Art by Matthew Fleming.
This episode was written & produced by Casey Emmerling.
What does a time machine sound like? Or a magic carpet? For the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, that was just another day at the office. For 40 years, this oddball collective of engineers and composers pushed the boundaries of sound design, crafting eerie atmospheres, quirky jingles, and the iconic audio of Doctor Who. In this episode, we explore the rise and fall of this pioneering studio with composer and archivist Mark Ayres, and uncover how these sonic wizards shaped the future of sound.
MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE
Wesley Slover - One Sec
Wesley Slover - Navigating the World
Wesley Slover - Microprocess
Wesley Slover - Nightfall Neighborhood
Wesley Slover - Innovation Abstraction
Wesley Slover - Just Facts 03
Wesley Slover - Mitosis
Wesley Slover - Me and My Robot
Wesley Slover - Just Facts 07
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View Transcript ▶︎
[20K sonic logo]
[music in: Wesley Slover - One Sec]
Here in the US, most people have probably never heard of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Even as a sound designer, I had never heard of it until well into my career. But over in the UK, the Radiophonic Workshop was a cultural institution for four decades.
It was basically a pioneering sound design department funded by the British government… almost like NASA, but for sound. And it was staffed by a ragtag group of engineers and composers whose entire job was to craft bizarre sounds and music for BBC programs. This includes the amazing sound effects and theme music of Doctor Who, which are still being used today. The Workshop’s members never got famous, but their work has influenced generations of sound designers and musicians.
[music fades under]
I’ll let Supervising Producer Casey Emmerling take it from here.
[music in: film projector starts up with music: Franz Gordon - Tomorrow I’ll Be Gone]
In the 1930s and ‘40s, sound design was in its infancy. In fact, the term sound design didn't even exist yet. Back then, most of the sounds you heard in film, television and radio plays were pretty concrete. Things like creaking doors... [sfx] thunder claps... [sfx] and glass breaking. [sfx]
[music fade under]
But soon enough, creators started wanting more abstract sounds.
[theremin music in]
By the 1950s, science fiction was all the rage. And producers needed futuristic sounds to go with these spaceships and laser guns.
[theremin out with 50s laser gun]
Beyond that, they wanted sounds that didn’t come from a physical source, but conveyed emotion.
Mark: If you had a play about somebody having a nervous breakdown, where could you find the sound effect of someone having a nervous breakdown? What does that sound like? It's not a naturalistic sound.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Navigating the World]
Mark: Hello, I'm Mark Ayres. I'm a composer, sound designer, producer, remixer, mixer, remastering engineer, whatever. In the early years of sound design, a lot of innovation was driven by radio plays.
Mark: During the 1950s, people were getting far more experimental with radio drama. And producers at Broadcasting House in London...
The home of BBC Radio...
Mark: …saw what was happening on the continent in the field of electronic music. So there were two big studios in Europe.
One was in Paris.
Mark: The Paris studio was largely involved with Musique Concrète, which is recordings of found sounds turned into music. So, you know, you can record the sounds of [sfx: bird call] nature or the sounds of bottles being popped [sfx: bottle pop] and things like that, and making music out of those sounds. That's called Musique Concrète.
[music out intro in: Pierre Henry & Pierre Schaeffer - Symphony of a Lone Man]
As you might guess, “concrète” means concrete... Not like pavement in this case, but like the real, concrete world. This is a 1951 piece of Musique Concrète called “Symphony of the Lone Man” by composers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer.
[music up, then under]
The other studio experimenting with electronic music was in Cologne, Germany.
[music in: Karlheniz Stockhausen - Studie 1]
Mark: In Cologne, the studio was more involved in creating music out of pure electronic sources.
...Things like oscillators and noise generators. What you're hearing now is a 1953 piece by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen made purely of sine waves.
[music up, then out]
Mark: So, they were very different disciplines. But both studios had been set up by broadcasting organizations to experiment with this new musical art.
