He's a man whose compositions have soundtracked many Saturday nights of suspense and terror, sending shivers down the spine and children behind the sofa.

Now Doctor Who composer Murray Gold is bringing terror and excitement to a live audience with the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular.

The show combines Gold's music, played by a live orchestra, with some of Doctor Who's favourite and most feared monsters.

Gold said: "I think it'll blow people's minds because wherever we've played it, whether it's the Albert Hall or the Opera House, people have reacted explosively.

"It's a spectacular, it's like a massive rock gig with all of that big emotion and massive screens showing highlights and clips from Doctor Who with the music alongside it."

The composer has even managed to get input from fans on the show's setlist.

He said: "It's such an interesting time because social media means that feedback on the music for each episode starts almost as soon as it goes out. Fans tend to put the music on YouTube and start marking it so I can actually find out how popular everything is.

"When we put the programme for the concert together I was actually really busy writing something so I said to my assistant can you just go through YouTube and find the tracks that the audience want to hear more of, it was an extremely democratic process."

Gold, who watched Doctor Who "semi-religiously" in the 1970s, has been writing music for the show since it returned to screens in 2005 with Christopher Eccleston as the intrepid Timelord.

During his ten years with the hit BBC sci-fi show, he has written music for its biggest moments, including the 50th anniversary episode last year, which saw the return of David Tennant and the introduction of John Hurt as the War Doctor. However, he claims some episodes are harder to compose for than others.

He said: "Each episode always brings its own challenges and when we do a Christmas episode it tends to be scrutinised a bit more.

"The episode this Christmas wasn't difficult but it was a little problem to solve. It's just about getting the balance and tone right between horror and sentiment so that people feel it's properly Christmassy but at the same time has a bite of horror."

Gold, whose favourite Doctor is Tom Baker, began watching the show when he was four-years-old and stopped when Peter Davison, the host of the Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular, took over because "he was the guy from All Creatures Great and Small, not Doctor Who".

However, when it comes to sound-tracking each episode, he takes an intuitive yet technical approach.

He said: "It's actually really fun, I sit with a piano, start the episode and I start blocking it out with the piano and then I sort of start colouring it in really, it's like being a draughtsman.

"You have to do it really quickly, it's normally around four to five days per episode. It's become a sort of instinctive, reflective response."

Gold's love of the show's seventies era means that the next item on his metaphorical wish list is to write music for an episode that features body horror, something reminiscent of the series Philip Hinchcliffe era.

He said: "Tom Baker stories like the Ark in Space, the Seeds of Doom and the Planet of Evil were the ones that really stuck in my head. They used to love body horror and the idea of people being consumed, Philip Hinchcliffe (who directed the show between 1974 and 1977) used to love that sort of thing.

"I'd love to do one like the Seeds of Doom, where you have a giant spinach monster coming over the top of the house, I remember it at the time and it was absolutely terrifying."

The Doctor Who Symphonic Spectacular will visit the SSE Hydro in Glasgow on Friday, May 29.