‘Way Out – Of This World!

’
Delia Derbyshire, Doctor Who and
the British Public's Awareness of
Electronic Music in the 1960s
David Butler

Abstract
The composer and musician Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001) remains most famous
for her arrangement and realisation of Ron Grainer's title theme for Doctor Who.
Yet although providing the theme tune with its distinctive sounds, which would
be featured in the programme's titles from 1963 until 1980, Derbyshire provided
little else in terms of music for the Doctor's adventures during her time at the
BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This article considers the impact of the Doctor
Who theme tune on Derbyshire's career and the interest in electronic music that
it generated amongst the British public in the 1960s.

Key words: Delia Derbyshire, BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Doctor Who,

(electronic) music, gender, reception

One of the recurring discussions throughout the Doctor Who (1963–89, 1996,
2005–present)1 fiftieth-anniversary conference held at the University of
Hertfordshire in September 2013 was the programme's problematic engagement
with gender and the role of women, both in terms of the characters on-screen
and the creative personnel behind the camera. Lorna Jowett's keynote, a version
of which features elsewhere in this dossier, provided a compelling critique of the
Steven Moffat era in particular, and the programme's history as a whole, which
features relatively few female practitioners in prominent roles. That overall re-
cord is all the more disappointing given the programme's original creative team.
With key figures including a Canadian ‘creator’, female producer (and, at the
time, the only female drama producer at the BBC) and a British-Indian director,
as well as a title character who was yet to become the recognisable heroic figure
celebrated by a global simulcast in November 2013, this original line-up was far

Critical Studies in Television, Volume 9, No. 1 (Spring 2014) © 2014 Manchester University Press.
http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/CST.9.1.5
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 63

from ‘typical’ of mainstream British television and society. That atypical quality
also applies to the astonishing rendition of the programme's theme music, written
by the Australian composer, Ron Grainer, but realised by Delia Derbyshire (1937–
2001) at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop with the assistance of Dick Mills.
Variations on Derbyshire's remarkable arrangement of Grainer's composition –
electronic but with an organic sensuality – would lead in and out of the Doctor's
adventures until 1980 and inspire, excite and terrify several generations of viewers,
many of whom would grow up to become significant musicians in their own right.
Based at the Radiophonic Workshop, from 1962 until 1973, Derbyshire's output
during these years, as both a BBC employee and freelance musician, would include
collaborations with leading figures in Britain's arts scene, from Peter Hall and the
Royal Shakespeare Company to Ted Hughes and Yoko Ono. The result was a dis-
tinctive and evocative body of work that contributed to the growing awareness in
Britain of the possibilities of electronic music, fusing the popular with the experi-
mental. Doctor Who looms large in Derbyshire's career and yet, beyond the theme
tune, her work was seldom featured in the series. Douglas Camfield used two of
her most distinctive compositions—‘The Delian Mode’ and ‘Blue Veils and Golden
Sands’—as ‘stock music’ in the Jon Pertwee Doctor Who story ‘Inferno’ (1970), and
in 1967, Derbyshire would arrange Dudley Simpson's ‘Chromophone Band’ cue
for the Patrick Troughton adventure ‘The Macra Terror’ but there are no ‘Delian’
scores for any Doctor Who stories during the years she was active at the BBC. In
fact, Derbyshire was not even the first choice for the creation of the Doctor Who
theme tune, with Verity Lambert, the programme's first producer, initially
approaching the avant-garde French group, Les Structures Sonores; but they
proved unavailable.
It is difficult to quantify the influence of Derbyshire's arrangement of the Doc-
tor Who theme, but the broadcaster Stuart Maconie was probably stretching en-
thusiastic appreciation to its limits when he described it in a 15 November 2010
feature for BBC One's Inside Out2 as ‘the theme tune that changed the world’
and ‘the very first time the public had ever heard electronic music’. Even if we
exclude the electronic music in earlier BBC productions like Quatermass and the
Pit (1958)3 for television and All That Fall (1957) for radio or Hollywood films
released in the United Kingdom, such as Forbidden Planet (1956),4 the BBC had
included electronic music for the first time in the 1960 Proms season. That said,
there was evidence of resistance to electronic music, especially the perceived ‘dif-
ficulty’ of the work of composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen. The BBC acknowl-
edged that the 1960 Proms performance of Luciano Berio's 1957 Perspectives
was listened to with ‘polite but somewhat uneasy attention’, and there was clear
relief when the orchestra returned ‘to the platform to continue the concert with
“natural” music’.5 Doctor Who, however, was a very different case, with a promi-
nence and regularity (a weekly teatime show aimed at the family) which ensured
that, for many people, in 1963 and 1964, it was the first time that they had heard
electronic, tape-based music. It has often been pointed out that it was the emer-
gence of the Daleks in the second Doctor Who story to be broadcast (from late
64 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