And the BBC realized that these techniques might be useful for what they were making.
Mark: What the BBC wanted was music and sound for programs on BBC Radio and Television.
So a couple of BBC Radio employees started testing things out.
Mark: Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe were experimenting with this stuff. And the way they were doing that was, back then, broadcasting shut down at 11 o'clock at night, and they played the national anthem, [God Save the Queen TV sign off] and the whole country went to bed…
[God Save the Queen up, then out]
Mark: And then started up again at sort of 6 o'clock in the morning with the news. [1950s BBC News Intro up, then under]
Mark: So there was all this time overnight when nobody was using all the gear. So Daphne and Desmond would borrow all the gear from all the studios, wheel it down the corridors…
Mark: [carts rolling down hallway + footsteps + whistling] Set up an electronic music studio, have fun making sounds... [Radiophonic beep boops]
Mark: And then try and put it all back where it came from by the time everybody came in the next morning. [carts + footsteps + whistling] Around this time, the BBC produced a radio play by the famous Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. It's called All That Fall, and it follows an old woman on her slow, exhausting walk to a train station. But underneath that, it's about her psychological journey, and her fear of aging and decline.
Beckett wanted the sound to help convey these emotions. And that gave Desmond Briscoe a chance to use these techniques on a high-profile production. Here's a clip from the play.
[clip: All That Fall]
All That Fall was immediately recognized as something new and exciting... But if Desmond and Daphne were gonna produce more work like this, they couldn't do it in the middle of the night with borrowed equipment.
Mark: It was very quickly realized that that was no way to run a business. So there was a couple of free rooms at the Maida Vale Recording Studio, which is the big BBC music recording studio in Northwest London.
Mark: And in 1958, they were given these two rooms and, as they always said, "The key to the redundant stores departments," so any bits of gear that nobody else wanted, they could have to experiment and make electronic music with, and that's how the department started.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Microprocess]
They called it the [with BBC voices] BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Mark: They're basically two words for the same thing. "Radio" and "Phonic." "Phonic" is "Of sound." And they were just put together because it sounded like an interesting name, “Radiophonic.” At first, the Workshop was just Desmond, Daphne, and a few engineers. But gradually, people started trickling in.
Mark: They got their staff from, mainly, studio managers in BBC Radio. So people who really knew how to create sound, how to cut sound, edit tape, et cetera, how to get the best recordings. And they were after people who had mathematical, engineering, and/or music background.
It was a smart group of people working in uncharted territory. No one was an expert. But as Desmond would often say, "Because we're not experts, we don't know what we shouldn't be able to do."
Mark: Of course, they weren't experts because it wasn't a field that existed. They were creating a whole new field of the commercial use of electronic sounds and music.
The commercial aspect is what set them apart from the studios in France and Germany.
Mark: The continental studios were making art music. They weren't making applied music. Everything that the Workshop did was applied. It was to serve another person's vision.
[music out]
[sound design throughout]
To bring those visions to life, they'd start with recordings of everyday objects... Coins, bells, wooden blocks, radiators, anything that made a sound. They also used oscillators and other equipment to make electronic sounds. [trio of tones, different waveforms]
Then, they'd take that tape and manipulate it in all kinds of ways. They could slow it down to lower the pitch... Or speed it up to raise it. They could flip it backwards to reverse it.... Or splice it into a loop so it repeated endlessly... They could run two tapes slightly out of sync to make a doubling effect... Or feed the signal back on itself to make a trailing echo...
[sound echoes out with warm tape delay]
Sometimes, they'd chop the tape into pieces that were only a few millimeters long. And other times, they'd have loops of tape that were 40 or 50 feet long, running down the hallway to another machine. Using these techniques, they could make all kinds of strange music and eerie soundscapes.
[Quatermass & The Pit Effects in]
Mark: One of their first big commissions was television production called Quatermass and the Pit, which was an early science fiction series.
