Any television show that’s been around as long as Doctor Who has is likely to build up a few beloved traditions, particularly as a new era, and a new Doctor, dawns. In the case of the classic British science fiction series, fans will discuss, with some passion, the new Doctor’s costume, the look of the TARDIS console room (Are we pro-roundel? Indeed we are!), the shape of the Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver and — the most primal expression of the show’s unabashed strangeness — the newest orchestration of the classic Ron Grainer/Delia Derbyshire theme.
As just released by the BBC, yesterday, and performed by the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales here is what it sounds like today:
And here is what it sounded like when the show premiered in 1963:
Leading up to the 60th Anniversary of the classic series, the BBC is pulling out all the stops with its celebration of the show and this month they seem to be focusing on the music and that iconic theme with a two-hour special on BBC Radio 2: Doctor Who @ 60: A Musical Celebration.
The concert features world-exclusive first live performances of new companion Ruby Sunday’s theme The Life of Sunday, The Fifteenth Doctor’s theme called Fifteenth, and, of course, the new version of the theme tune, brilliantly reimagined by long-time Who composer, Murray Gold. Fans of the show will also recognize I Am The Doctor, Abigail’s Song, This Is Gallifrey, The Impossible Girl, I Am A Good Man, and The Shepherd’s Boy. Showrunners Russell T. Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall appear to discuss their time on the show and there is also a trip back in time to the classic years of Doctor Who from the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s featuring the vintage synthesizers of BBC Radiophonic Workshop veterans Mark Ayres and Peter Howell.
And this leads us to the topic at hand, Delia Derbyshire.
“What we are doing now is not important for itself, but one day someone might be interested enough to carry things forwards and create something wonderful on these foundations.” — Delia Derbyshire
Delia Derbyshire was a young woman who had joined the BBC in 1960 and, by 1962, had talked her way into being a composer/technician for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — ultimately becoming its most famous member in a large way due to her work on the famous theme.
But first, what was the BBC Radiophonic Workshop?
From 1958 to 1998, the Workshop — founded by electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram and composer Desmond Briscoe — ostensibly existed to provide sound effects and music for BBC radio and television productions, and, while it certainly did that quite successfully, the magic of the organization was in that the composers/technicians/thinkers were mostly left alone to try new ways to make sound. The sheer amount of time this group was let to tinker and dream would be unheard of today on a national budget, but it produced such fascinating technological artistic miracles that one wonders if the model for government funding of purely experimental artistic organizations should be revisited. (Yes, yes it should.)
By the time Delia Derbyshire had joined the Radiophonic Workshop, Oram had left to set up her own studio and the organization was producing smaller jobs doing jingles and educational programming soundtracks. In 1963, with little fanfare or expectation, the composition that would become the most famous piece they’d ever work on was dropped into their laps. Composer Ron Grainer had written a score for this quasi-educational/entertainment program about a mysterious old man who could travel through time. By most accounts, the theme was a melody with some indication of a bass line and some descriptive text written on the paper. How much of what was written made it into the actual broadcast theme is in some question as the BBC have refused to release the actual manuscript, which is in their archives, but it is notable that Mr. Grainer, upon hearing the recording, exclaimed, “I wrote that?” and later offered to share composing credit with Derbyshire due to the extent of her influence on the finished piece. (The BBC would not allow her the shared composition credit due to in-house authorship rules.)
Delia Derbyshire, at the height of her powers, took Grainer’s melody and created something that sounded entirely new. (Really, go back and listen to the clip above, again. It still sounds new, sixty years later.) She created the galloping bass line by recording individual plucked notes on a guitar, creating modified pitches by speeding up or slowing down the recording and then cutting the tape, note-by-note, into rhythmic phrases: “Dum-De-Dum, Diddly-Dum, Diddly-Dum, Dum-Dum-Diddy.” Hundreds and hundreds of splices were made to compose a tape of the entire backing track. It was said that troubleshooting notes in the composition involved unraveling the magnetic tape down a long hallway looking for where a piece of splice tape should be, but wasn’t.
Then a second tape was made with an oscillator generating a pitch that was controlled by spinning its frequency knob back and forth to approximate the melody.
Then a third tape was made with all the other extraneous sound effects that Delia Derbyshire dreamed up for the song: whooshes and hisses and howls.
The actual performance of the song involved running all three tapes at the same time and praying they stayed in sync.
“There were no musicians; no synthesizers; not even a 2-track or stereo tape machine. It was all mono (single-channel recording). Every part of the song was constructed on 1/4-inch mono tape, inch by inch, using…filtered white noise and something called a wobbulator. Three separate tapes were made, then put into the machines. We stood next to them, counted down, and pushed all three ‘start’ buttons at once, letting the outputs mix together.” — Delia Derbyshire
As complicated as this all sounds, it was actually even more complicated than that as a melodica was added at some point as well as a low drone and extra grace notes to lead into the bass sounds, amongst many other details; it’s a masterful piece of recording as composition.
The impact of that music in 1963 must’ve been thrilling. It is still thrilling now and is one of the most enduring iconic aspects of Doctor Who. The Workshop and Derbyshire especially continued to provide theme music and sound effects for Doctor Who through much of its black-and-white era.
Delia Derbyshire went on to do more and more interesting music, becoming increasingly interested in collages of sound behind speaking human voices being interviewed on a variety of subjects which became the hallmark of her later career.
She became disenchanted with the work of electronic composition as computers and keyboard-based synthesizers became more and more integral to the field as she felt that the work should remain tactile and in 1973 she left the BBC and by 1975 had stopped doing music altogether. After some struggles with alcohol she returned to music, briefly, in 2001 to work on, Derbyshire super-fan, Pete Kember’s Sychrondipity Machine (Taken from an Unfinished Dream) a 55-second track that served as her final public piece.
Delia Derbyshire dies of renal failure brought on by cancer in 2001. She was 64.
“I’ve put it all behind me. It was the doing of it that was the pleasure,
really. I can still hear beautiful things in my mind and I know how I can
make more beautiful things, too. That’s the important thing.” — Delia Derbyshire
For more about Delia Derbyshire, take a look at these three terrific documentaries:
Delia Derbyshire — the Myths and the Legendary Tapes (2021)
The Delian Mode (2009)
Sisters With Transistors (2020)
Also, the current issue of Electronic Sounds magazine is all about the Radiophonic Workshop and even includes a silver 7" record of music and sounds that the Workshop produced for Doctor Who in 1963.
Doctor Who premieres on Disney+ this November.
Doctor Who @ 60: A Musical Celebration will air on BBC Radio 2 on October 15th and is available through the BBC Sounds app today. To continue the celebration through the Autumn, Doctor Who stars will also be featured on Radio 2’s My Life in a Mixtape program to discuss the music important to their lives.
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
