You know how some people have a “Roman Empire,” like the thing they think about at least once a week even when no one brings it up? Mine is Delia Derbyshire.
This woman joined the BBC in 1960 and was so good at sound editing for classical music that she could literally see where the trombones were on a vinyl record. Like she’d just look at the grooves and be like, “There they are.” People thought she was doing actual magic. She basically said, “Yeah, I am,” and walked into the BBC Radiophonic Workshop like it was her birthright.
She didn’t wait to be assigned to the Workshop like everyone else. She just said, “I want this,” and got it. By 1962 she was creating entire soundscapes and electronic music for hundreds of BBC radio and television productions.
Then in 1963 she casually created the Doctor Who theme, one of the first pieces of music ever made entirely with electronics. It completely changed the landscape of TV sound design. She took Ron Grainer’s notes and turned them into something nobody had ever heard before using tape loops and pure experimentalism. When he listened to it, he literally said, “Did I write this?” And she, ICONICALLY, replied, “Most of it.”
He wanted to credit her. The BBC said no.
She was a woman in a deeply male-dominated space. And not just “wow, there aren’t many women here,” but like explicitly, officially, “women don’t get creative credit here.” Engineering was seen as men’s work. Sound design was men’s work. Women were allowed to assist, to type memos, to splice tape if a man told them where. But they weren’t allowed to author. They weren’t allowed to be the genius in the room.
So they handed all the glory to Ron Grainer.
She wasn’t paid royalties. She didn’t get a credit. She didn’t even get her name on-screen. Not for fifty. actual. years.
Delia also composed music for other BBC programmes, including The Blue Veils and Golden Sands. The Doctor Who story Inferno even reused some of her music that had originally been made for other productions, because that’s how good her work was. It got recycled because nothing else came close.
She hated the remixes of the theme they did after 1980 because they kept sanding down the weirdness, the dissonance, the edge, everything she had fought to put into it.
So yeah. Delia Derbyshire is my Roman Empire. Every time I hear the Doctor Who theme, I think about her physically slicing tape by hand and looping it to build something no one had ever heard before, and I just sit there like:
🫡🫡🫡🫡🫡
(When I have enough time I'll make a post about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop as a whole because it is so fucking cool.)
