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written by Dominic Jackson
VERSION 3.01
revised
7 May 2006 |
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The
purpose of this FAQ is to explain the survival of many pieces of rare
Doctor Who material, either video or audio, or to explain why the
copies of certain
episodes that are closest in character to the original broadcast are
inadequate for present day use. I have presented it in the form of
common questions
and answers. I'm keen to hear feedback on this FAQ so please
let me know what you
think of my efforts! Release dates and catalogue numbers
refer
to UK releases unless stated otherwise.
Contents
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Author's
note: In some cases I have used what some may see to be "incorrect"
story titles when discussing some of the Hartnell serials for which no
overall title was given on screen. If you think this prejudices my
arguments & that I obviously haven't done my research properly,
you're entitled to your opinion. But I assure you that the facts
contained in this article are as well-researched as possible, and I
simply used "wrong" titles because they're the ones I feel most
comfortable with.
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This
section is intended both for the reader who may only have heard of the
missing episodes phenomenon by reputation and requires more
information, and to explain in some detail the roles of various BBC
departments in the destruction of material throughout the period of c.
1967 to 1978.
It
is tempting to assume that the BBC had an all-encompassing central
storage facility at the time it first became necessary to archive
Doctor Who episodes (i.e. in late 1963), however this was not the case.
60s (and early 70s) Doctor Who was usually videotaped for transmission
and telerecorded from these videotapes for BBC Enterprises, for
overseas
sale purposes. At this time the only formal archive was the BBC Film
Library, whose mandate was to keep programmes made on film. This was
interpreted somewhat loosely: for example, episodes such as The
Crusade :3 and The Enemy of the World :3 were found
when
the film library was re-catalogued in 1978. These episodes were
originally recorded on videotape but were held by the library as 16mm
film recordings, probably because viewing prints circulating through
other BBC departments were returned to the film library by default
(being film copies) even though they did not originate there, but from
the BBC Enterprises master telerecording negatives. (However, as it was
filmed rather than videotaped, all four episodes of
Spearhead From
Space
were quite properly kept by the library). The important point is that
the library – which is often referred to as "the archives" – did not
concern itself with videotapes in any way, as these came under the
jurisdiction of the BBC Engineering Department until 1978. (In 1978 the
Engineering Dept. videotape library was merged with the film library to
become the BBC Film and Videotape Library – Engineering then became
Television Recording and ultimately Post Production).
After
a sixties programme (for example, Doctor Who) had been
broadcast, the master videotape would be given to Engineering, who
maintained a small library. They would make a telerecording of it for
BBC Enterprises if Enterprises thought it had overseas sales
potential (and when colour broadcasts started, copies of the colour
tapes that programmes were broadcast from would be made by Engineering,
in both PAL and NTSC colour systems, for
Enterprises to pass on to the purchasing country). After the
telerecordings had been made the tapes would be placed in the
Engineering Department videotape library. In about 1967, tapes from the
Engineering Department library (for which there was no mandate) began
to
be wiped to make way for newer programmes, although not until the
production teams and BBC Enterprises had indicated "no further
interest". By 1978, so many tapes had been wiped by Engineering that
not
a single videotape of any Doctor Who story prior to The
Ambassadors
of Death episode 1 was still held in their library.
The original contracts
with the writers, actors and their unions dictated how long BBC
Enterprises could sell a programme abroad for - typically 5 to 7 years
after its first UK transmission. These contracts also controlled how
many UK repeats a programme could have (a great concern on the part of
the actors' union Equity, which in hindsight seems slightly quaint and
charming, was that there would be so many repeats that their members
would have no new work once technology to record television productions
matured during the 1950s). When these rights ran out, BBC Enterprises
saw little point in keeping their film copies - they had limited storage
space and it seems they thought the Film Library was keeping everything.
The Film Library in turn believed that Enterprises was responsible for
archival duties and that the Film Library therefore only needed to
retain selected episodes of the many BBC programmes produced during
their existence. It is unclear how much communication occurred between
these two departments and whether Enterprises was aware that they were
destroying the only copies of many shows, after the original videotapes
were wiped by Engineering. Whilst BBC Enterprises' permission was needed
to wipe the videotapes, once again the extent of internal communication
in what must have been a very busy department is not accurately known -
since they thought the Film Library was keeping material, Enterprises
may not have bothered to correlate the authorisations for tape wiping
with their later destruction of the film recordings. Whatever, from
about 1972 to 1977, BBC Enterprises destroyed or attempted to destroy
all the negatives and prints they had of episodes for which the sales
rights had expired.
