A far cry from the HD and Sky+ world of visual media we enjoy today, early TV shows were crude recordings, with very little editing, mastering and certainly no digital enhancement. It was a small group of engineers and technicians in the 1950s, all members of a young BBC, who were to change the way we saw and thought about television. The work of those who would form and contribute to the Radiophony Workshop for the next 50 years served as a benchmark for cutting-edge broadcast sound design and a complete encyclopedia of digital audio production and electroacoustic engineering. The incredible reach and influence of a department that spent much of its final years struggling to stay open elevated it to near-cult status within the sound industries. Names like Delia Derbyshire became standard references for sound designers, recordists, and musicians alike.
By and large, the work of your average BBC department won’t achieve global recognition or cult status, so what makes the Radio Workshop story stand out? It is the cultural and technological environment of the time that lays the foundations for design departments. A keyword that is still frequently used today is accessibility. It was the natural progression that followed the development of the first televisions into living rooms across the country, and for this new, larger, and increasingly demanding audience, the shows had to progress to keep up. Of course, being a fast-growing and promising medium integral to our daily lives, television productions and studios enjoyed a great deal of publicity and popularity, and significantly increased budgets.
The first line of the obituaries of the workshop’s co-founders, Desmond Briscoe and Daphne Orams, contain the adjective ‘pioneer’, referring to their contributions to the broadcast and electroacoustic industries. Pioneer is an accurate word to sum up the workshops’ 60-year discography, which includes familiar tracks like Doctor Who in 1963. Written by Delia Derbyshire and commissioned by Ron Grainer, it’s still in use half a century later. Despite their substantial successes, the members of the workshop would be considered by many to be “unsung heroes” of sound design. Having started at the BBC in 1943, aged just 18, Oram spent years trying to persuade his employers to allow the workshop to go ahead, only succeeding in 1958 when the growing popularity and accessibility of the television industry demanded higher production values. The workshop was set up in what is now the renowned Maida Vail Studios, with a budget of just £2,000. However, in 1959, as a result of the great exposure and popularity of the work, Oram made the decision to leave and dedicate herself to her music, but not before leaving her name in the history books as the ‘mother of this great legacy’. .
French composer Pierre Schaeffer was experimenting with a new musical composition technique called Musique Concrète. Another byproduct of the advancement of technology at the time, the nature of Music Concrete lies in recording and stitching together electronic sounds on magnetic tape to create a wide range of sound effects and musical elements the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Techniques such as pitch manipulation and echo effects are still important in sound design today. It was this technique that caught the attention of the Radiophony Workshop and formed the basis of its first productions. Like Schaeffer, the workshop very quickly became aware of the popularity of this new sound, bringing additional public recognition to his work.
The nature of the earlier work of the workshops was consistent with the cultural and technological progressions of the time, using and experimenting with newly developed electronic synthesizers and recordings. By capturing a variety of varied sounds and using these physical cutting and editing techniques to layer and fade samples, the team was able to create soundtracks, add effects, and even produce electronic music, the likes of which had never been heard before. Little did they know at this time that their work would be religiously referenced more than half a century later throughout the recording industries. As well as providing the perfect accompaniment for this new era of television programming, this new technology opened up a world of experimentation, which would later pave the way for music production, studio engineering, and many more media production techniques.
In particular, considering the ever-increasing speed with which advances in audio technology are occurring, it is significant that many of the techniques first used by the Radiophonics Workshop are used in the sound and music industry of the cinema today. Similarly, parallels can be drawn between the increasing accessibility of audio production equipment which would later contribute to the workshop’s eventual demise. Especially with the evolution of digital technologies, the natural next steps are to simplify the techniques and processes involved in audio productions and thus bring them to a larger and growing pool of potential producers and engineers.
The developments and creation of these technologies that brought so much attention to the shop continued, mostly due to the popularity these techniques and hardware were receiving and also becoming more and more accessible. Furthermore, with the rapid increase in demand as another byproduct of the inadvertent promotion of their methods, production costs for manufacturers fell as they took advantage of the business opportunities that had arisen. Arguably, while these advances and increased accessibility may be detrimental to certain industries and specialties, they may also provide great opportunities for those who can use the new equipment and techniques but were previously unable to access them. This is something that is perfectly demonstrated by the contemporary music industry, with many new genres shaped by digital technologies and recording/sampling techniques.
Having contributed to over 300 shows such as Blue Peter, Tomorrow’s World, Blakes 7 and The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, and enjoying huge success in the late ’70s, contributing factors such as over-accessibility and subsequent lack of financial viability marked the end of the workshop in the 90’s. In an unstable financial climate, similar to our current recession, BBC director John Birt was forced to order cuts in various departments, including the workshop. Even though they were given 5 years to turn their balances around, it became clear that it wasn’t going to happen. A long way from the early years where the techniques and equipment used were the first of their kind and the productions never seen before, the inevitable demise became a reality. Many of the reasons why can also be attributed to its initial success. By 1998 there was only one songwriter left, Elizabeth Parker, and the workshop was finally closed. Fortunately, in recognition of its importance, the BBC commissioned Mark Ayres to archive the Radiophony Workshop’s work; most of it has been saved. This unique department grew out of a unique set of cultural and technical circumstances, not repeatable but often paralleled today, and left its permanent influence on an industry that is an important part of our daily lives. Curiously, the pioneers of the Radiophony Workshop remain unrecognized and virtually unknown.