Richard Elen visits the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

In its 21 years, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop has grown from a few experiments with tape recorders in one of the old studios at 201, Piccadilly to a hive of activity in several rooms at the BBC's Maida Vale studios, equipped with synthesisers, multitrack machines and many of the trappings of modern recording technology. It all began back in 1958 as a result of some experiments by a handful of people — including Desmond Briscoe, the present Head of the Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram, a music studio manager, and Donald McWhinnie, then Assistant Head of Radio Drama — looking for something just a little different from the normal run-of-the-mill incidental music and sound effects to use in the BBC's modern drama productions. The mid-50s were probably the highspot of radio drama, and many scripts called for a different approach. The BBC were of course aware of the research going on in France, with musique concrète, and in Germany with Stockhausen and the avant garde movement, but this kind of music had largely failed as incidental music: perhaps because radio — and broadcasting in general — is such an immediate thing that the medium requires music for drama to be primarily accessible. There's no point in having incidental music that distracts from the dialogue by being very deep and thought-provoking; it must complement the project as a whole.

The production that really got things off the ground was All That Fall, a play for radio written by Samuel Beckett. 'It was a remarkable script, really,' says Desmond Briscoe, 'in that he wrote "silence" and "pause", quite obviously differentiating between the two, and when he demanded sounds, he didn't say they had to be any particular way, but the whole nature of the script led to experimentation. In fact a lot of the sounds were actually done in the studio, but they were unusual.' The production used things like simple drum rhythms to indicate people walking, where footsteps just wouldn't have worked satisfactorily. 'We were fascinated by the new toy,' says Desmond as he thinks back to the early days. 'Fascinated by what happened when you faded up the replay knob of the recording machine while it was recording. It was just tape feedback, of course, but to us it was something entirely new, it had just never been used, it had never happened, not under our circumstances.

'There were very few places you could actually do this,' he continued. 'At that time tape was not used universally, even for recording programmes; discs were still being used much of the time. But there was a recording channel attached to one of the studios in 201, Piccadilly that had some interested, obliging engineers, and we could experiment, often late at night. And whilst many programmes weren't recorded on tape, the rehearsals could be, so some studios were equipped with a Ferrograph, so a lot was done that way. People began to think in these terms and a staff producer at that time, Frederick Bradnum, wrote a radiophonic poem called Public Dreams and Private Nightmares which had a score of sounds, and we made all these sounds and we treated all the words and put the whole thing together. It was an experiment.'

The embryonic Workshop also found it could do something else: it could be funny; and the Workshop was called upon to realise some of the sounds for a play by Giles Cooper called The Disagreeable Oyster, about a man who goes up to the north of England on a business trip and ends up in a surrealistic world of cartoon-like encounters. Its success prompted Giles Cooper to write a play especially for the Workshop, called Under The Loofah Tree. This was one of the first productions made entirely in the Workshop, although the incentive came from other departments, in August 1958. A new production was recorded in 1975, and will be broadcast again on Wednesday, April 4 on Radio 3.

Desmond Briscoe was originally a drama studio manager, but he also wrote plays, arranged, and 'did all sorts of things', as he put it. Yet he had always been interested in music and drama, and he eventually managed to get a room allocated in Maida Vale on a very small budget and with some redundant equipment. 'We set up in Room 13, which may or may not have been an ominous thing. The little room next door was a studio.'

Very quickly, of course, television became interested: Quatermass And The Pit was one of the Workshop's first big ventures into TV. 'From then on it developed very quickly, really, in programme demand, but not in our facilities, because even getting professional tape machines took time,' says Desmond. There was an attitude in the BBC at the time, it seems, of, 'Our engineers have spent years trying to create perfection — why on earth do you want to distort it and ruin it?' Because of this, the Workshop had to exist on very early recording equipment for some time. 'People got the impression we couldn't produce anything above Middle C because if you're using elderly mono Ferrographs the tape hiss you're left with is enormous and you have to filter it off to get rid of it!' Desmond points out.