After
the problem came to light (see Is it true that
nearly six minutes of Galaxy 4: Four Hundred Dawns
still exists?) Sue Malden was appointed as the first BBC
Archive Selector – essentially her job was to decide what to keep and
what to junk (as things were previously done on a somewhat arbitrary
basis), as well as attempting to locate other copies of material that
had been destroyed. Malden and Ian
Levine were responsible for many early recoveries – the
full story of subsequent findings was told in Richard Molesworth's Doctor
Who in the Archives articles in The DWB Compendium and Doctor
Who Magazine #257.
As
of January 2004, 108 episodes of Doctor Who are classified as "does
not exist" in the BBC Archives – the majority of these are from
seasons 3, 4 and 5 although some episodes are missing from seasons 1,
2 and 6. A full list of what is missing follows: see
Robert
Franks' Doctor Who in the Archives page for more details. In
many cases, extracts exist where the complete episode has been lost -
Steve Phillips' clips site has
full details of these cases. It should
be pointed out that episodes of other BBC programmes were destroyed
in a similar way, and also that the BBC was not the only company to
indulge in such activities (many ITV companies wiped tapes and
destroyed film recordings, leaving gaps in their archive holdings).
Production
code
|
Story
title
|
Number
of episodes
|
Tx dates
(dd/mm/yy)
|
Episodes
missing
|
D
|
Marco Polo
|
7
|
22/2/64 to
4/4/64
|
All
|
H
|
The Reign
of
Terror
|
6
|
8/8/64 to
12/9/64
|
4 and 5
|
P
|
The Crusade
|
4
|
27/3/65 to
17/4/65
|
2 and 4
|
T
|
Galaxy 4
|
4
|
11/9/65 to
2/10/65
|
All
|
T/A
|
Mission to
the Unknown
|
1
|
9/10/65
|
All
|
U
|
The Myth
Makers
|
4
|
16/10/65 to
6/11/65
|
All
|
V
|
The Daleks'
Master Plan
|
12
|
13/11/65 to
29/1/66
|
1, 3-4, 6-9,
11, 12
|
W
|
The Massacre
|
4
|
5/2/66 to
26/2/66
|
All
|
Y
|
The
Celestial Toymaker
|
4
|
2/4/66 to
23/4/66
|
1-3
|
AA
|
The Savages
|
4
|
28/5/66 to
18/6/66
|
All
|
CC
|
The
Smugglers
|
4
|
10/9/66 to
1/10/66
|
All
|
DD
|
The Tenth
Planet
|
4
|
8/10/66 to
29/10/66
|
4
|
EE
|
The Power
of
the Daleks
|
6
|
5/11/66 to
10/12/66
|
All
|
FF
|
The
Highlanders
|
4
|
17/12/66 to
7/1/67
|
All
|
GG
|
The
Underwater Menace
|
4
|
14/1/67 to
4/2/67
|
1, 2 and 4
|
HH
|
The Moonbase
|
4
|
11/2/67 to
4/3/67
|
1 and 3
|
JJ
|
The Macra
Terror
|
4
|
11/3/67 to
1/4/67
|
All
|
KK
|
The
Faceless
Ones
|
6
|
8/4/67 to
13/5/67
|
2, 4-6
|
LL
|
The Evil of
the Daleks
|
7
|
20/5/67 to
1/7/67
|
1, 3-7
|
NN
|
The
Abominable Snowmen
|
6
|
30/9/67 to
4/11/67
|
1, 3-6
|
OO
|
The Ice
Warriors
|
6
|
11/11/67 to
16/12/67
|
2 and 3
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PP
|
The Enemy
of
the World
|
6
|
23/12/67 to
27/1/68
|
1 and 2, 4-6
|
QQ
|
The Web of
Fear
|
6
|
3/2/68 to
9/3/68
|
2-6
|
RR
|
Fury From
the Deep
|
6
|
16/3/67 to
20/4/67
|
All
|
SS
|
The Wheel
in
Space
|
6
|
27/4/68 to
1/6/68
|
1, 2, 4 and
5
|
VV
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The Invasion
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8
|
2/11/68 to
21/12/68
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1 and 4
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YY
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The Space
Pirates
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6
|
8/3/69 to
12/4/69
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1, 3-6
|
In
addition, 13 Pertwee episodes are not held in any transmittable colour
format, and only exist in black and white. These are:
Production
code
|
Story
title
|
Number
of episodes
|
Tx
(dd/mm/yy)
|
Colour
episodes missing
|
CCC
|
The Ambassadors of Death
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7
|
21/3/70 to 2/5/70
|
2-4, 6 and 71
|
FFF
|
The Mind of Evil
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6
|
30/1/71 to 6/3/71
|
All2
|
SSS
|
Planet of the Daleks
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6
|
7/4/73 to 12/5/73
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33
|
WWW
|
Invasion of the Dinosaurs
|
6
|
12/1/74 to 16/2/74
|
13
|
1
|
Colour
versions of the outstanding episodes of The
Ambassadors of Death do exist, however they
are unsuitable for colourisation – see later.
