There are now two TARDISes out there in the TV Universe of Earth Prime-Time – one belonging to the 15th Incarnation and the other, newer, incarnation which the 14th Incarnation of the Doctor has at his disposal. That is, if I’m figuring aright, the being used by Tennant’s third version of the Doctor is the new model. (And hopefully Gatwa’s Doctor did not create a split personality by dividing up the soul of the TARDIS between the two blue boxes. Then again, I’m sure there’s a future scriptwriter for the show out there who is already preparing his pitch that each TARDIS has a mind of its own.)
Both of them have the same screensaver running to project the holographic interior (at least for the control room.) And – looking at the show from an outsider’s point of view as a producer keeping an eye on the purse strings – they will probably stay the same in order to cut down costs. (Should Tennant ever return to the role of Fourteen, all they have to do is wheel that jukebox off the set and bob’s your uncle.)
Within days of the reveal of the jukebox inside the TARDIS, fans were speculating as to what music should be heard emanating from its speakers. (Not that I had anything against some of the songs heard elsewhere in the series, but I hope they’re not all going to be in the same vein as the Britney Spears/Spice Girls/Boney M./Rogue Trader selections which we heard in the past.)
To that end, I have a song to recommend for inclusion in the Doctor’s playlist….
From Wikipedia:
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and performed by Celentano and his wife Claudia Mori. It was released as a single in 1972. Both the name of the song and its lyrics are gibberish but are intended to sound like English in an American accent.
By the 1960s, Celentano was already one of the most popular rock musicians in Italy, in large part due to his appearance at the Sanremo Music Festival in 1960 and the subsequent success of his song "24.000 baci". "Prisencolinensinainciusol" was released in 1972 and remained popular throughout the 1970s.
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" has been described as varying music genres including Europop, house music, disco, hip hop and funk. Celentano, however, did not have these styles in mind when writing the song. He composed "Prisencolinensinainciusol" by creating a loop of four drumbeats and improvising lyrics over the top of the loop in his recording studio. The song is characterised by an E flat groove in the drum and bass guitar and riff in the horn section. Between the drum loop and the looped horns, not to mention the conversational improvisational "freestyle" flow of the lyrics and the chanting chorus, the song has many elements that predate hip hop, elements later found in hip hop in the mid 1980s and 1990s, respectively.
The song is intended to sound to its Italian audience as if it is sung in English spoken with an American accent, however the lyrics are deliberately unintelligible gibberish with the exception of the words "all right". Andrew Khan, writing in The Guardian, later described the sound as reminiscent of Bob Dylan's output from the 1980s.
Celentano's intention with the song was not to create a humorous novelty song but to explore communication barriers. The intent was to demonstrate how English sounds to people who do not understand the language proficiently. "Ever since I started singing, I was very influenced by American music and everything Americans did. So at a certain point, because I like American slang—which, for a singer, is much easier to sing than Italian—I thought that I would write a song which would only have as its theme the inability to communicate. And to do this, I had to write a song where the lyrics didn't mean anything."
"Prisencolinensinainciusol" wouldn’t just have to add flavor to a scene, an opportunity for the Master to let loose with his funky self. It could even be integrated into a plot-line for the show. How? What if some alien race visited Italy at some point in 1970 or ’71 and implanted that song – its tune and its lyrics – into the mind of Celentano, with the long-range goal of it triggering something dire for the world once the recorded song began to be heard throughout the world?
In recent years, "Prisencolinensinainciusol" has had a resurgence, thanks to YouTube, streaming services, and being used in the soundtracks for episodes of ‘Fargo’ and ‘Ted Lasso’. So why not in an episode of another show ending with the letter “O”?
One thing I like about this idea is that the backdrop for the story would be Italy. It gives me the opportunity to do a bit of research as to why aliens would have been in Italy circa 1970-71.
From Wikipedia:
The Reggio revolt occurred in Reggio Calabria, Italy, from July 1970 to February 1971. The cause of the protests was a government decision to make Catanzaro, not Reggio, regional capital of Calabria. The nomination of a regional capital was the result of a decentralization programme of the Italian government, under which 15 governmental regions were concretized and given their own administrative councils and a measure of local autonomy.
Protest in Reggio Calabria exploded in July 1970 when the much smaller town of Catanzaro (with a population of 82,000 against 160,000 in Reggio) was chosen as the regional capital of Calabria. The people of Reggio blamed their rivals' success to "the Red Barons" in Rome, a group of influential centre-left Calabrian politicians from Cosenza and Catanzaro.
Doesn’t sound like something worthy of a sci-fi show, but the genre can adapt to any event in history.
At any rate, here’s the song I want to be included on the TARDIS jukebox….
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