But as time went by the situation got better and the Workshop got more well-known both within the BBC and outside. Dr Who, of course, was a milestone: 'Not because it's still going,' says Desmond, 'and not because it's science fiction, but because of the actual realisation of the signature tune: a piece of music "performed without performers" was a first time — it wasn't really a first time, but it was the first time anybody noticed.' Then the advent of BBC Local Radio produced a sudden need for plenty of news idents, sig tunes and the rest. 'This gave us lots of opportunities. We did things for almost every local radio station in the first eight and this has gone on. They've always been fairly big customers,' comments Desmond.

Over the last five years or so, the Workshop has been actively encouraged to produce its own material. Previous to this, there were several productions performed almost entirely in the Workshop, but the organisation had always come from other departments. Desmond Briscoe says, 'We were very much encouraged by Stephen Hearst, who was until recently Controller of Radio 3, to express our own ideas and make our own programmes. This has built up considerably, and it's given a great creative outlet for those who want it. Some are perfectly happy to go on composing and to be a part of other people's programmes, but for those who've got the ideas there is the opportunity, and this is great. It's important because there is an enormous expertise here in the medium generally; there are people with ideas — or they wouldn't be here.' It's significant that since this has happened, a number of award-winning programmes have been produced by the Workshop. Malcolm Clarke adapted the Ray Bradbury story There Will Come Soft Rains for radio, under the title August 2026. In fact, Malcolm Clarke did practically everything: all the music, and all the sound. As Desmond says, 'We are a little bit like that here.' The programme won Best Radio Adaptation.

Another superlative success story was Desmond Briscoe's own programme, A Wall Walks Slowly, produced in 1977. It was a poetry programme, but poetry with a difference. Desmond used poems about Cumbria written by Norman Nicholson and linked the poetry with recordings of people's words, finely edited into a form in which the words and phrases made their own poetry. 'I used a score of natural sound, continuous natural sound, and I used some music as well, composed by Peter Howell. The whole thing was put together like a piece of music.' The programme has a remarkable feel, and is instantly appealing. So much so, in fact, that it would no doubt be very successful as an album. The programme itself won both the Best Documentary Feature award and Best Production and Direction, and brought Desmond the personal Golden Award for the Most Outstanding Contribution to Radio.

One would think at first sight that, in an industry and a department where deadlines are so all-important, there would be no time to devote to high-quality sound craftmanship like this. But, strangely enough, this must be one of the few places in broadcasting where people can earn the time to sit down and work for long periods on a complete production. Hardly surprising, then, that such superlative programming can in fact be produced, no doubt contributing greatly to the international feeling that, of all the broadcasting organisations, the BBC is 'The Best'. Yet the facilities available at the Workshop are little different from those that you'd find elsewhere: the difference is in the people, and the people who make up the Workshop are without doubt its greatest asset. Certainly it takes very special composers — or 'Producers', as the BBC call them with unusual aptness for a job description — to make a place like this actually work successfully. The people in the Workshop have an ability to be supremely creative — yet so often they must do it to order, and on their own, for here there is little opportunity to work with someone else directly: the studios are 'self-operated' and between the director's brief and the final playback there may only be one person involved, more often than not.

Desmond Briscoe has assembled a group of very special people. On the day I was there, several of the rooms were occupied by members of the Workshop, working alone on one project or another: Dick Mills, for example, was hard at work on a future episode of Dr Who, and in another room Elizabeth Parker, one of the newest members of the 'team' was busily producing special effects for the current series of Blake's 7.