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2
|
Three
colour extracts exist from The Mind of Evil episode six, as explained below.
|
3 |
Some fan versions of these
stories (especially domestic recordings of North American broadcasts)
apparently include colour versions of the missing sections. These
are however not real and are created by editing existing colour
material
together or excising the monochrome-only portions completely and
reducing the stories to five episodes in length. |
Back to contents
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When
the junking process was stopped in 1977/8, and so much material was
found to have been destroyed, various individuals set about looking for
other copies of the missing material. Many Hartnell episodes were found
in negative form at BBC Enterprises, having been overlooked by the
junking teams, whilst other episodes were recovered from overseas TV
stations and private collectors. See the aforementioned articles for
more details, and also Brian Hass'
Lost
and Found Episodes of Doctor Who article. The biggest TV
archives (Australia, Canada and New Zealand) have already been searched
several times, and material has turned up from TV companies in such
unlikely places as Nigeria and Cyprus, but some other companies'
archives have yet to be investigated. For further information on what
formats existing episodes are held on and where material has been
recovered from, see Robert
Franks' guide. It must be said, however, that the episodes
many fans (including me!)
would
like to rediscover (i.e. the season 5 Troughton stories) are the most
unlikely to be found at foreign TV stations as BBC Enterprises
paperwork shows they were only sold to a handful of countries (the
seminal regeneration pair The Tenth
Planet and The Power of the
Daleks vying for the wooden spoon with screening rights to each
only being sold to three countries). The practice of "cycling"
(passing on second hand film prints from one country to another and not
obtaining fresh copies from BBC Enterprises) means in reality, fewer
copies would have been made from the master negatives at BBC
Enterprises. A list of overseas sales rights for each story has
been compiled by Richard Molesworth and is available
here
(Microsoft Word document format but opens fine with
OpenOffice). The BBC also
started its own "Treasure
Hunt"
campaign to spread the word, which resulted in a number of recoveries
(both television, including two complete series 2 Dad's
Army episodes, and radio) but no Doctor Who material. The
main thrust
of the campaign is now over but the web page remains open to provide a
point of contact with members of the public who may have missing
material.
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A
very old chestnut, this one. Careful research by various people has
revealed that many of the rumours circulating in fandom over the years
are with only a very slight basis in fact. Such rumours are for
example,
that a private collector has some or all of The Macra Terror
(almost certainly confusion with some amateur-shot clips
from this episode, which began to circulate through fandom in 1996) and
that William Hartnell was given a print of The Daleks' Master Plan:
The Feast of Steven after it was transmitted (he was actually
given a 12 minute portion of The Dalek Invasion of Earth:2
which later found its way to the British Film Institute). One
"recovery" often quoted by those advocating such conspiracy theories,
is that a poor quality copy of The Tomb of the Cybermen was
recovered from "fan" hands shortly after the story was returned from
Hong Kong. It must be said that there is no truth whatsoever
to this rumour – no redundant copy of Tomb was returned. This
is yet another fan rumour circulated by those who fervently believe
stories of private collectors hoarding missing material.
