Soundtrack to a Morphine Dream (The Music of Green Wing)

Having spent the last couple of weeks in a kind of time-stasis, focusing all my energies towards job and future, and stepping well away from hard listening time, I'm about to write a little bit about something I've re-invested all my down energies to.

Green Wing is a sort-of hypnotic flow; stream of consciousness sitcom set in a hospital ward & occasionally outside it. The scenes are like individual sketches that meld together to form a coherent storyline; characters cross from one room to another on their daily rounds with personalities ranging from mildly over-the-top to completely bent out of shape mental.

Wiki it.

The absolutely gripping qualities that Green Wing possesses are without doubt the way it is shot and, more importantly, the soundtrack, which mirrors so many qualities of the show. The music occasionally reaches song snippets, but on the whole is a warped blend of electronic ambiance which creates a seamless flow to the scenes through mimicking the visual remixes and chop-ups of the edit.

All the way through the show, the music frames the visuals like a pink-tinted haze; you feel like the wandering patient, drugged-up to the eyes and wandering aimlessly through the hospital, creating your own characters for the doctors and admin staff you see day-in-day-out. Somehow without the music, the ridiculous element would swallow up some of the credibility of the storylines, and void  the emotional attachment you build with the characters as the show goes on.

The effect is like a half-reality, in which everything in the character build is emphasised, and emotions become amplified to the point that every inflection feels like profound insight. The trauma of the hospital environment is left to one side, with nods towards outside realities being touched on in barely sobering moments and always juxtaposed with humor. Instead, relations between the staff are built and dropped steadily over the course of two seasons, again the music always book-ending the peaks and troughs of created and failed relationships before it all melts away into a final bittersweet dream.

.. it's not how I imagined it would be, 

I suppose when I pictured it there was music 

 sort of, sad music ..

 

The music was mostly composed specially for the show, by an artist named Johnathon Whitehead, under the guise of Trellis, Whitehead has written soundtracks to some of the best British sitcoms of the last 20 years, but his work on Green Wing is undoubtedly his most enthralling. It was released as a soundtrack which is still available to buy, but really, like any great soundtrack, it just doesn't have the same edge without the story in the background. This is a meticulously composed and refined entity which is woven into Green Wing and makes it into a hypnotic and emotionally charged story. By the way, it's also brilliantly funny.