David Butler

'Way Out - Of This World!' Delia Derbyshire, Doctor Who and the British Public's Awareness of Electronic Music in the 1960s

The composer and musician Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001) remains most famous for her arrangement and realisation of Ron Grainers title theme for Doctor Who, Yet although providing the theme tune with its distinctive sounds, which would be featured in the programmes titles from 1963 until 1980, Derbyshire provided little else in terms of music for the Doctors adventures during her time at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. This article considers the impact of the Doctor Who theme tune on Derbyshires career and the interest in electronic music that it generated amongst the British public in the 1960s.

The Fantasy Film

in shaping the footage. (Hovde and Meyer share directorial credit with the Maysles brothers.) He cites Hovde as describing the edit as emerging as ‘a feminist project’ (p. 20), while recognizing the dependency that shapes Little Edie’s situation. With decades of scholarship on the male gaze (beginning with Laura Mulvey’s seminal essay) as a given, Tinkcom complicates the dynamic between male film-maker and female photographic subject by investigating a particular relationship ‘that can only be called a seduction’ (p. 9), whereby it is the documentary subject, Little Edie, who takes control of the gaze as she courts the film-makers (particularly David Maysles, who took sound, but also Al, behind the camera). Nevertheless, in a chapter on ‘Direct Cinema and the Problem of Seduction’, Tinkcom assigns the figure of the male rescuer from melodrama to the film-makers. Describing Grey Gardens as ‘both a film and an idea’ (p. 84), Tinkcom briefly examines the two most widely disseminated texts inspired by the original documentary: The Beales of Grey Gardens and the HBO version of the Beales’ story. The former he sees as ‘supplemental fact while the other is fantasised fiction’ (p. 85). To Tinkcom, crucial supplements include more of ‘the play’ between the film-makers and the Beales—he concentrates on a sequence in which Big Edie, using a still camera, photographs the brothers—and conversations between mother and daughter about how Little Edie should present herself. Tinkcom doesn’t mention the change in editors or speculate on whether the feminist spirit he finds animating the original film continues in the 2006 release, edited by Ian Markiewicz. The author makes a convincing argument that the HBO version (with memorable performances by Drew Barrymore as Little Edie and Jessica Lange as her mother) is ‘much more conservative in its understanding of these women than the Maysleses’ original film’ (p. 89). In dramatizing the women’s earlier lives and making explicit motives that the original documentary left ambiguous, the 2009 docudrama holds the women’s eccentricities responsible for a failure to keep men in their lives. Tinkcom wisely advises against rendering the Edies as ‘heroines of a resistant femininity . . . because such a fantasy requires us to neglect the steep costs demanded of these women’s remarkable independence’ (p. 91). He ends his thoughtful monograph noting that the ‘continuing appeal of Edith Ewing Beale and Edith Bouvier Beale’ . . . ‘tells us of an important shift in the politics of everyday life’ (p. 91).