The show is about the discovery of an ancient buried spaceship that unleashes an evil psychic energy on the people of London.
Mark: They made some wonderful sort of rumbling, ghostly, sounds for that.
[Quatermass & The Pit sounds out]
Once the BBC realized what the Workshop could do...
Mark: They quickly started getting lots and lots of commissions to do weird and wacky sounds and music for radio and television. One was for a comedy series called The Goon Show. It was for a character named Major Bloodnok, who loved curry.
Mark: And every time, you know, he had a curry, you'd get the sound of Major Bloodnok's stomach, which was, you know, his digestive system working, and it's a comedy sound effect.
[sfx: Major Bloodnok's Stomach]
During this time, there were lots of local BBC radio stations popping up. And each station needed a unique, identifying jingle... which the Workshop was happy to provide.
[music in: David Cain - Radio Sheffield]
This tune was made by Workshop composer David Cain for Radio Scheffield. Here's David in the BBC documentary Alchemists of Sound.
David Cain: I had a talk on the telephone with the radio director up there. And I said, "Well, I'll tell you what, send me a canteen of cutlery, and we'll do it with that." And I recorded them. And those were the basis for Radio Sheffield.
David Cain: The tune's played on the tines of the fork… the bass line’s on the knife… and the rhythm was the spoons.
[music out]
And some of these strange sounds were made specifically for kids.
Mark: Their biggest client, the biggest work they did for the BBC was for schools programs, educational programs.
Across the UK, teachers would tune into BBC Television or BBC Radio, while their students watched and listened. And that's how Mark first heard these sounds growing up in the 1960s. For instance, there was one program that revolved around a magic carpet.
[music in: Jenyth Worsley - Music for a Magic Carpet]
Mark: It was a program which was designed to be played in schools to fire kids’ imaginations and get them moving and acting. And so we all had to sit in small groups around the classroom or the playground, wherever we were listening to the program, and then pretend to be on a magic carpet.
Mark: And you would rock around as the carpet swooped lower over mountains, et cetera. And that there was a sound effect, a Radiophonic Workshop score to accompany this...
[Music for a Magic Carpet out]
Mark: ...which of course sounded just like a magic carpet to us. You know, it was electronic sound. It was the sound of the wind, white noise. It was all this kind of stuff, and it was pure imagination.
[music in: John Baker - Festival Time] The Workshop's music could also be quite groovy. This is a track called Festival Time, by Workshop composer John Baker.
Mark: …who was this amazing jazz musician who made electronic music swing.
Mark: He could actually cut tape so it syncopated. Just an incredible talent.
[music out]
But not everyone loved what the Workshop came up with.
[music in: Eric Coates - Television March]
For instance, in the 1950s, BBC Television used this music to introduce the 2 o'clock news. It's called Television March, by composer Eric Coates.
[music crossfades into Television March [Radiophonic Arrangement]
But in 1960, they swapped it out for this Radiophonic arrangement by Desmond Briscoe.
Afterwards, one viewer wrote in saying, "What is the noise supposed to be that precedes the two o’clock television news? It sounds like a nightmare in a railway train!”
While another viewer said, “Please use your influence to stop that dreadful introduction to BBC-tv programmes… Or does the background music intend it should be taken for a lunatic asylum?”
[music out]
Casey: A lot of the sounds and music coming outta the Workshop were pretty artsy and avant garde, especially for something like the intro jingle going into the news. So why do you think the BBC was willing to use these kind of experimental sounds so broadly during that period?
Mark: Quite simply because it was a BBC department who could produce it “above the line,” as it were. They were there, they might as well do the work. It was cheaper to get the Radiophonic Workshop to make a jingle than it was to employ a more conventional composer who would then have to, you know, hire a studio, and hire a band, and a mixer.