December 1963 until early February 1964), which boosted the programme's rat-
ings and reputation, as well as helped secure its immediate future.6 Within three
weeks of the conclusion of the first Dalek story, discussions were taking place
with the Head of Business for Television Enterprises about the need to ‘resurrect
the Daleks’ and the creatures' potential for exploitation.7 But two weeks before a
Dalek's manipulator arm made its first dramatic appearance in the cliffhanger to
‘The Dead Planet’ (1963), Derbyshire's arrangement of the Doctor Who theme
tune had already generated enough wonder and fascination amongst the general
public to be deemed a significant subject which merited coverage in a national
newspaper.8 In this article, I want to explore the impact of the Doctor Who
theme tune on British audiences in the 1960s as well as Derbyshire's relation-
ship with the programme and the BBC more generally. That impact is worthy of
celebration, but it was not without consequences. Interviewed for the 2012 re-
release of his music for The Seasons (1969),9 David Cain, one of Derbyshire's
contemporaries at the Radiophonic Workshop, reflected that ‘Doctor Who was
an enormous distraction, it became the focus of the output and everything else
was pushed into the background’.10
Doctor Who was not Derbyshire's first science-fiction project – indeed, her
schoolwork includes a time-travel story, in which a railway passenger discovers
that the mysterious station he has stopped at has only just been commissioned
and he has thus glimpsed into the future.11 If that suggests an interest in the fan-
tastic, Derbyshire's schoolwork indicates a somewhat dismissive attitude towards
popular culture – she calls in one essay for the banning of American comics and
warns against the perils of too much film, television and radio. Born in Coventry
in 1937, music and mathematics were her passions at school; she excelled in both
subjects with her major formative musical influences being Mozart, Bach and, es-
pecially, Beethoven. Derbyshire read music and mathematics at Girton College,
Cambridge, and it was during her time at university that she would travel, in
1958, with her fellow student Jonathan Harvey (who would go on to become one
of Britain's leading composers of the last fifty years and whose own music was
influenced directly by Derbyshire's haunting collaboration with the poet Barry
Bermange, Amor Dei [1964]12) to Le Corbusier's and Iannis Xenakis' Pavilion at
the Brussels World's Fair and heard Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique, nurtur-
ing a growing interest in electronic music and its relationship with the visual arts.
Throughout her career, Derbyshire would work on projects both about visual
artists, including Goya, Henry Moore and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as with vi-
sual artists such as Madelon Hooykaas, Elisabeth Kozmian and staff from
Hornsey College of Art. Towards the end of her life, in 1999, she discussed her
hopes for an electronic music festival in partnership with Peter Kember (Sonic
Boom), which would associate electronic music ‘with light, and vibrations of ev-
ery sort, including tactile vibrations. A tie-in between sound and light, move-
ment, sculpture. . .’13 That interest in the relationship between sound and image
became a working concern when she transferred to the Radiophonic Workshop
in 1962 after joining the BBC as a studio manager in 1960.
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 65

When Derbyshire arrived at the Radiophonic Workshop, it was still in its for-
mative years, having been established in 1958 to provide the ‘special sound’ for
BBC productions. Derbyshire soon made a positive impression and her first ma-
jor contribution, composing the music for Time On Our Hands (1963),14 was
also her first involvement with science fiction. Broadcast in March 1963, Time
On Our Hands was a docu-fiction about the city of the future – Holyhead in
1988 – imagining a world in which the Russians got to the Moon first (in 1967),
mass unemployment is rife as a result of increasing automation, cyberneticists
have become hill farmers and the core problem is ‘how to spend a golden life-
time, what to do with so much time’.15 Derbyshire's title music conveys the pro-
gramme's sense of progress, leading to an uncertain emptiness (‘the void of
leisure’) with its glassy sounds and slow ascending notes giving way to childlike
falling phrases and a lack of ultimate resolution. There is no satisfying keynote
achieved here, unlike the triumphant musical ascent suggested by Stanley
Kubrick's use of Richard Strauss' first movement from Also Sprach Zarathustra
at the outset of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968),16 laying the foundation for the
evolutionary quest ahead. In contrast, Derbyshire's music points to a chilly ennui
and restless yet lonely cityscape. Time On Our Hands was well received within
the BBC and gained particular praise from the Head of Television Drama,
Sydney Newman. By the end of the year, Derbyshire had realised and arranged
the theme tune for a new project overseen by Newman – a piece of music that
would become an iconic part of the soundscape of British popular culture, in-
stantly recognisable yet with sounds whose origin and nature retain a potent
ability to fascinate and mystify today: Doctor Who. Its success would generate
considerable attention for the Radiophonic Workshop and Derbyshire, although
she was often not named in coverage of the theme tune.17
The standard practice at this time was for individual Radiophonic Workshop
staff not to receive on-screen or printed credit for the special sound and music
they contributed to BBC programmes. The Daily Mirror was among the first to
try and solve the mysteries of the Doctor Who theme tune for the general public
and, in a piece from 7 December 1963, two weeks after the first episode of Doctor
Who had been broadcast, claimed that ‘nothing quite like this [. . .] has been
heard before on TV. It's a noise with rhythm and melody which continually pul-
sates in a weird, fluid, and uncanny way’.18 But the article made no mention of
Derbyshire's involvement, placing more emphasis on the role of Verity Lambert,
the producer of Doctor Who, and her desire for a ‘new sound – way out and cat-
chy’.19 For his part, the tune's composer, Ron Grainer, was delighted with Derby-
shire's contribution and sought, unsuccessfully for her, a share of the credit and
royalties, but he was overruled. As Derbyshire noted: ‘The BBC wouldn't allow it.
I was just on an assistant studio manager's salary and that was it. . . and we got a
free Radio Times. The boss wouldn't let anybody have any sort of credit’.20
The ‘boss’ in this case was Desmond Briscoe, the manager of the Radiopho-
nic Workshop. His relationship with Derbyshire and role in how her reputation
and awareness of her work was managed, and in some instances restricted, is
66 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

