THE MAN BEHIND TARDIS SOUND EFFECT REVEALS HOW HE DID IT
A front door key, an old piano and a bit of technical wizardry made one of the most iconic sounds on TV
THE composer who created the iconic whooshing sound of Doctor Who’s Tardis has revealed how he invented the sound using his mother’s front door key.
The sound effects wizard also came up with the voices of the Daleks at the Radiophonic Workshop, the BBC department where he and Delia Derbyshire, who wrote the Doctor Who theme tune, worked.
“Delia was asked to realise the music and I was asked to create the sound stuff,” Brian Hodgson said.
“I was sound designer for the first nine years, making all the sounds.”
When he was asked to create the noise of a time machine he was stumped.
“What sound does a time machine make?” Brian said.
“You couldn’t look that up in the effects library.
“We were talking about which way does a time machine go. Does it go up, or down, or sideways?”
He began tinkering, eventually discovering the noise he wanted by running his mother’s front door key along the bass string of a gutted piano.
“Then I wanted to create a concept of coming and going so I used white noise and little blips from oscillators,” he said.
“Then I put them through a process called feedback.”
He added: “When I sold my mother’s house I gave the key to the people who bought it.
“I said, ‘This is a piece of history. This is the key that created the sound of the Tardis.’” Despite his legacy as part of a science fiction cult classic, the sound engineer, who used to work at the Swansea Grand Theatre, is no huge fan of the show. “I watch it if I happen to be watching TV,” he said. “People find that difficult to believe, especially the Doctor Who fan club, that I’m not a Doctor Who fan – just someone who worked on it. For me it was a job, not a reli- gion.
“It’s brilliant that they have managed to keep it going, though,” the 78-year-old added.
“They are now doing things that in the early days you could only do with millions of dollars in Hollywood, but now they are doing it in Cardiff.
“There were times at 5am when I thought, ‘What the f*** am I doing making stupid noises for kids?’”
The Daleks and the Tardis were not the only sounds Brian conjured up. “There are so many things on there that they still use today,” he said.
“I created 72 reels of tape. That was 50-odd hours of sounds over the period I worked on it.”
He and his colleagues were “just young people doing something we enjoyed, with a deadline”.
“Delia and I discussed Doctor Who,” Brian, who now lives in Norfolk, said.
“At the start they were going to run it for 13 weeks and we reckoned they would be lucky to get six.”