Mark: But also because it was avant garde, because it was new, because this was a new way of doing stuff which was impressionistic in a way in which perhaps conventional music wasn't.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Nightfall Neighborhood]
One of the Workshop's most impressionistic composers was a woman named Delia Derbyshire.
Mark: Delia was brought up in Coventry during the Second World War. She'd been fascinated by the sound, you know, that the bombs made, [sfx: distant bombs] as they dropped on Coventry during the war. You know, you, she found music in those sounds. She found music in the sound of people walking on the cobbled streets. [sfx: footsteps on cobblestone]
Mark: So she was fascinated by sounds. She'd gone to Cambridge. She'd studied mathematics and music. She was exactly the kind of person that the Workshop needed.
[music out]
One of Delia's favorite sounds at the time came from a green, metallic lampshade. This type of lampshade was apparently common in industrial buildings back then.
Mark: And so they were hanging all the way down the corridors at Maida Vale Studios. And I suspect that Delia accidentally bashed one [sfx] as she was wandering down the corridor, realized it made this wonderful sound full of all these harmonics. So she nicked it and, and this lampshade stayed next to her desk. And she sampled it every which way.
Mark: You know, she recorded it and she filtered it, [sfx] and she recorded it while pulling the fader up. So it had a soft attack, [sfx] and she had a hard attack version. [sfx] She reversed it. [sfx] She bowed it. [sfx] Tapped it with all sorts of different sticks [sfx] And it became this library of lampshade sounds.
[music in: Delia Derbyshire - Blue Veils and Golden Sands]
Delia used her sampled lampshade in this track, which is called “Blue Veils and Golden Sands.” It was made for a documentary about the Tuareg people, a nomadic tribe in the Sahara desert. Here's Delia describing the piece in a 1997 interview with BBC Radio Scotland.
Delia Derbyshire: I tried to convey the distance of the horizon and the heat haze. And then there's this very high, slow, reedy sound, that indicates like the strand of camels seen at a distance wandering across the desert.
[music out]
[music in: Delia Derbyshire - Ziwzhi Ziwzhi oo-oo-oo]
Delia also scored an episode of a sci-fi series called Out of the Unknown. It involved a group of robots who start worshiping the power converter on a space station. And this song is the robots' chant.
[music up for chant, then under]
The track is called uhh “Ziwzhi Ziwzhi oo-oo-oo.” Here's Delia on Radio Scotland again.
Delia Derbyshire: It is difficult to pronounce because it's made from backwards chanting. I think if you play it forwards, it would say something like, “Praise to the master, his wisdom and his reason.” And I just chose the best bits. And “Ziwzhi Ziwzhi,” “his whiz, his whiz” it's that backwards.
Delia Derbyshire: And I must say that the “oo-oo–oo” is electronic!
[music out]
[music in: Delia Derbyshire - Doctor Who]
But Delia’s most famous piece was the theme song for a different TV show... which would eventually become one of the most iconic and long running sci-fi series of all time.
That's coming up after the break.
[music up for melody, then out]
MIDROLL
[music in: Wesley Slover - Nightfall Neighborhood]
In the early '60s, the BBC greenlit a new sci-fi series called Doctor Who. It was about a being known as The Doctor, who travels through space and time defending the innocent and fighting against evil.
The producer of Doctor Who was named Verity Lambert. She wanted the show to have a unique sound. And while it was being developed, the BBC happened to make a documentary about an experimental French band…
[music fade under]
Mark: ...called Les Structures Sonores… “Musical Structures,” “Musical Sculptures.”
[music in: Les Structures Sonores - Quatour pour trois]
Mark: Jack Lasry and his colleagues, they made metallic and glass sculptures, which had a musical purpose. So they were sculptures which could be played. And they'd done concerts and made a couple of records.
[music up, then fade under]
While working on Doctor Who, Verity Lambert saw this documentary.
Mark: And she thought that would be ideal sound for her science fiction program. Unfortunately, she couldn't afford to book the band.
