Somewhere in the multiverse, there exists a timeline where John Williams never got the call for Star Wars, Hans Zimmer was busy, and the production budget got routed through a BBC department that made alien noises using a Radiophonic Workshop oscillator and a length of Sellotape. I think about that timeline a lot. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, for anyone who needs a quick catch-up, was the legendary sound design unit founded in 1958 that gave us the Doctor Who theme, acres of gloriously unsettling ambient noise for public information films, and sounds that still make a certain generation of Britons feel simultaneously nostalgic and mildly anxious. They were brilliant. They were also absolutely, magnificently weird. So what would happen if the BBC Radiophonic Workshop had been handed some of cinema’s most iconic soundtracks? Pull up a chair. This is going to be very good.
Star Wars: A New Hope, the full orchestral sweep becomes a two-minute oscillator wobble
John Williams wrote one of the most recognisable pieces of music in human history for the opening crawl of Star Wars. Seventy-piece orchestra, bold brass, thundering timpani. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, working with the tools and budget of 1977 BBC television, would have approached this rather differently. Picture the opening sequence: that massive yellow text floating through space, and underneath it, a sustained electronic drone that sounds like a fridge trying to communicate. The main theme would almost certainly have been realised on the EMS Synthi 100, the big synthesiser the Workshop actually used, and it would have been genuinely haunting. Not triumphant. Haunting. Darth Vader’s march would have gone from menacing orchestra to something resembling a washing machine on a spin cycle with reverb applied. Honestly, I think it might have been scarier.
Inception, already half a Radiophonic piece, if we’re honest
Here is the thing about Hans Zimmer’s Inception score: large chunks of it are already doing what the Workshop did instinctively. The famous slowed-down Edith Piaf horn blast, the low rumbling drones, the sense of time moving at half-speed. Give that brief to Delia Derbyshire or Brian Hodgson in 1970 and they would have produced something functionally similar using tape manipulation and ring modulation. The difference is it would also have sounded like it belonged on a BBC Two late-night arts programme presented by a man in a turtleneck, and I mean that as a genuine compliment. The Workshop’s version of the dream-collapse sequences would have been magnificent: layers of reversed tape, filtered noise, and probably one genuinely lovely melodic fragment buried just beneath the chaos that you’d only notice on a third listen.
Jurassic Park, John Williams again, and this time the dinosaurs sound like the shipping forecast
Williams’ Jurassic Park theme is warm, sweeping, emotional. It makes you feel the wonder of seeing a living brachiosaurus for the first time. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop would have made you feel like you were watching a nature documentary narrated in a very calm voice about something that was nonetheless going to kill you. The Workshop’s dinosaur sounds would have leant heavily on low-frequency drones and pitch-shifted recordings, which is genuinely how the film’s sound designers approached the actual creature sounds anyway. But the orchestral wonder theme? Gone. In its place: a slow, cycling electronic arpeggio that would have been technically astonishing for the period and also sounded faintly like a primary school music lesson. I love it. I want it. Someone please make this happen.
The Dark Knight, Zimmer and Howard’s chaos gets even more chaotic
The Joker’s theme in The Dark Knight is a single repeated note on a cello, growing louder and more distorted. This is, functionally, exactly what the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were doing for BBC public information films in 1973. The Workshop version of the full Dark Knight score would have leaned into that energy completely. Batman’s themes would have been angular and clipped. Gotham’s ambience would have been layered treated recordings of actual city sounds, probably sourced from the BBC Sound Effects library, which means there’s a reasonable chance the Workshop’s Gotham would have subtly sounded like Birmingham New Street in the rain. Which, you could argue, is more honest about what Gotham actually is.
If you enjoy thinking about how different creative institutions would reimagine each other’s work, you might have a similar amount of fun reading about which video game cities would fail a UK fire safety inspection, it operates on the same principle of applying an unexpected British lens to something fictional and watching the results fall apart beautifully.
2001: A Space Odyssey, already perfect, already British-adjacent, still improved by wobble
Kubrick famously replaced the score Alex North had composed for 2001 with classical music. He also used Atmosphères by György Ligeti, which is the kind of music the BBC Radiophonic Workshop would have been extremely jealous of. The Workshop’s version of 2001 would have been extraordinary, not because they could match the classical repertoire, but because the HAL 9000 sequences would have had an authenticity that even Ligeti couldn’t touch. HAL’s voice already sounds like something made on a Radiophonic oscillator. Their score for those sequences would have felt genuinely lived-in. The Dawn of Man sequence, meanwhile, would have had a theremin. Obviously.
The actual BBC Radiophonic Workshop legacy (because they deserve the credit)
I don’t want this piece to come across as purely affectionate mockery, because the Workshop were genuinely remarkable. Delia Derbyshire’s arrangement of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme, created by hand, cutting and splicing tape, with no computers whatsoever, was so far ahead of its time that Grainer reportedly struggled to believe it was possible. The BBC’s own archive pages on the Radiophonic Workshop give a sense of the breadth of their output, from children’s television to avant-garde drama to the kind of experimental audio that universities now study. They were not a novelty unit. They were pioneers who happened to be working inside a publicly funded British broadcaster with, presumably, a tea rota and a strong opinion about the biscuit situation.
The reason imagining BBC Radiophonic Workshop movie soundtracks is so entertaining is precisely because the Workshop’s aesthetic is so distinct. It has texture. It has personality. It sounds like Britain in a very particular era: optimistic about technology, slightly unsure about the future, and absolutely committed to making something interesting out of very limited means. There is something in that creative constraint that I find genuinely inspiring. Also, the thought of Hans Zimmer’s BRAAAM reduced to a single oscillator drone is very funny. These two things can both be true.
For a similar kind of fun, I’d also point you at the piece on the worst video game menus ranked by someone who has clearly never used the NHS website, which operates on the same energy: taking something beloved, applying a very British critical framework to it, and marvelling at the results. And if you’re in the mood for more institutions-colliding-with-pop-culture chaos, the piece on superhero costumes failing a UK health and safety risk assessment is exactly the kind of thing that pairs well with a good cup of tea and mild existential delight.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop closed in 1998 and was revived as a collective in 2013. Their legacy is vast, their influence on electronic music is documented and real, and their version of the Star Wars opening crawl would have been deeply, magnificently strange. We deserved that timeline.