compilations of BBC Radiophonic Workshop music from Doctor Who. The album collected various incidental music from the 1970s including, for the first time, the complete Malcolm Clarke score for the 1972 serial The Sea Devils, only the second scored completely by the Radiophonic Workshop. The compilation also featured a few of Dudley Simpson's compositions as realised by Brian Hodgson, some Delia Derbyshire music as featured in Inferno, two Peter Howell demos from 1979 and a selection of Dick Mills' sound effects from the era.
Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 3: The Leisure Hive is the third in a series of compilations showcasing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's work on the science-fiction programme Doctor Who. The album focused mainly on the Peter Howell synthesiser score for the 1980 serial The Leisure Hive, which received its first full release here. The compilation also collected some Dick Mills sound effects from the story as well as some effects from other 1980 serials Meglos and Full Circle, whose music would be the subject of the fourth volume in the series. The final track was a new remix of the original Delia Derbyshire version of the show's theme tune by series compiler Mark Ayres.
Maddalena Fagandini was an English electronic musician and television producer. She was employed by the BBC in the early 1950s, as part of their Italian Service, before becoming part of the pioneering BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1959. Her work with the Radiophonic Workshop involved creating jingles and interval signals, using musique concrète techniques, for BBC radio and television. She had an important role to play in the coverage of the 1960 Olympics in Rome, due to her bilingual fluency in English and Italian. In 1962 Fagandini collaborated with Parlophone record producer George Martin to create two electronic singles, "Time Beat" and "Waltz in Orbit", which were released as recordings by the pseudonymous Ray Cathode. The recordings were made a few weeks before Martin met The Beatles.
BBC Radiophonic Workshop – A Retrospective is a 2008 compilation of music and effects from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It was released to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the workshop and includes material ranging from then to its closure. Many of the tracks were previously released on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop - 21 and The Soundhouse.
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