Last year the BBC announced that they were resurrecting the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, their pioneering sound effects unit that was quietly shut down in 1998. That closure marked the end of forty years of groundbreaking work in composition, sound design and production. The new incarnation – with Matthew Herbert at the helm – is based purely online, a far cry from my own romantic image of the Workshop’s heyday. In my mind, the Workshop was a bunker-like complex containing a series of dusty, mysterious laboratories where hunched, frowning nerds in horn-rimmed glasses and button-down shirts methodically turned dials on home-made oscillators or rearranged fragments of scalpel-spliced magnetic tape to create bizarre new sounds.

And to be fair these two remastered vinyl reissues, BBC Radiophonic Music (recorded in 1968 but released commercially in 1971) and BBC Radiophonic Workshop (1975), do nothing but reinforce that picture. Both are fascinating snapshots of a time when the Workshop was at the fore-front of electronic experimentation but simultaneously had mainstream acceptance thanks to their work on primetime programmes like Doctor Who. The thought that BBC execs once happily signed off large sums of license payers’ money to purchase cutting edge equipment for the production of laser gun sounds and alien screams is enough to warm the heart of any closet analogue aficionado.

BBC Radiophonic Music focuses solely on three composers, each with a distinct approach but each equally able to surprise by writing against type. John Baker, with his jazz background, takes the most traditional approach to melody and song structure – take “The Missing Jewel” with its agreeably twangy, Big Band bass line for example. Then again, his “Christmas Commercial” is a musical punchline – “O Come All Ye Faithful” played on a series of ringing cash registers. The late, great Delia Derbyshire – most celebrated Workshop member of all – is the most experimental of the three. In particular the brooding, layered drones of “Blue Veils and Golden Sands” and “The Delian Mode” (two pieces of incidental music from Doctor Who) are astoundingly forward-thinking. However her Bach reading, “Air”, shows that she could also create music of real delicacy and warmth. David Cain’s contributions are almost nursery-rhyme like with an endearingly home-made, unmistakably British sensibility. Then he surprises us with “War of the Worlds” – a genuinely terrifying (try walking through the desolate backstreets of Finsbury Park with this on your headphones), discordant collage of analogue screams, thunder claps and B-movie organ stabs.

BBC Radiophonic Workshop contains music from a wider variety of composers and for me this is the more rewarding listen of the two. What’s great for me is that I know so little about any of the programmes that these extracts originally came from that I get lost in faux-nostalgic reveries of imaginary channel-hopping. The jaunty exotica of “Geraldine” (by Roger Limb) evokes George Jetson throwing a cheese and wine party, whilst “Kitten’s Lullaby” (also by Limb) is the mournful score to a silent film of an orphaned cat, doomed to wandering rain-soaked alleyways in futile search of its mother. Paddy Kingsland’s Look Around You-recalling “Panel Beaters” has to be from a low-budget, regional quiz show where bearded, polo-necked hopefuls compete to win a mug and pen. In fact the only ‘song’ familiar to me is “Major Bloodnok’s Stomach” by Dick Mills – a bracing 11 second electro-splurge used in The Goon Show. Yet for every brash theme tune there is a meticulously crafted piece of background music, such as Glynis Jones’ barely-there “Veils and Mirrors” or the ambitiously labyrinthine “Waltz Antipathy” by Richard Yeoman Clark.

Over the past decade or more, mounting praise from enthusiasts, journos and artists alike has begun to coax this unique music out from under the cultish floorboards it’s hidden under for far too long, and this small, somewhat eccentric collective are now widely – and rightly – regarded as a major influence on the development of electronic music worldwide. With original members including Paddy Kingsland and Roger Limb now playing classics from the RWS catalogue live and this month’s 50th anniversary of Doctor Who, there’s no better time to begin exploring the vast catalogue amassed by these bookish firebrands.