Music From Earth

With spoilers for the Battlestar Galactica third season finale (which you really don't want spoiled) a couple of paragraphs down.

My Mars music mission is going well: I bought the soundtrack album and downloaded forty other tracks from the first series. Then I asked myself why I bothered with four by Hawkwind. I cut the modern music and stuff that was already old when they played it in the Seventies. I cut the Bowie and the Rolling Stones because I have those songs elsewhere and I cut bad pop like Wizzard to fit it on one sixteen-track rock 'n' reggae bonus disc. The final episode of Life On Mars airs Tuesday. Gimme til the weekend to make a Series 2 bonus disc.

Music's a funny thing. I associate it with good times. When I was unhappy living in Virginia I didn't feel like putting a record on very often. And I'd turn them off halfway through, dissatisfied with something intangible. My mood was actually spoiling new albums. Now my hunger is back and there's usually something playing at home. Read into that what you will!

The winner of the Even More Integral Use Of Music In A Serialised Drama Than Life On Mars award goes to Battlestar Galactica. Drunk Colonel Tigh was hearing music that no-one else could hear and mumbling how there was too much confusion and he needed to find some kind of way out of there. Then three other characters started hearing it... and reciting other lyrics from All Along The Watchtower. It turns out, the cylons were transmitting the signal into the heads of four of their agents. Transmitting Earth music! By implication, the bad guys have reached Earth before us and it's at least 1967 (when the song was written) there in the show.

There are many questions still to be answered but I adored how they communicated huge conceptual changes using more than plain dialogue.