Mark: So she then decided what she would really want was a theme tune produced by the Radiophonic Workshop, which would sound a bit like Les Structures Sonores. The theme was first dreamt up by BBC composer Ron Grainer. Now, Ron wasn't actually a member of the Workshop... but he had worked with them on the music for a documentary about steam engines.
Mark: ...which had a rhythm track created by Brian Hodgson at the Radiophonic Workshop, which was all sort of pulsing white noise and metallic clanks, to sound like an engine.
[music in: Ron Grainer - Giants of Steam]
Mark: They'd made a tape loop of that rhythm. And then Ron had recorded an orchestral piece over the top of that rhythm.
[music up for horns, then under]
Mark: So he was well known to the Workshop.
Verity showed Ron the Doctor Who title sequence, which is kind of a black and white tunnel of trippy, swirly shapes. Next, Ron went off to his private beach in Portugal to write the score, which would then be produced by the Radiophonic Workshop.
As Delia told Radio Scotland...
Delia Derbyshire: He came back with a score with abstract things on like, "wind clouds" and "sweeps" and oh, "wind bubble," all sort of beautiful descriptions, but with a carefully worked out rhythm. And so I got to work and put it all together.
Mark: The bass line is a stretched string, and all the sounds she made out of that one single recording.
Mark: So you record a single pluck of a string, [bass note] make a tape loop. So it goes round and round and round playing over and over again. [bass note looping] You vary the speed of that tape playback [speed variations] to get all the different pitches you want and record all those pitches on another piece of tape. And then you divide them all up and label them, so you've got, you know, a whole box full of D's, and a box full of E's and a box full of G's.
Mark: But she was even cleverer than that. She recorded them all at different volume levels, so she'd had, you know, a loud D and a quiet D. So she could cut these all together and make a bass line out of literally cutting all these different notes together in the right order and at the right lengths, and using the right dynamics. It was ridiculous. The theme starts with that bass line.
[music in: Delia Derbyshire - Doctor Who]
Next, there's some hissing white noise, for those wind clouds and wind bubbles. Then, there's the iconic melody.
Mark: The melody, a lot of people say, “Oh, there was a theremin on the Doctor Who theme.” There wasn't a theremin on the Doctor Who theme, but there wasn't a synthesizer either.
Mark: So she had a test tone oscillator. It was a device for literally creating very high quality tones. It's designed for calibrating audio equipment. In other words, it's not an instrument.
Mark: But she would play it. You know, there's a dial on the front of it, so she would literally turn the dial on the front of the “doo wee oo” of the Doctor Who theme was her performing on a test tone oscillator.
Mark: It's bizarre. That's how it was made.
[music out] In her interview with BBC Radio Scotland, Delia described bringing this theme to life.
Delia Derbyshire: It was a magic experience, because I, I, I couldn't see from the music how it was going to sound. And it was just Ron's brilliant aural imagination, because when he heard the result, oh, he was really tickled pink.
Along with the theme music, the Workshop was also responsible for Doctor Who's sound effects... Like the TARDIS, which is The Doctor's time machine slash spaceship.
Mark: It was made by Brian Hodgson. And he had to come up with the sound of a time machine materializing and dematerializing in different points in time and space. And how do you do that? You know, where do you start with that?
[Brian Hodgson - TARDIS in]
Mark: What he did was he actually recorded the sound of him scraping his mother's front door key up and down the bass strings of an old piano.
Mark: That was the basic sound. It was then looped, it was slowed down, sped up, it was reversed.
Mark: He wanted to create a sound that felt like it was going away and coming towards you all at the same time.
Mark: And with a bit of white noise and a rising electronic tone added to it, that is the sound of a TARDIS.
[TARDIS out]
Brian Hodgson also did the vocal processing for the Daleks, a race of evil robotic aliens.
[clip: Doctor Who Daleks episode]
Daleks: You will move ahead of us and follow my directions.
