Time On Our Hands

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TOOH, Delia's shorthand for Time On Our Hands

Time On Our Hands is Delia's theme music, created in 1962, for a 70-minute BBC television documentary of the same name "on the problems of increased leisure in the automated world of the future. Pure electronic sound."[1]

The programme was produced by Don Haworth and directed by Pieter Morpurgo[2] and is described as a

Documentary made in 1963, which projected the viewer 25 years into the future to 14th Sept. 1988, to look back over the events of the past 25 years. With Kingsley Amis, Stafford Beer, Aldous Huxley, Franklin Medhurst and Raymond Williams.[2]

Robin Carmody writes:

One of her earliest contributions - "Time On Our Hands" - is a superb subversion of a phrase which would normally evoke (especially in the context of 1962) new-found affluence, spare time and leisure, now rendered alienated, distant and isolated.[3]

and Delia said:

I had only done one other television programme before Doctor Who, called Time On Our Hands, using beautiful abstract electronic sounds. So I was very inexperienced, but making something from nothing was my secret.[4]

In 2008, a second piece made by Delia for the programme was published on The BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective, entitled City Music, presumably her incidental music for scenes inside the programme.

Copyright

Under UK law, all audio recordings made before 1963 are in the public domain.

Papers

Spectrogram

Time On Our Hands - Spectrogram.jpg

Availability

References