complex. Derbyshire's time at the BBC has been characterised by some as her
being suppressed by a patriarchal institution.21 Interviewed in 2005, Clive
Blackburn, Delia's partner from 1980 until her death in 2001, reflected that ‘she
was badly treated by the BBC, repeatedly turned down for promotions that
should have been hers’.22 There is no doubt that Derbyshire did encounter sex-
ist attitudes and prejudice both within the BBC and other organisations as well;
as when she was told by Decca in 1959 that they did not employ women in
their recording studios. It is also true that reviews and news items were still re-
ferring to ‘the men’ of the Radiophonic Workshop in the late 1970s, despite
the central role of female personnel at the Radiophonic Workshop, from
Daphne Oram, Maddalena Fagandini and Derbyshire to Glynis Jones and
Elizabeth Parker. It is easy to cast Briscoe, with his ‘notoriously officious side’23
as Louis Niebur describes it, as the face of BBC patriarchy holding Derbyshire
back, but to do so would risk constructing a somewhat convenient strawman.
Evidence suggests that any restraints from Briscoe were neither directed exclu-
sively at Derbyshire nor necessarily a direct result of her gender. Other Work-
shop staff also encountered complications in their dealings with Briscoe. Niebur
notes, for example, how Derbyshire and her Radiophonic Workshop colleagues,
John Baker and Brian Hodgson, worked ‘long but eccentric hours’ in part to
‘avoid Briscoe's interference’, with Hodgson confirming that Briscoe became a
‘great bogeyman’ and ‘was seen as an obstacle rather than anything else’.24 The
BBC Written Archives at Caversham, however, reveal a more shaded story: there
are several documents in which Briscoe praises Derbyshire and acknowledges
her burgeoning reputation and in return she would congratulate him warmly on
his 1977 radio production A Wall Walks Slowly, after she had left the Work-
shop.25 Most significantly, when Briscoe was on extended leave from the Radio-
phonic Workshop in 1966, Derbyshire was placed in charge during his absence.
Interviewed by Jo Hutton in 2000, Derbyshire was willing to suggest that
Briscoe's motivation for the lack of credits might have been benign and that ‘his
attitude may have been, come on let's give him benefit of the doubt, that because
a lot of the Workshop's stuff was criticised as being too frightening or too, you
know, too whatever, he was protecting us by keeping our names secret’.26
The issue of individual staff not being credited for their work seems to have
been a case of Briscoe ‘following orders’ rather than a wilful effort to deny his team
recognition. There were multiple opportunities and indeed direct calls for the pol-
icy on credits to be overturned. On 30 June 1964, Martin Esslin, the Head of
Drama (Sound), wrote to Briscoe to put on record ‘my deep appreciation for the
excellent work done on [The Tower]27 by Delia Derbyshire and John Harrison’:

This play set them an extremely difficult task and they rose to the challenge with a
degree of imaginative intuition and technical mastery which deserves the highest
admiration and which will inevitably earn a lion's share of any success the produc-
tion may eventually achieve. I only wish that is [sic] were possible for the names of
contributors of this calibre to be mentioned in the credits in the Radio Times and
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 67

on the air. But failing this I should like to register the fact that I regard their con-
tribution to this production as being at least of equal importance to that of the pro-
ducer himself.28

Esslin's fulsome praise was not enough to overturn the BBC's standard policy
on individual credits but underlines the growing esteem in which Derbyshire's
creativity was held by her colleagues and senior figures within the BBC. It was
not enough, however, to persuade Briscoe. Tellingly, following the production
of ‘The Naked Sun’, a 1969 episode of the science-fiction anthology series Out
of the Unknown (1965–67, 1969, 1971),29 there were requests by their respective
Heads for the lighting, sound and costume supervisors on the production to be
given credit, but Briscoe did not lobby on Derbyshire's behalf for her music to
receive similar recognition.30
If Briscoe was not prepared to stretch the BBC's policy on credits for Radio-
phonic Workshop staff in 1963 when Doctor Who first appeared, a decade later
he was accusing the Doctor Who production team of the very ‘crime’ with
which he has been charged. In January 1974, Doctor Who was in the midst of
its tenth anniversary with the Radio Times marking the milestone with a Doctor
Who Special, recognising the contribution of ‘the backroom boys’. The Radio-
phonic Workshop, however, received little recognition and Briscoe wrote to the
programme's producer, Barry Letts, to express his disappointment that his staff
were given nothing more than ‘a name drop’ in a piece on Dudley Simpson,
the show's principal composer. Briscoe's ‘officious side’ saw him coming to the
defence of his staff: ‘Delia, Brian and Dick [Mills] have, I think, made signifi-
cant contributions to the success of Dr Who over the years. Whether or not this
warrants a word or two from you in Radio Times I leave for you to decide and,
should it be felt necessary, a brief not-too-technical note could be prepared’.31
Although Derbyshire did not receive an official on-screen credit for her work
on Doctor Who, it is certainly not the case that her contribution was actively
hidden and suppressed by the BBC. The Doctor Who theme was released com-
mercially as a record by Decca in 1964, and in the same year, the BBC prepared
an information sheet about the creation of the Doctor Who theme tune, which
emphasised that one of the most distinctive qualities about the music was that
nobody actually played it with each note being constructed by electronic means.
This information sheet made no direct reference to Derbyshire (‘DR. WHO title
music by Ron Grainer with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’) but was clear
about the impressive level of skill required to create the theme tune:

working from Ron Grainer's score, the music was constructed note by note, with in-
finite patience, and without the use of any live instrumentalists whatsoever. But
what does such a score look like – is it a series of undecipherable hieroglyphics set
out on logarithmic graph paper? No – in fact in this case it was not far removed
from a regular music score except for certain rather abstract indications of tonal
quality such as “clouds”, “wind bubble” etc, and subsequently a rather awe-inspiring
68 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

superscription of long decimal numbers denoting decibels, cycles per second and
inches of tape [. . .] The resulting catchy sound, which can be heard every week in-
troducing Dr. Who on BBC Television, has now been issued as a commercial
recording.32