To create that effect, he boosted the midrange of the actors voices, and then ran them through a device called a ring modulator. Ring modulation involves two audio signals... One is whatever you're feeding into it... In this case a voice. The second signal, you set manually. For the Daleks, Brian used a sine wave around 30 Hz.
The ring modulator takes these signals and outputs two new ones: [mixed fully] One is the sum of the two frequencies... [mixed fully] And the other is the difference. [all 3 together] Mix some of the original back in, and you get something metallic and grating, which was perfect for these cruel cyborgs.
Daleks: Your legs are paralyzed. You will recover shortly, unless you force us to use our weapons again.
Within its first year, Doctor Who exploded into a runaway hit. And crafting the show's sounds and music became one of the Workshop's primary duties. Millions of people were transported by these sounds, including a young Mark Ayres.
Mark: I was a fan, was watching Doctor Who in the early 1970s, and I just fell in love with the sound of the show. I was fascinated by... You know, that people can have a job making these sounds. But there were big changes coming for the Workshop, starting with the arrival of synthesizers.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Innovation Abstraction]
Mark: The problem with synthesizers is… Ha, I say, “the problem with synth—” There was nothing wrong with synthesizers when they started.
One of the first synths that the Workshop got was the EMS VCS-3, which stands for Voltage Controlled Studio. It had a joystick and lots of knobs... But what it did not have was a piano keyboard.
Mark: It was literally just a box which could produce electronic sounds. And the idea was that you would make a sound, you record it to tape, and then you treat it like any other Musique Concrète source. It was never intended as a performance instrument, as a musical instrument in its own right.
But then, the famous Moog synthesizer, which did have a keyboard, made its way from the States to the UK.
Mark: So that came in, and somebody said, "Well, let's put a keyboard on the VCS-3.” So suddenly everything that Delia and… well particularly, Delia were trying to get away from, trying to get away from the equal-tempered scale, trying to create music which was made of pure sound, suddenly people were saying, "Well, oh, you can play tunes on it, can you? Oh, brilliant. Let's have a tune!"
Mark: And Delia wasn't too keen on that. And she wasn't too keen on the fact that electronic music suddenly became, as far as a lot of people were concerned, very easy. You know, you just play the tune on the keyboard.
For Delia and a few Radiophonic purists, a synthesizer that played the 12-note Western scale was the opposite of what the Workshop was all about.
Mark: The joy of creating music out of pure sounds, music which, literally, wasn't performed but was made, was sculpted, that's what Delia loved. And she felt it was a backward step. But once that genie was out of the bottle, they couldn't put it back in.
Mark: You look at the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, and it is very true that over a period of just a couple of years, tape music went pretty much out the window, and everything became synthesized.
[music out]
To her credit, Delia did give synthesizers a shot. In the early 70s, she, Brian Hodgson, and another Workshop member remade the Doctor Who Theme on a modular synthesizer.
[music up: Doctor Who 1972 version]
Mark: And she hated it. And it's not very good.
And the show's producers agreed. They tried putting it on a couple of episodes, but then decided to swap it back before they aired.
Mark: Amusingly, a couple of the first-version of the episodes escaped to Australia, 'cause someone sent the wrong tapes. So some episodes of Doctor Who went out in Australia with the new theme on.
[1972 theme up, then out]
The shift towards more traditional, synthesized music was part of broader change in the Workshop.
Mark: Its job became more and more to provide music for programs. Whereas it started off much more as a sound design department, it became much more of a music department. And it became a bit of a factory.
Amid these changes, Delia quit the Workshop, and basically left sound and music behind.
Mark: She shone very brightly for a relatively short period of time, for about 10 years. And then unfortunately, you know, the shorter and shorter deadlines and greater demands, it got to her and, and she had to get out.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Just Facts 03]
Around this time, Brian Hodgson and John Baker also left the Workshop, and new members came in. But while they kept pumping out music, the Workshop was falling behind technologically.
