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I was wandering around the Internet the other day and found that you can actually get the original music score for the Doctor Who theme. ‘From the B.B.C. Television Series “Dr. Who” by Ron Grainer' it said. Goodness. Got to have that! I’m not a great musician but I scraped a few piano and flute grades before I got too cool and my flatmate has a keyboard. So.
This music was a big hit for me. It tinged Saturday teatimes with other-worldly wonder-terror. If you could hear all the mystery of the Doctor, all the fear and excitement of his amazing adventures and the sound of the space-time vortex then this was, absolutely, what it all sounded like. These days it's more instrumental with an electric guitar, trombones, violins and percussion. If you don’t know the original then you really have to hear it, so here it is:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/doctorwho/classic/clips/ram/first_doctor_titles?size=4x3&bgc=CC0000&nbram=1&bbram=1
Then there's the equally superb updated version that I remember:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/ilove/tv/titles/realmedia/drwho4.ram
There. See? Those remarkable sound pictures, if you will, were created by an unsung hero called Delia Derbyshire. She was a pioneer - nay: genius - of electronic music and sound. This was in 1963 before there were even synthesisers let alone sound sampling software. She worked on it for weeks and weeks, creating each note as a separate entity using test tone generators (whatever that might mean), a 'wobbulator' (ditto) and by fiddling around with all sorts of things from old lampshades to piano strings. She stuck it all together using scissors and Sellotape and ended up with about eight separate lines of magnetic tape each containing a different layer. Then she lined them all up and pressed play – and must have been so proud. And, you know what, it still sounds like the future. Still produces visions of goodness knows what.
So with an air of childlike wonder I sat down at my flatmate’s keyboard and had a go. It’s not that difficult actually. After all it’s, 'Dum de dum, dum de dum, diddly dum; ooooooo eeeeeee oooooo'. First surprise is that it sounds different. You sort of expect to be able to produce something like Delia Derbyshire did but it’s a cross between Belgian Jazz (Bill Bailey’s observation and he’s right! Check out his Dr Qui) and the theme to The Archers (dum de dum de dum de dum). There are some nice chord structures here and there which sound very pleasant on the piano and would be most convivial if heard in the background of a bar in Bruges whilst drinking cherry beer. It ends not with that weird whooshing sound that has chilled kids and adults alike for decades but with a cheery glissando through four octaves, almost as if the pianist might follow with, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much - you’ve been great. Good night!’. Whether this is unique to this arrangement for piano I don’t know, but it puts a new slant on it!
Ron Grainer composed something highly original. Of that there is no doubt. There really isn’t anything else like it. Like today’s arrangement by Murray Gold the score is upbeat, a little quirky, full of promise, and hard to categorise. Perfect for Doctor Who. He knew that it would be given the electronic touch and annotated his score with ideas for this – sadly these are not included in the published version so knowing exactly what he had mind and how much Delia Derbyshire created from scratch we don't know. However when she played it to him he said, 'Did I compose that?'. It's something remarkable and it still works today: the unearth-ily rhythmic and indefinable treatment of ‘dum de dum, dum de dum, diddly dum' as if something very strange is on the way all the while building through some utterly mind boggling sounds to the unforgettable (and thank you Murray Gold for keeping it in today’s version) ‘oooooo EEEEEEE OOOO, OOOOO-oooooooo'. Brrrrrrrr. Blooming brilliant.
For more info check out these excellent websites:
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Mark_ayres/DWTheme.htm
http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/
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2 comments:
I love this - thanks Andrew!
As the owner, not only of several CDs of music from the series, a battered old cassette of BBC Sound Effects from the series, but also a mug with the "lyrics" of the theme tune bought at the Museum of Moving Image's Dr Who exhibition in the early '90s (dumba de dum, dumba de dum, dumba de dum, diddly dum...etc), the music of the series has always been, and is now too, something to behold.
It was, certainly back in the 60s and 70s, such a distant idea to write music for, and the Radiophonic Workshop created so many wonderful soundscapes that are often hard to differentiate from the soundtrack. Those guys are legends and pioneers.
And the theme tune will be popular for a very very long time, I think. If you're interested, this is quite an interesting site - Whomix is a great site of fan remixes of the tune - some better than others, but some are superb... http://whomix.trilete.net
Thank you, most kind!
I found that site as part of my wanderings, good innit? There's one on there that I did like a lot. It has slight undertones of techno rave, which come to think about it echoes the original version in some ways.
I saw a prog once, one of those 100best TV ones, which had a section on the Who theme and musicians were saying how much it had inspired them. Pink Floyd and Orbital spring to mind.
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