Derbyshire's marvellous arrangement was realised in the pre-synthesiser days

of the Workshop: a combination of sounds augmented using musique concrète
techniques, sine and square wave oscillators, and a white noise generator. These
sounds were recorded to tape and manipulated, raised and lowered in pitch,
sped up, slowed down, looped and filtered to eliminate particular frequencies – a
painstaking process informed by Derbyshire's mathematical precision, but with
a human warmth and unpredictability often felt by opponents of electronic mu-
sic to be lacking in the field.33 Indeed, prior to the positive response generated
by the Doctor Who theme tune, a considerable amount of reviews and corre-
spondence relating to the Radiophonic Workshop's output stressed frustration
and distaste with what was perceived by some viewers and listeners as unpleas-
ant, discordant noise. The Radio Times received several complaints including
one viewer, in November 1960, describing the ‘noise’ before the Two O' Clock
Television News as ‘a nightmare in a railway train!’34 Whereas a later letter in
September 1962 noted that ‘it seems that every interval between radio pro-
grammes has now to be filled with weird, celestial, electronic, faintly musical
noises.’35 More critical was a letter from April 1962 bemoaning that ‘the BBC
had forgotten conventional music and resorted to electronic music’ otherwise
known as ‘horrible emanations’.36 Desmond Briscoe responded that ‘many of
the sounds we produce are [. . .] well designed and beautiful, which is more than
can be said for the building where, in fact, they are made’.37 Yet even Briscoe
had been forced to acknowledge the previous year in 1961 that ‘it has been
found that whilst with manipulated sound it is easy to be unpleasant, to create
an atmosphere of horror, it is difficult to be pleasant, and more difficult to be
beautiful.’38 Derbyshire's Doctor Who arrangement challenged these perceptions
of electronic music.
It certainly intrigued audiences at the time, as the 4 September 1964 instal-
ment of the radio question and answer show, Information Please, reveals. Pre-
sented by Franklin Engelmann with a busy piece of light orchestral theme
music, underlining just how unusual and alien the Doctor Who theme was in the
British televisual and musical landscape at the time, Information Please fielded
questions from the public on a variety of topics including, in the 4 September
edition, the following request from a Miss Anne Macmillan of Perth: ‘We often
hear in mystery or science fiction plays strange, eerie music, which I understand
is not produced by ordinary musical instruments but electronically. How is that
done?’ To answer that question, the programme provided a short feature in
which Engelmann visited the Radiophonic Workshop to meet with Derbyshire
and discover how, amongst other things, the Doctor Who theme was made. The
conversation between Derbyshire and Engelmann seems to have provided the
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 69

basis for the BBC information sheet discussed earlier. Several of the observations
by both Derbyshire and Engelmann about the Doctor Who theme tune's con-
struction reappear, word for word, in the information sheet. The radio item,
however, is revealing, not just for the air of slightly patronising and paternal be-
musement that runs throughout (acknowledging her ‘good technical knowledge
combined with a musical training and a sense of dramatic ability’, Derbyshire is
described by Engelmann as ‘a very versatile girl’ and the music sounding as
though it was ‘picked up by radio telescope from outer space’) but also the tone
in which Derbyshire's work is framed by the programme. Having explained her
working methods and tools (‘without going into technical details’ pleads Engel-
mann), including the ‘wobbulator’ (‘well that is simply an oscillator which wob-
bles!’), Derbyshire delights in a final demonstration of her craft as Engelmann's
clipped ‘received pronunciation’ tones begin to warp and gurgle. ‘Hey! What are
you doing to my voice Miss Derbyshire?’ ‘I've turned you into a fish!’ ‘Thank
you very much indeed Miss Derbyshire’. That mischievousness was a feature of
Derbyshire's personality, but there is a subtext to the item: her work is viewed as
trickery, magic even, the opportunity for a funny game.
The playfulness in much of Derbyshire's music is one of its most endearing
and charming features, but there is an awkward question here as well. ‘Re-
stricted’ to theme tunes, radio call signs and advertising jingles is there anything
here of musical substance?39 To answer that question in the affirmative, certain
prejudices about the perceived lesser status of functional music and shorter
works or miniatures need to be overcome. Nonetheless, there is something bit-
tersweet about the opening track on the 2007 CD of Daphne Oram's electronic
music from the 1960s and 1970s, where Oram (Derbyshire's predecessor and
one of the co-founders of the Radiophonic Workshop with Desmond Briscoe)
introduces her new studio and its sonic possibilities and offers as her first ex-
ample of these exciting new horizons an advertising jingle for power tools. Der-
byshire and her close friend and colleague Brian Hodgson (creator of the
TARDIS dematerialisation sound and Dalek voices and the special sound for
Doctor Who as a whole until 1973) were clearly aware of the need to counter
certain assumptions about electronic music and the tone of some of the media
coverage of the Radiophonic Workshop which emphasised the sci-fi gimmickry
of Doctor Who. In January 1965, they organised an open day with the proposed
title ‘Serious Publicity for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, in which ‘selected
members of the responsible press’ were invited to attend the Workshop during
work on the music (by Derbyshire) for The After Life (1965),40 the third Inven-
tion for Radio, a series of four collaborations between Derbyshire and the poet
Barry Bermange.41 It is almost as if Derbyshire and Hodgson, conscious of the
‘gimmick’ publicity their Doctor Who work was generating, were trying to cor-
rect that by drawing attention to the Workshop's more serious ‘art’ projects.
One publication that seemed to get the message was the fashion, lifestyle and
high society magazine, Tatler, which ran a 12 May 1965 feature titled ‘The Cli-
mate for Experiment’. The piece asserted that ‘artists and people concerned
70 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

