MRH : Comedy is one of those genres that requires a great deal of finesse and subtlety, and whether it's the wit within Doctor Who, the new series Torchwood, or a film like Beautiful Creatures, you're been able to tackle the comedic needs of any given project.

MG : [Beautiful Creatures] is such a dark, dark film, really, but I've just worked with Frank Oz [on Death at a Funeral] who's a master at comedy and whose career is steeped in quality entertainment.

One of my first really big things was at Cambridge University, being Musical Director of the Footlights (they're the comedy society that spawned Monty Python and beyond the Fringe and a lot of well-known British comedians) and I was actually more associated with light comic scoring; I did a lot of that when I was younger, and did theatre as well.

I used to present a live comedy show – I was on stage throughout with a piano, and I was kind of a host – so you do need a different head or mindset for it.

When you're scoring comedy movies… You don't want anything that sounds too overbearing. It's lightness and timing, and they're really hard to get right. You get your grand, massive Wagnerian scores like Danny Elfman and Howard Shore and that sort of thing, but at the other end of the spectrum there are composers [like Thomas Newman]… He can do a lightness that is beyond the reach of almost every composer in an amazing stylistic way.

People like Rolf Kent who scores all of Alexander Payne's movies like Election and Sideways has got a wonderful kind of lightness. [It] can be kind of underestimated in music, because people are more impressed by heavy; it's more immediately impressive, whereas lightness… is a really tricky thing to do… It's very much supportive of the jokes, and it's very supportive of the buoyancy of a piece of work.

Murray Gold's light touch with the world of Doctor Who will continue this Christmas when Season 4 begins airing in England, while Torchwood will make its North American debut September 8th in the U.S. on BBC America, and in Canada on the CBC.