I asked Desmond about the way he thought things had changed during the life of the Workshop: of course, the advent of voltage-control and the synthesiser in general had made a lot of difference to the sound-sources available, but the staff had by no means lost sight of some of the earlier techniques that were the speciality of the Workshop in previous years. John Baker's techniques of meticulous tape-cutting and his brilliant ability with the varispeed and natural sounds — like the famous blowing across bottle-tops he used in Radio Nottingham, for example — were by no means forgotten. Neither was David Cain's dramatic sound for the BBC's War Of The Worlds serialisation, or his music and voice-effects for The Hobbit; and Desmond mentioned that the BBC Green Lampshade, used by Delia Derbyshire amongst others — at various speeds as part of her immensely mood-evoking, atmospheric pieces — was indeed still in the store-room for use at any time. Desmond intimated that whilst the technology of sound-production, as well as recording, had changed, and the people in the Workshop had changed over the years, it was almost entirely the latter that had contributed to the gradual change in the style of the Workshop's output. He agreed that perhaps synthesisers discouraged some people from exploring sounds as they had done in the past, but he emphasised that it was only very rarely that 'raw' synthesiser sounds finished up in the final production, because they still did use tape a great deal. And people's attitude to synthesisers differed. Some, like Peter Howell, were exploring the spontaneity that polyphonic synthesisers offered; others, like Malcolm Clarke, felt that a monophonic device forced you to concentrate more on each note, each sound. 'And of course,' says Desmond, 'we're all basically lazy, and you're never going to produce synthesised sounds which are as interesting as natural sounds. You're never going to have as many variations, as many imperfections, as real sounds. But all right, it has novelty value, and it does open up the range just as it opens up the range of instrumental sounds, and it is a much easier way of doing it. Certainly there's no comparison with having to struggle with 12 manually-controlled oscillators and sweep them up and down and do all these sorts of things.'

Of course the workshop is always on the lookout for new synthesisers: 'But the ARP Odyssey,' he said, 'has had incredible use. It's one of the best things we've spent comparatively little money on. Despite being a keyboard-operated device, the way it is conceived and the system of being able to introduce its various effects are very clever, and it is a very useful noise-making device. There are certainly things that it won't do that a VCS-3 will do, equally it is a lot easier to play things on the Odyssey than on a VCS-3.

'But I don't think the synthesiser has made us produce more music. It may have made some of the music we produce sound more as if it was conceived for a keyboard instrument, and curiously make it more acceptable, whereas the 'plinky-plonk' sort of radiophonic music to some people in itself is unacceptable because of the sound qualities — which is the whole point of doing it that way. I think it's partly a change in fashion; we do an enormous number of signature tunes: any day on Radio 4 there are four or five regulars. And we do, increasingly, use performing musicians, we use instrumental sound as part of the music. It is a matter of 'humanising' it and of making it acceptable and yet making it new, because there is a synthesiser line or a similar element.

I mentioned that one of the things the Workshop was very good at was voice treatment, which is very noticeable in things like The Hobbit, the 'computer poetry' programme Arthur and, of course, the amazing Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Obviously, I put to him, there are big limitations to what you can do with the human voice as far as processing is concerned.

'How far you can go, yes. The human voice is a marvellous source of sound; in fact a lot of Delia Derbyshire's work was with the human voice. And Peter Howell's been doing quite a lot of this with the Vocoder. The strange thing is that it is very easy to destroy the human voice's ability to communicate but almost impossible to destroy its innate quality. I must have said that for the first time in about 1959, and I learnt very quickly, because I was very wild in my ideas. I wanted to do all sorts of extraordinary things and I didn't really care to a great extent whether the listener could understand what was happening or not. But of course if you do that you don't get broadcast very much. It was making the place a sort of 'music factory' that brought us the equipment. Being clever is of limited interest to anybody else, to the listener and certainly to the management. They don't mind if you're clever and they can understand it, and I think this is fair enough. But you've very often got to go beyond the limit and this is why I suppose I'm quite a good person to be running the place, because having gone beyond the limit and come back, when other people here go beyond it I know why; I understand why and I'll defend them against anything and anybody!

Desmond Briscoe is the Head of the Workshop; under him is Brian Hodgson who is officially the 'Organiser' of the Workshop, the term Organiser being usually reserved for purely administrative BBC purposes. But Brian is far more than an administrator — so is Desmond for that matter. Brian is responsible for much of the day-to-day running of the place, and is thus 'in charge' of getting things together technically for the six or so 'Producers' who operate in the Workshop. Yet he is not only an accomplished member of the 'composing' staff, he has also had a fair degree of experience in commercial recording: in fact he left the Workshop some years ago to set up his own studio, Electrophon, before returning to his present position.

