Why Delia Derbyshire’s ditties were just what The Doctor ordered: The story of the woman behind some of TV’s most iconic themes

THERE aren’t many women who spend their lives making experimental music and creating some of the most iconic British TV theme tunes of all time.

Then again, Delia Derbyshire was a bit different and a bit special.

Born in 1937, she was the daughter of a Coventry sheet-metal worker, and went on to graduate from Cambridge with a BA in Maths and Music.

If that seemed an odd combination, it was the ideal pairing for what she would make her lifetime’s work.

Keen to work in a studio, she first approached Decca, but the same folks who turned down The Beatles told her a studio was no place for a woman.

She then found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, who made sound effects and incidental sounds for the Beeb, more than happy to take her on.

As workshop archivist Mark Ayres explains, she was an eccentric, brilliant genius, who could get music out of just about any inanimate object, long before there was such a thing as synthesisers.

“I think the original Doctor Who theme in 1963 was the first time a piece of electronic music entered commercial mass consciousness,” says Mark, who composed some classic Doctor Who music himself.

“It captured the public imagination. I was born in 1960 and was always aware of Doctor Who. The first TV appearance of the Daleks was on my third birthday. I was 11 when I really got into it, and what I really liked was how it sounded.

“Back in 1963, there were no synthesisers. If you wanted an electronic sound, you used a tone generator, which was a piece of test equipment. You would turn a dial on the front of an oscillator and the pitch changed.”

If it all sounds like an underground hideaway full of mad scientists in white lab coats creating weird noises from various objects, that’s pretty much what it was.

Delia’s genius was in taking countless recordings of such things, splicing up the tapes, and arranging them into the music you recognise when you watch those classic early Doctor Whos.

“The bassline of her Doctor Who theme tune is a recording of a plucked string, going dong,” Mark explains. “She recorded that on to tape, then made a loop of it, so it went dong, dong, dong.

“She had a frequency counter on the table, and she was very mathematical about how she did it. She had the most amazing mind. She was a trained musician and a mathematician.

“I had seen her name on records, and even that was the most amazing name. She later told me her name was the best thing her parents had given her, because it just tripped off the tongue, but had an air of mystery.

“I’d also worked on Doctor Who in the late 1980s, without meeting her.

“In 1993, after Doctor Who had been cancelled, a friend of mine, Kevin Davies, was making a programme to celebrate it, called 30 Years In The Tardis, and we contacted Delia to ask if she would give an interview.

“She was very shy, but we coaxed her down, and there she was, sipping her red wine from a Ribena bottle as she did. We got talking and hit it off. She was very eccentric, sometimes quite difficult to get on with. She was an absolute perfectionist.

“Delia had what Brian Hodgson, another guy at the workshop, called ‘reverse adrenaline’ – the nearer a deadline got, the slower she went. This was because she got terrified of the deadline, whereas with most of us the adrenaline kicks in to help you get the job finished.

“Frequently, a job would be finished and 10 minutes before the producer came in to hear it, she would get terrified and destroy the tape. She did that a couple of times. She used to go out for a fag when she had finished a job, and Brian Hodgson would sneak in and make a copy of her work, just in case she destroyed it.”

Like many a creative genius, Delia also did the everyday things in life a little bit differently from the rest of us. Mark recalls being in the middle of phone chats with her, and suddenly realise she must have hung up.

She’d call back two weeks later, seemingly able to continue exactly from where they had left off.

“At first, I wondered what I had said to upset her,” he laughs. “Two weeks later, she’d call back and I’d wonder what she was talking about, but she was picking up from where she’d left off.

“Later, I discovered she would sit by the phone with a pad and make notes of the conversation as it went along. In fact, I started doing the same thing.

“They would put all sorts of names on that now, but back then we had no labels and people just were what they were. She was just an extraordinary character.”

Legend has it that Paul McCartney, who was fascinated by electronic music, sought Delia out with a mind to giving Yesterday an electronic backing rather than the strings George Martin wanted.

“Delia and Brian Hodgson were present on the London underground art scene,” Mark says, “and they had all these contacts. It is said that McCartney was interested in an electronic backing for Yesterday, and I have no reason to doubt it.

“I would have loved to hear what Delia might have done with it.”

Although you can still buy some of her work on CD, and she is fondly remembered by Doctor Who fans and worshipped by electronic music buffs, has the extraordinary Delia Derbyshire had the recognition she merits, and is her legacy appreciated?

“She liked atmospheres, and she wasn’t so bothered about tunes,” says Mark, who was asked to look after hundreds of tapes found in Delia’s attic after she died. “Hopefully, more will come out.

“Is her legacy being treated properly? Absolutely!”