Welcome to I Thought That Was Non-Diegetic: The Real-World Music of Televised Doctor Who and the Whoniverse Bracket Tournament.
Here we have 46 songs for your evaluation that have appeared on screen on Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, or Class. To qualify, they must:
have been heard on screen (i.e., not merely mentioned by a character) in the form of a pre-existing studio recording (e.g., not the Doctor singing to himself)
not be library/production music (i.e., the insert music from the TV movie, good though it is)
be diegetic (heard by the characters) within the episode (e.g., Toxic in The End of the World counts; Toxic in Lux doesn’t)
and have been listed on the “Songs from the real world” category on TARDIS Wiki so I could find them.
There may very well be mistakes in here, because I have not watched a ton of these episodes. So guess what? If there are, they’re staying!
A complete list of the contestants, including YouTube links, is here. Hopefully that link will last.
Obviously with such a weird number there will be a number of byes in the first round. To determine the seeds for the songs, I grouped them as follows:
Can’t Get You Out of My Head, Tainted Love, Rasputin, Toxic, Spice Up Your Life, I Can’t Decide, and Voodoo Child, as the most recognizable in their respective stories
All other songs from Doctor Who proper
All songs from Torchwood, SJA, or Class, plus the one from Dreamland
Then I randomly sorted the songs within each group to get the final seeds, which are as follows:
Oh hell, I didn’t realize there were subcategories on the wiki category. That’s how I missed them both.
Oh well! I would have excluded Christmas songs anyway, and a glance through the others suggests they mostly didn’t qualify. Paperback Writer was one I specifically thought of when I was dreaming this up, though. I told you it would be a cluster.
Oh, it happens. Ticket To Ride is memorable to me because of being footage that only still exists because of the Doctor Who episode, and also being cut from some copies for copyright.
Merry Xmas Everybody is memorable to me because I like Slade. (But I also like the Beatles.)
I might have to listen and see where Don’t Mug Yourself is in Father’s Day, as I don’t really remember it. Monster is a great song anyways, though, and I watched Countrycide not that long ago…
Truly insane of you to put this together I love hearing songs from episodes I’ve definitely seen (multiple times!) and yet have zero recognition of them
This is an awesome idea! Thanks for putting this together! I’m excited to see the results and its fun to hear all the music from the episodes that I’ve totally missed.
Thanks for putting this one together! Wow, I have so many thoughts regarding the state of “music,” but we’ll focus on the tracks at hand. Disclaimer: there may be strong opinions ahead, but no personal attack is intended, so if any of these are your favourite artists/songs, then I’m happy for you.
I voted for ‘Turn the Music Louder’ in the first match because, despite the annoying trend of everyone in the world featuring on everyone else’s songs these days (seriously, can no one’s work stand on its own?), I didn’t hear much autotune, so there was actual singing, and it was slightly catchier than ‘I See You Baby.’
That Tinie Tempah person was by far the worst part of the track, though, so when I saw him reappear in the third match, there was definite Gen X eyerolling happening, and it was just as awful as I expected it to be. No one needs you to stand there and tell us all how great you think you are. Such an easy vote for ‘Midnight, the Stars and You.’
The second match was also pretty easy, as I found ‘Monster’ to be a genuinely decent song. I wouldn’t necessarily add it to a playlist or anything, but it was good. ‘Don’t Mug Yourself’ was…a song.
For the bonus match, both were good songs. In the end, even though I’m not quite old enough to have been alive before The Beatles broke up, I won’t vote against them, especially because Ian is dancing to them. It’s just so wholesome.
I love hearing songs from episodes I’ve definitely seen (multiple times!) and yet have zero recognition of them