Brian was thus just the right person to take me round the various rooms and studios that make up the Workshop and show me the equipment they have at their disposal, before I went on to talk to some of the other people who work there. First of all we went into their copying and editing room. In the centre of the room were a couple of Glen Sound Outside Broadcast mixers, driving a pair of BBC LS3 speakers in OB cabinets; they apparently sound very good. The tape machines in the room are Studer — as are many of the machines in the Workshop — including a clutch of A80 stereo machines and a Revox/1700. Brian is very pleased with the Studers: they accept all the little speed-change devices and other things which are so widely used in the Workshop, and they've performed very well indeed. On top of the console was an Eventide Harmonizer; the keyboard for which was also around.

This device — a second is to be added shortly — is, of course, very useful. Brian intends to interface it with the A700 so that it can perform the Tempophon function (they in fact have one of these old, rotating head devices, enabling you to vary the pitch of a sound without changing the actual speed, and to vary the speed of, say, voices, without affecting the pitch). Next to it was a 'PEU': a BBC Portable Effects Unit. This is no more than a very steep filter with adjustable top and bass frequencies. 'Makes very good telephone conversations', says Brian, 'and great for wopping the top off something, especially in the old days of Ferrographs and resuscitated Reflectographs.

We moved into another room, where Dick Mills was working on a future episode of Dr Who. Brian described it as 'the last of the mono rooms', and in one corner was a remarkable console, all black and with heavy, antique knobs. It was about 18 years old. Next to it was another PEU, and a recently-repaired antique ⅓-octave filter by Albis of Switzerland. Dick was a little unhappy that he could no longer use it for crackles! Also associated with the desk was an original BBC Public Address Stabiliser, modified to accept external oscillators so that it would now do far more than merely shift frequencies by up to 5Hz. 'That's the story of the Radiophonic Workshop,' said Brian. 'It's the story of people opening the back of things and doing things they weren't meant to do!' Near the table on which Dick Mills was viewing Dr Who was a VCS-3, heavily modded with vernier frequency controls and buffered oscillators. It's now seldom used with the keyboard, however. As Dick commented: 'Well the keyboard sort of drifts. We can do nice Debussy things on it because you can spread the octaves how you like and play whole notes on any note you like, you don't have to worry about semitones.'

A lot of the original Dr Who incidental music was performed on VSC-3s, laying down three tracks on three machines and hoping they'd stay in sync, before the days of multitrack. And another piece of original Workshop equipment was partially set up in the corner — it had been used for one of the films about the Workshop that will be screened in the near future. It was a set of seven (originally nine) Advance signal generators, linked into a mini-keyboard spanning just about an octave. You set the frequencies on the signal gennies, and set the attack and decay on the switches above the keyboard: a kind of pre-voltage-control synthesiser.

A new film editing machine in the next room provides the Workshop's film sync capability, replacing hours of work with rulers and bits of ¼-in tape of previous years. Brian recalled times when he and Delia Derbyshire used to spend ages measuring pieces of tape, based on the formula that 0.6in of tape at 15in/s was equal to one frame of film! Now it's obviously much easier. But in strange comparison with the editing table was the original Ampex (Mark 1?) tape recorder standing beside it, used for guide tracks. 'Its brother has been cannibalised and stuck inside it,' commented Brian.

Next we came to the original room where the Workshop began, now resplendent with a couple of A80 stereos, an 8-track A80 and a brand-new Neve 8066 console, 20 in, 16 out. The Workshop is expecting a 16-track (A 80 of course) at any moment. Monitoring is performed on a pair of very nice-sounding Chartwells, although apparently the tweeters have a habit of blowing! There are also a couple of A700s. A useful modification to the 8-track is the wiring up of the 'remote' position of the 'sync/safe/ready' switch on each track so that it gives 'sync-ready', the usual configuration offering only normal replay in 'ready' mode. Over in the corner was a harmonium with — wait for it — 'Mouseproof pedals'. In another corner was the big EMS Vocoder on a trolley, and to round off the room, there were a pair of Paddy Kingsland's personal synthesisers, the ARP Avatar and Axxe. After a quick tour round the small acoustic area, tape store, and 'junk store', piled high with noise-producing objects from past and present, I wandered off to talk to two or three people who were working in the other studios.