with the social scene are induced to experiment when the century moves faster
than they do [. . .] The boundaries of the arts must be pushed even further to
include new experience – designers and architects must make themselves aware
of what the public needs before the public itself is aware of the need. Here are a
dozen experimentors, all concerned, all committed and all pleased to be living
in Britain in 1965’.42 In poll position, showcased on a centrefold photograph
like a publicity still from Mad Men (2007–present)43 or, perhaps more appro-
priately, The Hour (2011–12),44 was the Radiophonic Workshop: Desmond
Briscoe, Dick Mills, Delia Derbyshire, Keith Salmon and Brian Hodgson, with
Doctor Who mentioned most prominently alongside other significant Radio-
phonic Workshop achievements such as Samuel Beckett's Embers (1959).45
If Tatler featured the Radiophonic Workshop as a whole, other publications
across 1965 chose to focus exclusively on Derbyshire with her work on Doctor
Who to the fore. The Coventry Evening Telegraph located Derbyshire within
‘this almost wholly male scientific preserve’ where she acknowledged that ‘in
the three years I have been here I suppose my most popular accomplishment
was doing the electronic setting to [. . .] “Dr. Who”’.46 The Daily Express
claimed that the Workshop's ‘proudest achievement – in collaboration with
Ron Grainer – is the signature tune for “Dr. Who” which has proved so popu-
lar that they have brought out a single as a candidate for the Top Twenty’,47
and the Lancashire Evening Post painted a vivid portrait of Derbyshire (‘She
can talk about electronic manipulation, “white noises,” “pink noises” and man-
ual tape manipulation like some girls talk about pop records’) as a ‘tall girl with
a mixed mathematics and music degree’ who produced the sounds which ‘made
one five-year-old I know wet the bed the first time he heard it’ before noting
that ‘neither she, nor the composer Ron Grainer dreamt that a sound which
was produced purely to go with the credit titles would virtually steal the thun-
der from the stars of the serial’.48
By the mid-1960s, the appeal and fascination of the Doctor Who theme tune
had generated such an amount of requests to visit the Radiophonic Workshop
that Briscoe, although noting that ‘we like to help students when possible’, ad-
vised that school parties visiting the BBC should no longer be allowed to see the
Radiophonic Workshop as it distracted the staff from their work.49 There had
been interest in the Workshop prior to Doctor Who, but, from early 1964 on-
wards, the Workshop's mailbox was bulging with a substantial amount of corre-
spondence about the Doctor Who theme from as far afield as Canada. The
theme tune attracted most letters from enthusiastic teenagers as well as (occa-
sionally) insistent school Music Masters. Derbyshire was more than happy to en-
gage in outreach activities (in 1962 she assisted Luciano Berio with sessions on
electronic music at Dartington international summer school) and respond to
questions about her creation. That public interest continued throughout the
1960s with numerous letters from people asking how electronic music was made,
some for personal interest others for theses and school projects with Doctor
Who often mentioned. In 1966, the musicologist and composer Hugh Davies,
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 71

who had visited the Workshop in 1963 for his thesis on electronic music before
working as Karlheinz Stockhausen's personal assistant, contacted Briscoe on be-
half of François Bayle and the Parisian Group de Recherches Musicales, asking
for Briscoe's assistance with an international audit of all compositions for mag-
netic tape ever composed up to the end of 1966 in order to document the early
history of tape music, with the Doctor Who theme duly acknowledged. This de-
velopment was indicative of the growing awareness of Derbyshire's work
amongst figures within so-called ‘serious’ music. On 26 April 1968, her piece ti-
tled ‘Composition’ featured alongside works by Luciano Berio, Tristram Cary,
Brian Dennis, Pierre Henry and Donald Henshilwood on the programme of the
first concert of electronic music given in the north west of England, at Liverpool
University's Mountford Hall.
By now her profile had expanded considerably. She was commissioned to com-
pose for the first edition of the Brighton festival in 1967, and her freelance activity
increased markedly through Unit Delta Plus and Kaleidophon, studios she set up
with, respectively, Brian Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff, and Hodgson and David
Vorhaus. Derbyshire and Hodgson often collaborated, and there is clear evidence
in her archive of the two sharing and recycling sounds they had created for earlier
BBC productions. Sounds and cues from 1964's Amor Dei return in Derbyshire's
work for Peter Hall's 1967 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of
Macbeth. Similarly, sounds from a theatre production could also re-materialise in
a later project for the BBC as was the case with an early 1970s production of
Macbeth that Kaleidophon contributed ambiences to, one of which would reap-
pear nearly ten years later in the Dalek tunnels deep beneath the surface of Skaro
in the Tom Baker Doctor Who story ‘Destiny of the Daleks’ (1979).
When ‘Destiny of the Daleks’ was broadcast, Derbyshire had been long gone
from the BBC. What prompted her to leave the corporation in 1973? Inter-
viewed by John Cavanagh in 1998, she discussed how the BBC had become in-
creasingly dominated by accountants and that both the corporation and the
world at large had ‘gone out of tune with itself’.50 It is certainly true that the
early 1970s were a turbulent time at the Radiophonic Workshop, with increased
demands being placed on its staff without an adequate increase in the resources
needed to meet them. Across 1971–72, there were major discussions around
staffing at the Radiophonic Workshop and its role within the BBC. In March
1971, the Managing Director of BBC Radio, although acknowledging that ‘[the
Radiophonic Workshop] is a useful part of the BBC’, recommended that ‘we
could set a target for a reduction in operating expenditure’ and the possibility
of dropping one of the assistants (the official staff title) at the Radiophonic
Workshop.51 Much more revealing is a confidential document from late 1971,
in which Briscoe detailed his concerns about the staffing and management of
the Workshop. He warned that the commitments placed upon the Radiophonic
Workshop in the previous twelve months had ‘exceeded both quantitatively and
qualitatively those for any previous year’ and that, although the recent purchase
of ‘small electronic synthesisers’ had enabled the Workshop to meet increased
72 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