Mark: By the end of the ‘70s, it had had the same gear for years. It was very old fashioned. Every other department at the BBC had probably got all the latest tape machines. Radiophonic Workshop was still using, you know, people's castoffs.
But in 1977, Brian Hodgson returned, and took over as the Workshop Organiser.
Mark: He campaigned for a budget, which meant they could update all the gear. And from then on, really, it was at the forefront of electronic music technology.
[music out]
In 1978, the Workshop crafted the sound effects for a radio adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
[sfx in: Hitchhiker's Guide - "The Book's Activation Code"]
In the story, The Hitchhiker's Guide itself is an all-knowing device that narrates parts of the plot. Here's the sound for when The Guide boots up.
[sfx up then out]
In 1980, Workshop composer Peter Howell made a new synthesized version of the Doctor Who theme.
[music in: Doctor Who 1980]
Mark: I think it was felt that after 17 years, the program just needed something new.
[music up for melody]
For part of the melody, Peter Howell used a Vocoder.
[music up for Vocoder bit]
It's a device you connect to something like a synthesizer. As you play the keys, you speak into a microphone, so that your voice shapes the notes.
Here's Peter demonstrating on a BBC special from back then.
[clip: Peter Howell Vocoder]
[music in: Elizabeth Parker - Jungle]
In 1984, Workshop composer Elizabeth Parker scored a nature documentary series called The Living Planet. Her pieces blended synthesized music with atmospheric sound design. Here she is describing an episode called “Jungles” to the BBC.
Elizabeth Parker: And it's dawn in the jungle, so you've got the animals calling to each other in the distance, and just the dripping of the leaves that I wanted to pervade the music.
[music up, then under]
Elizabeth Parker: To achieve that feeling of wetness, I took a raindrop sound off the synthesizer. And then I used a flute sound. In fact, the flute was actually myself blowing across a bottle, which achieves a very, very wet sort of note.
[music up, then under]
Throughout this time, Mark’s love for the Radiophonic Workshop was only growing. He studied music and electronics at university, and even applied for a job at the Workshop. He didn't get it, but he did meet with Workshop founder Desmond Briscoe, who was really encouraging. And over the years, he became friends with many of the Workshop's members.
Mark: And then in the late 1980s, I found myself working as a freelance composer. And, rather brilliantly, was commissioned as a freelance composer to work on Doctor Who.
[music in: Mark Ayres - The Madhouse]
Here's a piece Mark made for a Season 26 Doctor Who serial called “Ghost Light.”
[music up, then under]
Unfortunately, that was the last season of the original Doctor Who before the show went on indefinite hiatus. And things were also going downhill for the Radiophonic Workshop. As gear became cheaper and more accessible, work like this could be done by individuals rather than entire teams. And the BBC started looking for ways to cut costs.
Mark: The BBC at the time had a director general called John Birt. And John Birt introduced a policy called Producer Choice which meant that any producer within the BBC, rather than just using BBC service departments, could, if they wished, and were able to find that service cheaper outside the BBC, could use that external service, and it would save the BBC money.
Mark: It was ridiculous, because it didn't save the BBC money, because everything that was inside the BBC was paid for within the BBC. The only way it worked is the economists sat down and put a price on every internal service. So they would say that, for instance, “Getting a set built at the BBC set department, what it costs us in staff costs is, you know, 10,000 pounds. If you can get it done for 8,000 pounds outside the BBC, that is saving the BBC money.”
Mark: But of course it wasn't, 'cause you still had the set departments there, sitting there. So rather than 10,000 of magic money going from your left pocket to your right pocket, 8,000 pounds was leaving the BBC. And the Radiophonic Workshop was largely a victim of that.