First of all I had a chat with Peter Howell in a studio dominated by a rather odd Glen Sound desk, odd in that it had the panpot mounted as the knob on the channel fader! Again the ubiquitous Studers, and here also was the Workshop's Odyssey. Peter, like all the staff at the Workshop, came into Radiophonics from being a 'Studio Manager', which I gather is a BBC term meaning 'Balance Engineer', but Peter's musical interests go right back to his experiences in the choir at Brighton College. That, via 'phases of Hank Marvinism' and sound-on-sound with guitar led to the development of an interest in tape and that, coupled with experience in amateur dramatics and later as a film sound recordist and 18 months experience at Glyndebourne, led him to the BBC. But as a studio manager he had little chance to develop his musical talents until he came to the Radiophonic Workshop temporarily. Did he aim to end up there, I asked him?

'I certainly aimed at being in a place where I could eventually use my tendencies to write instrumental music in some useful way. I didn't at the time realise it was possible to come here. I thought they just came out of the clouds or something! Theoretically it might be possible for people to come in directly from outside, but normally the studio managing experience is so vital, because you're dealing with tape every day. If you're playing instruments on to it and playing about with it, you're still dealing very closely with it, and if you haven't had any experience of that then it's a bit of a drawback.'

Peter's guitar playing gave way to keyboards when he acquired a piano at the age of 21. He finds it much easier to realise ideas on the keyboard, but he still uses guitar where necessary. He's recently discovered the CS80; it was originally hired for The Body In Question, the TV series he's been working on for the past year. But he's now fully come to terms with it. 'It's really great,' he said, 'I think when you get to that stage with an instrument you're winning because you can sit up all night with it and let things happen; I didn't get to that stage with the Polymoog for example. There I had difficulties wondering how to get the same sound more than once, things like that.' Peter uses the presets on the Yamaha quite extensively, and finds a lot of use for the two separate outputs, which offer very versatile combinations. But he also likes to build up on a preset sound with the various settings.

Peter discovered that there's quite a lot of freedom available when you're working on the music for a series, because of the relationship that develops between composer and producer, although it's rather less the case with a one-off production, where you perhaps can't quite take as many chances. But on a series, 'you hopefully get the confidence of the producer in the first couple of months, and thereafter you're, generally able to experiment with things and take them along. It was quite a revelation to be able to do that, very much more exciting.'

With The Body In Question Peter's technique was to start from the producer's brief and a copy of the film. This often led him to a starting point. 'After that, I sat with the film and marked it up. I normally mark it up with little blips of tone, for the shot changes that I want to use. While I was doing that I was constantly looking at the piece, and by the time I came out of that I normally had some idea of how I was going to start. I think half the battle, really, is starting. The creative instincts are like an old jalopy in a way, you need an awful lot of effort to start her up! And I like to put myself in a situation which I know will produce some sort of output, even if it's not very good to start with. Like I might choose some hackneyed chords or something and lay them down, then out of that might come a more interesting bass line, and I get rid of the chords and improve the harmonies. It's just a matter of getting that starting point: a little bit of an incentive, so to speak.'

Peter finds the poly much easier to work with because it offers spontaneity, as opposed to the 'woodenness' that sometimes results from laying a line at a time with a monophonic instrument. And this is perhaps one of the reasons that Peter is able to produce electronic music with such impact and appeal, although of course the instrument is only part of the story. Whatever the reason, Peter is in a class of very few in this sense, sharing an ability to produce 'electronic music with feeling' with people like Larry Fast and, to some extent, Jean-Michel Jarre.

One example of this is the Space For Man/The Case of the Ancient Astronauts track which appears both on Peter's own LP, Through A Glass Darkly, and on the recent BBC Space Themes album. The actual album track is a combination of two pieces of music for the programmes mentioned in the title, the second half relying very much on a strong synthesiser bass line. I asked him how it was done. Was it a sequencer?

'No, it was based on the technique of syncopated echo on random filtered "automatic" synthesiser, which gives a very bland mechanical thing a bit of life because it's always chasing forward all the time. It's manually played. I used a sequencer playing a descending sequence on the beginning of the track, but that's the only bit of sequencer on it. Even when I use a sequencer I never leave it alone: I never set it up and leave it. I'm always mucking about with it while it's happening. I used the sequencer on the Synthi 100, the biggie, and I was always playing with it so the thing kept on resetting to zero, starting off again and eventually getting down to the bottom. But it introduces some kind of humanity into it; I just can't keep my hands to myself!'