demands, 1971 had stretched his staff to the limits with the year ending with
sickness and annual leave being taken in November and December.52 It was
clearly not just Derbyshire who was feeling this change, and Briscoe cham-
pioned the ‘talents of the individual members [and their] ability to provide an
absolutely reliable creative service’ noting that his staff were becoming increas-
ingly vulnerable and that the increased demands meant that the organisation
was no longer adequate.53 It is a damning assessment and lends credibility to
Derbyshire's much later comments about accountants taking over at the BBC –
cuts to posts and value for money are clearly driving concerns in much of the
correspondence during these years. At the same time, the Radiophonic Work-
shop's greater emphasis in the 1970s on the use of synthesisers, with ever tigh-
ter deadlines, moved away from Derbyshire's preferred tape and musique
concrète techniques where she could create and sculpt her own sounds. In a
1999 interview, her response to Sonic Boom's observation that only a minority
of the Radiophonic Workshop's output was ‘really great, and the majority of it
was crap, churned-out-for-TV tunes’ underlines her disaffection with the shift
in ethos which she perceived at the BBC in the early 1970s:

Well, this was the level of what was demanded, and this was why I eventually left. I
didn't want to compromise my integrity any further. I was fed up with having my
stuff turned down because it was too sophisticated, and yet it was lapped up when I
played it to anyone outside the BBC. The BBC was very wary, increasingly being
run by committees and accountants, and they seemed to be dead scared of anything
that was a bit unusual. And my passion is to make original, abstract electronic
sounds and organise them in a very appealing, acceptable way, to any intelligent
person. But it was set up as a service to the drama department. It was nothing to do
with music, and that's it.54

Derbyshire was not alone in this perception of the BBC of the early-to-mid
1970s, with practitioners like Peter Watkins observing ‘that had TV taken an al-
ternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open
way, global society today would be vastly more humane and just’.55 The corpo-
ration was still a broadcaster capable of producing ‘original’ and ‘unusual’
works, to use Derbyshire's descriptors, such as David Rudkin and Alan Clarke's
Penda's Fen (1974), featured in the fifth season of Play for Today (1970–84)56
(a strand which Derbyshire had also contributed to), but it seems that Derby-
shire felt there were no longer enough opportunities within the BBC to satisfy
her creative needs and her working methods were becoming increasingly at
odds with the overriding demands being placed on the Radiophonic Workshop.
Delia Derbyshire left the BBC in 1973, still in her thirties and with the poten-
tial for so much more music. She worked briefly at Brian Hodgson's Electrophon
studio, collaborated with the Dutch video artist Madelon Hooykaas on two films
(Een van die dagen/One of These Days and Overbruggen/About Bridges) released
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 73

in 1973 and 1975, respectively, and with Elisabeth Kozmian on her 1980 film,
Two Houses, but her output reduced considerably following her departure from
the corporation. After working for Laing Pipelines as a radio operator and relo-
cating to Cumbria, she worked with the artist Li Yuan-chia at the LYC Museum
and Art Gallery at Banks by Hadrian's Wall. In 1978, she returned to London
and settled in Northampton in 1980 with Clive Blackburn, her partner for the
remainder of her life. The two would work together on songs privately, but it
was not until 2003 that new work by Derbyshire would be released in the form
of Synchrondipity Machine (an unfinished dream), a collaboration with Sonic
Boom, whom she had begun to work with in the late 1990s before her death in
2001. Yet, although only consistently active as a professional musician for just
over ten years, her work has a remarkable range – if she is most often associated
with the shimmering beauty and melancholy ambience of pieces like ‘Blue Veils
and Golden Sands’ then there are also playful, whimsical and delightful works
like ‘Door to Door’ or ‘Time to Go’ and its transformation of the Greenwich
time signal ‘pips’ into ‘Oranges and Lemons’ as well as aggressive machine-like
rhythms and stop-start angular ‘computer’ melodies or the paradigm shifting
dance beats buried deep within the mix of a BBC schools radio dramatisation of
the story of Noah – years ahead of its time, but tucked beneath a cheery melody
and wholesome arrangement so that its kinetic groove and squelching pulse was
barely noticeable to the schoolchildren of 1971. It is precisely that connection,
whether in schools radio and television or Doctor Who, which enabled her work
to place deep roots in the formative soundscapes of children growing up in the
1960s and 1970s who have gone on to become successful musicians and cham-
pion Delia Derbyshire as a seminal influence and inspiration.57 When she, Brian
Hodgson and Peter Zinovieff established Unit Delta Plus, one of the core aims
of the organisation was, as Derbyshire acknowledged, to bring electronic music
to the public.58 Over forty years on, with new works inspired by Derbyshire be-
ing commissioned and performed by prominent music groups, such as the Kro-
nos Quartet and the first ‘Delia Derbyshire Day’ held in January 2013, the extent
of Delia Derbyshire's creativity can still not be counted in full and the influence
of her music continues to grow. 23 November 2013 may well be the fiftieth anni-
versary of Doctor Who, but the programme would be far less memorable if its
theme tune had not been in a Delian mode.