[music in: Wesley Slover - Mitosis]
Gradually, the BBC started outsourcing more and more of its sound and music work. Meanwhile, the Workshop's budget got smaller and smaller, until Elizabeth Parker was the only composer left. Then in 1998, after forty years of existence, the Radioshop Workshop was officially shut down… And they weren’t the only ones to go.
Mark: Most BBC departments closed down. The costume department went, the set design department went, graphics went. Slowly, the BBC became just a broadcaster, not, you know, a classic production studio. As the Workshop was ending, Mark was contacted by several of its former members.
Mark: Saying, [phone filter] "Look, you know, the Radiophonic Workshop is shutting down. We're all being made redundant. But there's all this stuff which needs cataloging, and we are not gonna be there to do it. It needs someone to come in and, and sort it out. And it needs someone who actually knows what this is all about, who knows the history and is enthusiastic about keeping it."
So Mark spent the next couple of years tracking down, cataloging, and organizing the thousands of tapes that the Workshop had produced.
Mark: And I've done that ever since. So I look after the archive and I look after the library. Because there's never been an official archivist, I carry on as the unofficial archivist. So if they want to know anything, they call me.
Mark: I believe this stuff to be important, which is why I, I am very heavily involved in its preservation and its celebration.
[music out]
But while the Workshop was over, there was a new chapter ahead for Doctor Who. In 2005, after 16 years off the air, the BBC decided to revive it. And Mark was brought on as a consultant for the show's sound.
Mark: And I gave them basically a large library of all the sounds, for instance, for the TARDIS, for the Daleks, for the Sidemen, all that kind of thing. The sound designers wove these classic sound effects into the new series, which is still running today.
Mark: And most of those sounds, amazingly, are still the sounds that were made 60 years ago.
[TARDIS 2023 sneaks in]
Mark: It's still the same sound of the TARDIS as recorded by Brian in 1962.
[TARDIS 2023 up then out]
[Doctor Who 2023 theme fades in]
Mark: And underneath the new arrangement of the theme tune, there is still Delia's bass line and Delia's melody line.
Mark: And I think that's quite incredible. It’s 60 years, and those sounds still sound modern.
[music out]
[music in: Wesley Slover - Me and My Robot]
The legacy of the Radiophonic Workshop goes far beyond Doctor Who. Its members were pioneers in both sound design and sampling, decades before those concepts became widespread. They also proved that these experimental sounds could have mainstream appeal.
Mark: Electronic music became very much a part of the media landscape in the UK from the late 1950s, because we were subjected to it in everything from, you know, not just Doctor Who on a Saturday night, but current affairs programs with their jingles, to documentaries with their incidental music, to drama series, and schools radio and television programs. This stuff that was coming out of the Workshop was just everywhere. It's part of our DNA.
Today, you can hear echoes of the Workshop all over the place, from sci-fi films and TV shows, to all kinds of electronic and sample-based music. And lucky for us, we no longer need a room full of tape machines to craft our own incredible sounds. .
Mark: As the Radiophonic Workshop and Musique Concrète pioneers in the '40s, '50s and '60s discovered, we are surrounded by things which are not conventionally music, but which are music. And just go out there and discover, experiment, make. You know, you've got more technology on your mobile phone now than the Radiophonic Workshop had in its entire history. So there's no excuse for not getting out there and having fun.
[music out into music in: Wesley Slover - Just Facts 07]
Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of my sound agency, Defacto Sound. To learn more, follow defacto sound on Instagram, or visit defacto sound.com.
Other Voices: This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, with help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt and Colin DeVarney, with original music by Wesley Slover.
Thanks to our guest, Mark Ayres. Mark is actually in a band called The Radiophonic Workshop with several of its former members. They're less active now, but Mark says they hope to do one final show before they call it quits. You can find their Instagram and Bandcamp links in the show notes.
Finally, think of a person in your life who would dig the story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It could be a musician who loves synthesizers, or a super fan of Doctor Who. Then tap the share button on this episode and send it to them.
I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.
[music out]
