Doctor Who: An unearthly sound

Doctor Who has one of the most recognisable theme tunes in the history of television and is loved and feared in equal measure. The iconic electronic tones herald the start of each strange and terrifying adventure in the Whoniverse.

In the above memo from the BBC Written Archives, Doctor Who producer Verity Lambert asks Australian composer Ron Grainer and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to work together on the theme music:

Grainer is also known for his work composing the theme tunes to The Prisoner, Steptoe and Son and Tales of the Unexpected. He also won an Ivor Novello award for his work on the BBC series Maigret in 1961, but the signature theme tune for Doctor Who remains his most celebrated work.

Here, Brian Hodgson, who created many of the best-known sound effects for Doctor Who, explains how Grainer became involved and how the theme tune was realised by Delia Derbyshire. He alludes to the fact that Derbyshire, alongside the rest of the Radiophonic Workshop staff, were never given individual credit for their work. This was in accordance with BBC policy at the time.

Delia Derbyshire was a pioneer in the world of electronic music. She was working on the radio programme Record Review when she heard about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in Maida Vale. She asked specifically to work there and did so from April 1962, continuing throughout the sixties, contributing to more than 200 BBC programmes.

In this clip from Tomorrow's World in 1965, Delia describes her methodology. She describes taking sounds and speeding them up or slowing them down to make notes before cutting all the individual notes out on tape and sticking them together again to make music.

In 2010, Matthew Sweet travelled to The University of Manchester, home of Delia Derbyshire's private collection of audio recordings. There, he met Mark Ayres, archivist for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as well as Derbyshire's former colleagues from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Brian Hodgson and Dick Mills. Together, they discuss their memories of Delia Derbyshire, her creative process and deconstruct the elements that made up the ground-breaking track.

Just seven years after her death, Derbyshire's status as a pioneer of electronic music had already been firmly established. Here, her former Radiophonic Workshop colleagues speak about how she turned Ron Grainer’s simple manuscript into a pioneering piece of music.

Radiophonic Workshop sound engineer Dick Mills remembers working with Derbyshire on assembling the theme music and describes the lengths they had to go to find a wrong note on the tape.

Derbyshire’s original theme music continued to be used into the 1970s. In this interview, Brian Hodgson talks about the first attempt to recreate it with an early synthesizer, and about Derbyshire's reaction to Peter Howell’s 1980s version.

In 2018, composer Segun Akinola took on the task of writing music for Doctor Who. In this clip from the CBBC music series Ten Pieces, he explains how he was influenced by Delia Derbyshire to create his own version of the iconic Doctor Who theme tune.

Delia’s influence in the world of electronic music endures and her music for Doctor Who continues to inspire musicians.