Notes
1 Doctor Who (BBC/BBC Wales/BBC TV, 1963–89, 1996, 2005–present).
2 Inside Out (BBC/BBC One, 2002–present).
3 Quatermass and the Pit (BBC, 1958).
4 Forbidden Planet (Fred M. Wilcox, 1956).
5 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/11/2, Radiophonic
Workshop General, BBC Press Service, press release by B. Kane, ‘The Wizards of
Room 13 – The BBC's Radiophonic Workshop’, December 1960.
74 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

6 See, for example, Jonathan Bignell and Andrew O'Day, Terry Nation, Manchester
University Press, 2004, pp. 51–2; James Chapman, Inside the TARDIS: The Worlds
of Doctor Who, I.B. Tauris, 2013, pp. 26–7.
7 David J. Howe, Stephen James Walker and Mark Stammers, The Handbook: The
Unofficial and Unauthorised Guide to the Production of Doctor Who, Telos, 2005, p. 109.
8 Clifford Davis, ‘Verity's Tune is Way Out – Of This World!’ Daily Mirror,
7 December 1963.
9 Seasons, The (BBC School Radio/BBC Radio 4, 1969).
10 David Cain, ‘Q+A with Julian House (Ghost Box) and Composer David Cain’, CD
Liner Notes, The Seasons, Trunk Records, 2012.
11 Delia Derbyshire Archive, Manchester, Juvenile Papers of Delia Derbyshire, BDD/1/
1/1/5, Delia Derbyshire, ‘A Glimpse Into the Future’, 25 September 1952.
12 Amor Dei (BBC Third Programme, 1964).
13 Sonic Boom, ‘Delia Derbyshire Interview’, first published in Surface magazine, May
2000, http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_surface.php, accessed 27 October
2013.
14 Time On Our Hands (BBC, 1963).
15 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC N15/17/1, Time On Our
Hands, script and press release material, 1962–63. The finished programme was
transmitted on 19 March 1963.
16 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968).
17 In fact, Delia would have to wait fifty years before she received an on-screen credit in
Doctor Who for arranging the original theme tune. When the programme's fiftieth-
anniversary special, ‘The Day of the Doctor’, was broadcast on 23 November 2013,
the episode opened with the Derbyshire arrangement and in its closing credits noted
‘Original theme arranged by Delia Derbyshire’.
18 Davis, ‘Verity's Tune is Way Out’, 1963.
19 Ibid.
20 Jo Hutton, ‘Radiophonic Ladies’, interview conducted in 2000 and published on the Sonic
Arts Network, http://web.archive.org/web/20050906164214/http://www.sonicartsnetwork.
org/ARTICLES/ARTICLE2000JoHutton.html, accessed 27 October 2013.
21 Both Jude Rogers and Michelle Drury discuss Delia Derbyshire's status as a ‘feminist
icon’ and note the obstructions and battles that she faced in her career as a result of
her gender. Jude Rogers, ‘In Praise of Delia Derbyshire’, The Guardian, 20 July 2008,
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/jul/20/electronicmusic.bbc, accessed
18 December 2013; Michelle Drury, ‘Do Women Dream of Electric Sheep? Delia
Derbyshire and the Women of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, The f word:
Contemporary UK Feminism, 28 October 2012, http://www.thefword.org.uk/features/
2012/10/radiophonic_workshop, accessed 18 December 2013. Tim Baker comments
that Delia ‘faced a lot of prejudice in a then male dominated world of engineers,
technicians, mathematicians and musicians, and bitchy BBC queens who didn't like a
strong-minded perfectionist woman who refused to stay in her place’. Tim Baker,
‘Ada Lovelace Day: Delia Derbyshire’, Radio Clash, 24 March 2010, http://www.
radioclash.com/archives/2010/03/24/ada-lovelace-day-delia-derbyshire, accessed 18
December 2013.
 ‘Way Out – Of This World!’ 75

