Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the composer Debbie Wiseman.

Her work is wide-ranging, but her talents are most often employed in crafting lyrical melodic scores for film and TV. If you've watched

Landgirls, Judge John Deed, Haunted, Lost Christmas and countless other productions,

hers is the music woven through the storyline atmosphere and pace of the drama.

Now a visiting professor at the Royal College, her unlikely introduction to music came through

a bashed-up old piano sitting in the corner of a hotel dining room.

Even though it was mostly used for storing the spoons, she felt age-date an overwhelming want to

discover what it could do and was soon racing through her musical grades. She says,

seeing those little black dots on the stave and the language of it, I understood it

all immediately. It was as if it had always been there. It made complete sense.

So Debbie, much of your work for films involve of course inevitably writers and actors and directors.

I'm wondering from the point of view of the viewer how you would

encapsulate the importance of a good film score.

For me it's everything that you can't actually see on screen. So we can see the gorgeous

cinematography, we can see the actors. What we can't see is the

subtext, what's going on underneath, what the actors are perhaps feeling, and often a director will say to me look I've

shot this scene and you know what it hasn't got quite enough passion in it you know it's a love

scene and there isn't enough passion can you can the music add passion can it

add what isn't there necessarily on the screen. Should we as viewers actually

...