The album Through A Glass Darkly itself was the result of some music Peter did for Radio Carlisle: he found the idea very interesting and felt it could be developed into a longer piece. Desmond Briscoe allowed him two months to get it together, and the 20-minute piece, originally entitled In The Kingdom of Colours, became side one of the LP. I asked Peter about how he managed to persuade anyone to let him work on something for eight weeks. 'Well,' he said, 'there comes a time here, apparently, where everyone feels they ought to do something of their own rather than things that producers constantly ask them to do, and perhaps my time came a little bit earlier than some people's. But he said it was nonetheless valid, so he let me see if I could produce something out of the idea. I also wanted to try and crystallise my keyboard technique, if you can call it that, so I used pianos a lot. It's very much a "piano and electronics" sort of thing.'

I asked Peter what he was doing at the moment. 'Sleeping!' he said, 'having just finished the series, The Body In Question. I've been doing it since last February, and I finished pretty well a year later. I almost became The Body In Question! It's 2½ hours of music all of which is sync-to-film in little chunks. The longest bit was three, 3½ minutes, but I think I probably learnt more about the craft and the way music sits alongside film in that year than I ever learnt to date, because it was all so intense. And it was also a great challenge, great fun, because there were so many different types of music required. Stuff that appeared to be based upon older music as well as modern-sounding material. And it brings it all together, really: you suddenly realise how they do all rely on each other, different styles. But I'd like to do something that's a development of all this, because I can't help thinking that things like Astronauts and things like I've been doing for The Body In Question, put together would be quite an interesting venture.'

Next I spoke to Elizabeth Parker, who was in another room consisting mainly of Synthi-100 and Studers. In the corner, a Shibaden VTR was showing a still-frame, obviously from the SF series Blake's 7, on a monitor, the centre-bottom of the screen being obscured by a series of digits indicating that we were just over ten minutes into the episode. Elizabeth had taken over from Richard Yeoman-Clark, who left at Christmas to join Roundhouse Studios as an engineer. Previous to this she'd only done a couple of episodes of Dr Who, so she was still settling in when I turned up. She was doing episodes 7 to 13. I wondered how she'd got to the Workshop in the first place.

'I was originally a musician with a slightly off-beat taste in music, playing piano and cello, but I've always been interested in sound montage, and that's why I hoped I could come here.' She's also very highly qualified, with a Master's Degree in Music. At the time I came in Elizabeth was adding some 'button-pushing' sounds: I asked her about the techniques she uses primarily. 'My ultimate aim, I suppose, is to create an interesting sound. Not just a beep where a button is pushed, for instance, but to do something that's a little more interesting that that. Textured sound is really what it is, and to do that I'm using the Synthi-100 at the moment. But I think you get far and away the best sounds when you use a combination of electronic sources and tape manipulation, loops and things like that. There's an enormous variety of sounds come out of the synthesiser, but you are limited to a certain extent because they're all electronic. I prefer to use a mixture of basic sounds, really, and I suppose that's my pet enjoyment. But on Blake's 7 I'm concentrating on really just sounds rather than music, and it's a question of making interesting sounds and sounds you wouldn't perhaps expect to hear. Button-pushings, space-age machine guns, explosions, that sort of thing. '

Dedication, creativity and persistence are prime requirements here: the fact that everyone in the Workshop has these qualities was not only obvious from my discussions with the composers themselves, but will be obvious to all those who hear the results on TV and radio. Yet very often the composers can never tell when they'll be required, or what they'll have to do. As Elizabeth said, 'That's the thing about this job, really; sometimes you'll be working flat out for a week, 19 hours a day, and then everything calms down. Often you're hanging around for the graphics to come in, or waiting for the thing to be reduced before you can actually start work. So you're sitting around for two weeks and suddenly you've got two days to get something done.'

