Latest news with #QuatermassandthePit
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We're projecting into the future': sounds of BBC Radiophonic Workshop made available for public use
With its banks of bafflingly complex equipment, and staff members that were among the most progressive musical minds in the UK, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a laboratory of 20th-century sound that produced endless futuristic effects for use in TV and radio – most memorably, the ghostly wail of the Doctor Who theme. Now, the Workshop's considerable archive of equipment is being recreated in new software, allowing anyone to evoke the same array of analogue sound that its pioneering engineers once did. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's archivist Mark Ayres has collaborated with BBC Studios and Spitfire Audio, a company that provides libraries of sampled sound for music producers to work with. Added to their library is a collection of the Workshop's machinery, allowing users to, in effect, control the modular synthesisers, tape machines, vocoders and other equipment that was originally used as far back as the 1950s. There is also a library of sounds from the original Workshop tapes, plus newly recorded sounds by the – now fairly aged – members of the Workshop. 'I'm the youngest member of the core Radiophonic Workshop – and I'm 64,' said Ayres. 'We're not going to be around for ever. It was really important to leave a creative tool, inspired by our work, for other people to use going forward. I hope we've made an instrument that will inspire future generations.' 'We're not just looking back at what the members were doing way back when,' added Harry Wilson, Spitfire Audio's head of recording. 'We're projecting a strand of their work into the future and saying: if the Workshop was engaged with a similar process now, what would it sound like?' The Workshop may be best known for the Doctor Who theme, but it also created music and sound effects for other sci-fi shows such as Quatermass and the Pit, Blake's 7 and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Other cornerstone BBC shows such as Blue Peter and Tomorrow's World were also beneficiaries of the Workshop's creativity. The Workshop was originally created in 1958, tasked with adding an extra dimension to plays and other shows on Radio 3. Co-founders Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe were brilliant and high-minded, inspired by musique concrète – the style that asserted that raw, tape-recorded sound could be a kind of music. Before long a highly experimental, even fantastical means of composition was afoot, with lampshades being bashed to produce percussion, and long tape loops being carried along BBC corridors. 'There was freedom to do what you wanted and everyone was determined to do new things with sound,' one composer, Paddy Kingsland, has said. 'It was dusty and pokey, underfunded and peculiar, but I bet there were very few places that wonderful in the world.' Numerous Workshop staff became acclaimed composers in their own right, particularly the female alumni, including Oram, Delia Derbyshire and Glynis Jones. The Workshop ran until 1998, though its staff have since combined to form the Radiophonic Workshop, performing the unit's material live. In 2012, the BBC and Arts Council England created a new version of the Workshop to run online, headed up by the musician Matthew Herbert. During the 1960s, bands such as Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones popped in to have their minds expanded by the Workshop's experimental spirit, and numerous artists have been influenced by it. The naive yet eerie music the Workshop made for children's programming seemed to seep into the subconscious of a generation of leftfield musicians, from Boards of Canada to Broadcast and the artists on the Ghost Box label. The Human League and Heaven 17 musician Martyn Ware, who later collaborated with the Workshop's members, has said: 'When we started out with our two basic keyboards bought on hire purchase, the Radiophonic Workshop represented a kind of dreamland, this magical place where any sound could be made.' Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer is also an admirer. After purchasing the BBC's Maida Vale studios, where the Workshop was based, he has overseen the creation of a new synthesiser called the Radiophonic. Announced in 2024 and created by AJH Synth, it is designed to combine various analogue synths into a 'one-of-a-kind, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style super-synth', Zimmer has said. The newly available software will cost £149, and is available from 19 February, though it will have an introductory price of £119 until 17 March.
The Guardian
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
TV tonight: it's the last ever series of phenomenal weepy comedy Big Boys
Sunday, 10pm, Channel 4 Prepare for belly laughs and lots of sobbing: it's the third and final chapter of Jack Rooke's touching semi-autobiographical comedy about the friendship between a young gay man and his straight best mate. As the final year of university looms, Jack (Dylan Llewellyn), Danny (Jon Pointing) and the gang are forced to make big decisions about their futures – including Jack's dissertation title ('To Bum Or Not to Bum' is one idea). Before things get serious, though, the opening double bill kicks off with a Faliraki holiday – complete with all the naughty gags, fun 2010s references (look out for the Rylan cameo) and lovely heart-to-hearts that make this show such a hit. It will be missed. Hollie Richardson 9pm, ITV1 Newly acquainted detective duo DCI Jessica James (Sinéad Keenan) and DI Sunny Khan (Sanjeev Bhaskar) may have got off to a bumpy start last season, but they're back with a grisly new case to solve (which is, at least, a welcome relief from their personal dramas). When a spine is found on the Whitney Marsh, there are four potential suspects for Jessica and Sunny to investigate. Continues on Monday. HR 8pm, ITV1 Another pair of celebrities sit in the famous studio, trying to answer 15 questions to win £1m for charity. You can't fault the lineup for variety: will actor Julie Hesmondhalgh or former world cruiserweight boxing champion Tony Bellew display better general knowledge under pressure? Jack Seale 8.05pm, BBC One What a load of rubbish: a bin strike means piles of garbage piling up in Poplar, causing the nuns to dodge rats on the way to work. As Weil's disease leads to illness, death and bad-tempered council meetings, an obstreperous patient brings grief for Nurse Joyce (Renee Bailey). JS 9pm, Sky Documentaries In the second episode of this sobering three-parter, the cracks are starting to show for the boyband, who – says former member Shane Lynch – were tired and broken by the end of the 90s. The grim spectre of the tabloids also looms, as they vie to out Stephen Gately as a gay man. Hannah J Davies 9.05pm, BBC One Keeley Hawes plays Jane Austen's sister, Cassandra, in this fantastic reimagining of the juicy story behind her decision to burn the novelist's private letters. She continues to read them in secret, away from scheming cousin Mary (Jessica Hynes), and is reminded of a great young romance through her sister's words. HR Scott of the Antarctic, 1.15pm, BBC Two We do love a heroic failure in this country, and there's none more so than explorer Robert Scott, who set out to be the first to reach the South Pole but was beaten to it by a smarter man in the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. There's a lot of stiff upper lips and frostbitten toes in Charles Frend's fact-based rendering of the tragic tale, with the great John Mills the epitome of gentility and pluck as his expedition tromp heavily through beautiful Technicolor snowscapes and -40C temperatures towards second place. Simon Wardell Quatermass and the Pit, 11.50pm, Sky Arts Hammer's 1967 adaptation of the third of Nigel Kneale's celebrated BBC sci-fi dramas is easily their best, gripping and well-acted with pretty decent special effects. Andrew Keir is a thoughtful but twinkly-eyed Quatermass, a rocket scientist intrigued when work on a Central line extension in London digs up weird prehistoric ape skulls next to an unusual, possibly alien craft. Supported by palaeontologists James Donald and Barbara Shelley and butting heads with Julian Glover's blinkered military type, he uncovers an ancient, malevolent secret. SW Six Nations Rugby Union: Scotland v Ireland, 2pm, BBC One From Murrayfield Stadium. FA Cup Football: Plymouth v Liverpool, 2.15pm, ITV1 At Home Park. Followed by Aston Villa v Tottenham at 5.20pm on BBC One. American Football: Kansas City Chiefs v Philadelphia Eagles, 10.45pm, ITV1 Super Bowl LIX from Caesars Superdome in New Orleans, with the Chiefs' tight end Travis Kelce, AKA Taylor Swift's other half, going for a fourth title.
