Look, I know: following comics with Dr Who. Death by nerd. Let me say then that as far as my interest in science fiction goes, this isn't the tip of the iceberg, this is the whole iceberg, comfortably run aground in its whole ice-cube-like minisculity.
And this isn't about oooh, The Seventies, Sweets They Don't Make Any More, the Ford Capri, white dog shit, blah blah blah. This is about Delia Derbyshire, a woman so far ahead of her time she invented drum and bass in 1963 (really: scroll down to 'Experimental dance track' here.)
Quite apart from all of its soggily nostalgic baggage, the theme tune to Dr Who is an extraordinary piece of music, all the more so considering it was composed by Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire in the early sixties. It's worth remembering that while the Beatles were sticking random bits of circus noise together on a tape and being hailed as geniuses, Derbyshire and the Radiophonic Workshop were undertaking a quiet and often completely anonymous revolution. As it says on the clip, "it's, what, forty years old [fifty, now] and still sounds like... the future."
On Delia:
Deconstructing the theme:
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