With a series, of course, there are always some effects that are standard: they appear every week. Often these are stored on paper as standard patches, or on tape, to be used over and over again as they're needed. But every episode requires a batch of new sounds which must be made up from scratch. I wondered if it bothered Elizabeth that she was often left totally on her own to get something together. 'Not really, no,' she said. 'I quite enjoy it because you're so wrapped up in it. You forget everything else, you're just working with your little synthesiser; it doesn't worry me at all, because I get so wrapped up in it that time just goes.' Do the members of the Workshop get any choice in what they do, I wondered? The answer is, generally speaking, yes. Brian usually asks the composers if they'd like to do a given job, and generally they accept what they're offered, because they enjoy it, and at least theoretically everyone in the Workshop should be able to do anything: that's why they're there. They could take over from each other in case of illness, for example. But do they specialise at all, I asked Elizabeth? 'We're not supposed to specialise in anything,' she replied 'but there are some people who tend to; for example, Paddy Kingsland does super tunes and things like that; and you tend to get known for certain things.' On the whole, the composers do the things they like doing.

Finally I spoke to Paddy Kingsland, back in Studio E, and between admiring the new Neve console and listening to various odd things, we talked about what he was up to. Paddy has been with the Workshop for several years, and over that time has introduced a number of his own instruments to his work. He owns the ARP Axxe and the Avatar guitar synth which he reviewed recently for Sound International. He's a wizard with tunes and with words: apart from numerous signature tunes he has done a great deal of work with sound poetry, including a couple of programmes with the well-known sound poet, Lilly Greenham. They are remarkable combinations of voice-treatment, effects and original music. On a recent training course he combined excerpts of these and other programmes with interviews and other material into a half-hour programme called Words, Words, Words, which tackles the problem of how we understand words and their meanings in an original, yet very humorous, way. He's also well-known for his work on The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy, having produced the incidental music and effects for the first of the series and the Christmas programme that links the first series with a forthcoming continuation. At the moment he's awaiting the delivery of the Workshop's 16-track Studer so that he can start work on a new project: a musical for Radio 2, of all things, to be broadcast on Good Friday.

This project is entitled Rockoco, and it's being written by Jeffrey Shankley. Paddy is the producer, and the hour-long programme will be done primarily at the Workshop. The musical is a venture which he's very interested in, and he's very pleased to have been given the go-ahead, after having produced some demos to show Radio 2's management that it won't be entirely rock-orientated. The programme is almost entirely music, with very little dialogue out on its own, and tells the story of an alien who escapes the destruction of his spacecraft and is landed on a planet where he takes the form of the local inhabitants. He is immediately drawn into the life on this world, unaware of his origins, and has many experiences in a surrealistic city environment, including his becoming a rock star. After that... well, you'll just have to wait and see.

Unfortunately I didn't have enough time to talk to everyone at the Workshop in as much detail as I would have liked: indeed, everyone I spoke to had so much to say that was really interesting that I could easily write a book on it! After transcribing the interviews and discussions, I had over 64 pages to whittle down for this article alone. So I've concentrated on the people who make up this remarkable place, and have had to leave out a number of interesting developments, like the work which is going on to update the Synthi-100, and the other new developments that Brian is introducing, like the polyphonic keyboard controller — with which Brian has been closely involved in development with electronic engineer Ken Gale — which can control up to ten monophonic synthesisers of any type, and was demonstrated recently at the BBC's Radio 80 exhibition. When the new devices are installed, we'll go back to the Workshop and look at them in more detail.

I'll leave the last words to Desmond Briscoe, the Head of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. I asked him where he thought the Workshop was going, and what he thought was going to happen:

'Technically, obviously the galloping technology that we're living with is going to affect us — as it has over the past years — to the extent that digital techniques will affect us, which again will make things easier, although I hope it won't make them all the same. This is the great thing. They are all tools, these things, and we must always remember that we're making music for people, not for machines. This has been a place of continuous development, and I trust there isn't any reason why this should stop. But if I really knew at any moment where it was going to go next; that day, I know, is the day that I'll retire. I really mean it. I still come up with ideas and I surround myself with people who have ideas. I always keep myself open to people, anybody, any writer or poet or painter or anybody else — I see all sorts of extraordinary people. I'm always looking for ideas, because ideas can change the whole way of doing things. I'm a great believer in the fact that nothing, really, is impossible.'