22 Fidelma Cook, interview with Clive Blackburn (article title unknown), Mail on
Sunday, 20 March 2005, transcript available online at http://www.effectrode.com/
magnetic-delay/delia-derbyshire/, accessed 27 October 2013.
23 Louis Niebur, Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop, Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 131.
24 Ibid., p. 142.
25 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/25/2, Radiophonic
Workshop Scrapbooks, undated letter from Delia Derbyshire to Desmond Briscoe.
Although undated, the letter is clearly from 1977 as it is written in response to the
transmission on 13 February 1977 of Briscoe's A Wall Walks Slowly.
26 Delia Derbyshire Archive, Manchester, Delia Derbyshire interviewed by Jo Hutton,
audio recording donated by Jo Hutton, 24 February 2000.
27 The Tower (BBC Third Programme, 1964).
28 Delia Derbyshire Archive, Manchester, DD332, memo from Martin Esslin to
Desmond Briscoe, ‘The Tower’, 30 June 1964.
29 Out of the Unknown (BBC/BBC2, 1965–67, 1969, 1971).
30 See the production files for ‘The Naked Sun’, BBC Written Archives Centre,
Caversham, BBC WAC T5/1, 702/1.
31 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/31/1, Radiophonic
Workshop General Programme Correspondence, memo from Desmond Briscoe to
Barry Letts, ‘Re: Radio Times Dr Who Special”, 4 January 1974.
32 Delia Derbyshire Archive, Manchester, DD333, author unknown, ‘DR. WHO title
music by Ron Grainer with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, undated (but at least
September 1964).
33 For a more in-depth account of the creation of the Doctor Who theme tune, see Mark
Ayres' excellent article ‘A History of the Doctor Who Theme’ available at his website,
http://markayres.rwsprojects.co.uk/DWTheme.htm, accessed 27 October 2013.
34 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/25/1, Radiophonic
Workshop Scrapbooks, letter from F.M.M. (Shrewsbury), Radio Times, 10
November 1960.
35 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/25/1, Radiophonic
Workshop Scrapbooks, letter from Leslie F. Stevenson (Hillsborough, County
Down), Radio Times, 8 September 1962.
36 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/25/1, Radiophonic
Workshop Scrapbooks, letter titled ‘Radiophonic Music. . .’, Radio Times, 19 April 1962.
37 Ibid.
38 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/11/2, Radiophonic
Workshop General 1953–73 File 2, ‘The B.B.C. Radiophonic Workshop’, undated
document by Desmond Briscoe. Although a publication date is not given on the
document, the text is a variation of an earlier document from 1 March 1961 and
pre-dates Derbyshire's arrival at the Radiophonic Workshop.
39 Notably, when the album BBC Radiophonic Music, featuring tracks by John Baker,
David Cain and Delia, was reviewed in the November 1973 edition of Hi-Fi News &
Record Review, the anonymous reviewer commented that some of the pieces are
‘mere electronic jingles while others, notably the works of Delia Derbyshire, have
enough interest to exist in their own right’.
40 After Life, The (BBC Third Programme, 1965).
76 Critical Studies in Television 9/1

41 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/29/2, Radiophonic

Workshop External Corres.: General, event proposal by Delia Derbyshire and Brian
Hodgson, ‘Serious Publicity for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop’, 13 January 1965.
42 J. Roger Baker, ‘The Climate for Experiment’, Tatler, 12 May 1965.
43 Mad Men (Lionsgate Television/Weiner Bros. [in association with]/U.R.O.K
Productions/American Movie Classics [AMC], 2007–present).
44 The Hour (Kudos Film and Television/BBC, 2011–12).
45 Embers (BBC Third Programme, 1959).
46 Anonymous, ‘Delia Makes a Hit With “Dr. Who”’, Coventry Evening Telegraph, 28
April 1965.
47 Anonymous, ‘Composers Without Crotchets’, Daily Express, 10 June 1965.
48 Joan Mulcaster, ‘Weird Noises, But They're All in a Day's Work’, Lancaster Evening
Post, 18 November 1965.
49 See various responses by Briscoe to requests to visit the Workshop across 1965–66.
BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/29/1, Radiophonic
Workshop External Corres.
50 John Cavanagh, ‘Delia Derbyshire: On Our Wavelength’, first published in Boazine 7,
1998, http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_boa.php, accessed 27 October 2013.
51 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/11/1, Radiophonic
Workshop General 1953–73 File 1, letter from Ian Trethowan, ‘Radiophonic
Workshop’, 25 March 1971.
52 BBC Written Archives Centre, Caversham, BBC WAC R97/11/1, Radiophonic
Workshop General 1953–73 File 1, letter from Desmond Briscoe, ‘Staffing and
Organisation’, 26 November 1971.
53 Ibid.
54 Sonic Boom, ‘Delia Derbyshire Interview’, http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/
interview_surface.php, accessed 27 October 2013.
55 Peter Lennon, ‘Hate and War’, Guardian, 25 February 2000, http://www.theguardian.
com/film/2000/feb/25/1, accessed 24 November 2010.
56 Play for Today (BBC/BBC1 1970–84).
57 Derbyshire's influence has been acknowledged by a wide and diverse range of
musicians, such as Aphex Twin, Graham Massey, Drew Mulholland, Orbital and
Adrian Utley of Portishead as well as musicians and composers who have discovered
or responded to her work more recently, including Caro Churchill, Naomi Kashiwagi,
Ailís Ní Ríain, Bishi, Nicole Lizée and the Kronos Quartet.
58 Sonic Boom, ‘Delia Derbyshire Interview’, http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/
interview_surface.php, accessed 27 October 2013.

David Butler is Senior Lecturer in Drama and Screen Studies at the University of
Manchester. He is the editor of Time and Relative Dissertations in Space: Critical
Perspectives on Doctor Who (2007) and the author of Fantasy Cinema: Impossible
Worlds on Screen (2009). His recent work on Doctor Who includes chapters on
the programme's use of stock music and leitmotifs as well as the relationship be-
tween music, multiculturalism and the monstrous in the scores of Murray Gold
and the ‘classic’ era. Alongside this work, he is also engaged in ongoing research
with the archive of Delia Derbyshire, which was donated to the University of
Manchester by the composer Mark Ayres on behalf of the Derbyshire estate.