Music and sound designer David Roocroft tells us about crafting the soundscape for this unique tale: “The Darkened Earth marks the second time I’ve had the privilege of working on a John Pritchard-scripted Doctor Who story (the first being the recent Companion Chronicle, The Iron Maid), and once again, John’s gift for horror inflections have informed how I approached the music.

“Central to my work on The Darkened Earth was dividing the score into two distinct camps: when the creature is absent, and when the creature is present. “I felt it was important that the music reflects the creature's effect, here eliminating melody for the times it feeds. Consequently, there’s a big difference between the bright, more orchestral-leaning passages of the score and the sludgy, atonal sequences that denote the creature’s presence.

“I felt this was especially pertinent to emphasising the creature’s ‘otherness’ to Constance – in the absence of the creature, even when I’m attempting to evoke a sense of the approaching uncanny, the arrangements retain a footing in the kind of instrumentation that would have been recognisable to Constance, whereas the creature’s soundtrack would be distinctly ‘other’ and outside the auditory language of someone more used to life (and music) in the 1940s.”