Recording The Doctor Who Theme

"We got a phone call from Verity Lambert, the first Doctor Who producer," says Dick Mills. "She said she had a little sci-fi series that would only run to six episodes, but she'd like some special electronic effects. So me and Delia went along to Ealing for a meeting with her, and we said we could do the effects, but we could probably help out with a signature tune as well, as we'd just been working with Ron Grainer — a composer who was coming quite into vogue. So Ron was hired to write the sig, and us to record it. Ron had originally come to us first, so we were returning the favour. We'd done a TV show called Giants of Steam and Ron had got us to make loops of train effects and process them to different tempos for his musicians to play along to. He had great confidence in us — for Doctor Who, he just handed Delia one foolscap sheet of manuscript paper and said off you go! Then he cleared off to Portugal for a fortnight — he said it was for the sake of his health"

So how was the theme recorded? "Well, we started with the bass line. You know those 19-inch jack-bay panels? You could get blank panels too, to fill in between them. They were slightly flexible, so Delia found one that made a good musical twang, and played it with her thumb. We recorded it then vari-speeded up and down to different pitches, copied them across to another tape recorder, then made hundreds of measured tape edits to give it the rhythm."

And what was the main tune played on? Was it some early synthesizer? "No," says Dick, "it was just a load of oscillators — signal generators — that someone had connected to a little keyboard, one for each note. Again, we had to make lots of tape edits."

But what about that distinctive portamento? How could you bend the notes like that without a synth? Dick sighs: "Well you just twiddled the frequency knob, of course — how else? It was all done with actual knob-twiddling then — there was no other way! We did it in lots of little pieces, then joined all the bits of tape together."

Eventually, after some pre-mixing, the elements of the entire composition existed on three separate reels of tape, which had to be run somehow together in sync. "Crash-sync'ing the tape recorders was Delia's speciality," says Dick. "We had three big Phillips machines and she could get them all to run exactly together. She'd do: one, two, three, go! — start all three machines, then tweak until they were exactly in sync, just like multitrack. But with Doctor Who we had a bum note somewhere and couldn't find it! It wasn't that a note was out of tune — there was just one little piece of tape too many, and it made the whole thing go out of sync. Eventually, after trying for ages, we completely unwound the three rolls of tape and ran them all side by side for miles — all the way down the big long corridor in Maida Vale. We compared all three, matching the edits, and eventually found the point where one tape got a bit longer. When we took that splice out it was back in sync, so we could mix it all down."

Ron Grainer returned from his holiday and famously asked if it was the same piece of music that he'd written. The theme was an instant success, as was the programme. But success brought its own problems, as Dick remembers. "The trouble was, because it was a hit show, every producer wanted to put their stamp on it, so they'd ask us to record another version. We did loads and no-one ever liked them. One was laboriously done on the Delaware. The sounds were great, but no-one liked it. I remember Delia did one version herself, where there was very heavy tape echo on the rhythm that gave it a new and different groove. The first time it was played in a dub all the technicians complained. 'Oh no — what's wrong with that?' they all said. 'Let's have the old one back!' And we also had to make a 45-second version when the show got popular. Anyone who's worked in TV music knows how difficult it is to turn a 30-second sig tune into a 45 — it's a very unnatural thing to do, musically."

As a footnote, there is still a difference of opinion on how the Doctor Who bass sound was created, 45 years ago. Dick Mills remembers Delia twanging a blanking panel in a rack, while Mark Ayres offered two versions — a plucked string and a rubber band (he heard both from Delia!). Peter Howell, meanwhile, told me: "The bass twang was a plucked bass string on a home-made electric pickup device (a piece of wood with a string on it). That sound appears on several early Workshop recordings."