The
purpose of this FAQ is not to dismiss out of hand every fan rumour of
the past 20 years, but to counter suggestions that material exists but
is just out of reach, which is not really the case. Private film
collectors are a notoriously insular bunch, and it takes some time to
be accepted into their circles before they will reveal what they
have. Some material has indeed been recovered from private collectors (The
Reign of Terror:6, The Crusade:1, The Faceless Ones:3, The Evil of the Daleks:2, The Abominable Snowmen:2,The
Wheel in Space:3 and an unedited copy of The Dominators:5) but it seems unlikely that reports of up to 80 missing episodes
existing in private hands are true. For a final word on this
matter, consider the above list of episodes returned by private
collectors. Several of these collectors were interviewed for the
1998 documentary The Missing Years
(included on the BBC Video release of The
Ice Warriors, BBCV 6387). They all note that the sums they
paid for
the films when they acquired them were fairly small: less than
£20 each. Bruce Grenville, the collector discovered to be
in possession of The Lion,
was unaware of the value of what he had. Such a body of evidence
does not point to organised hoarding as much as simple ignorance (not
everyone has a complete list of all missing Doctor Who episodes in
their head!) Only the collector owning The Wheel in Space episode 3
attempted to hide what he had, but even in 1984 fan communication was
sufficient to pressure him into returning the episode. Another
collector did manage to conceal the existence of his unedited prints of
The Time Meddler
episodes 1 and 3 for some years until finally returning them in the
early 1990s but this is very much the exception that proves the
rule.
In addition, the standard law of conspiracy theory
would appear relevant: the greater the number of people involved in a
conspiracy, the more likely it is that someone will leak the details of
the cover-up. Of course, one can never conclusively prove a
negative, but the available evidence does not support the concept of
"missing episode clubs". Readers may also wish to note that
rumours of greedy collectors hoarding episodes of The Savages or The Space Pirates are conspicuous
by
their absence!
Back to contents
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There
is a long-held belief in fandom that the fourth episodes of The
Daleks' Master Plan and The Tenth Planet were stolen from the Blue
Peter office in November 1973. The evidence for this is thin:
certainly The Traitors (Master Plan :4) was signed out
from
the BBC Film Library for Blue Peter to use clips from in the
episode transmitted 5th November 1973 (celebrating 10 years of Doctor
Who), and despite repeated memos to the person who signed the episode
out (who went by the name of J. Smith – this could have been Justin
Smith, a member of the Blue Peter production team whose
responsibilities would have included ordering up such materials) the
print was never returned to the Film Library. The Tenth Planet
episode 4 must have been obtained from BBC Enterprises – there is no
evidence that the Film Library ever had a copy of the episode.
Furthermore, Enterprises were continuing to sell the story abroad
until 1974 (although this does not necessarily mean that the print of
episode 4 was returned to them after Blue Peter had finished
with
it; they would have retained a master negative to strike new prints
from, before this and any other copies of the episode they held were
destroyed when the sales rights ran out). It is unlikely that episode
four of The Tenth Planet would have been taken to the Blue
Peter office; more likely it was taken to a central telecine area
where the clip of the Doctor regenerating was copied from a film
print to an insert tape for the episode of Blue Peter (by examining
the noise characteristics of the clip, such as the areas of the picture
that show sparkle, we can be fairly certain that the clip was
taken from a print and not the master negative of the episode).
Hence, if it was never in the Blue Peter office, it could not have
been stolen from it! This is an example of how fan rumours can
take a known fact and compound the slight mystery surrounding it, to
suggest something that was not in fact the case is a certainty.
The BBC Film Library had obtained viewing prints of episodes 1 to 3
which were all accounted for when the library was catalogued in 1978
– these are the copies which exist today. Episode four was not
amongst the films in the library in 1978, but there was no
expectation that it should have been – the only episode which was
unaccounted for after the cataloguing operation was The Traitors.
What happened to the prints used
to take the
clips is not known – they could indeed have been stolen, however it is
more likely that they were never returned and were destroyed by the
telecine department.
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Viewing
prints of 11 episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan (the missing
one
being the episode broadcast on Christmas Day 1965 in the UK, The
Feast of Steven) were sent to ABC Television in Australia, for them
to evaluate them prior to purchasing the story. Strict censorship laws
were then in force in Australia (see What are the
Censor
clips?) and hence the episodes first had to go before the
Australian
Film Censorship board for review. This was done on 13th September 1966
and the Board's judgement was "These episodes not classified, see files
for information." A further comment was typed onto this memo:
These
episodes were all considered unsuitable for TV 'G' [as in "general"
rating] not because of specific scenes, but because of their
storylines.
The importer [the ABC] therefore elected not to attempt reconstruction,
and the episodes were not registered.
While
it has been assumed that the episodes were either destroyed or returned
to the BBC, investigations are currently in hand to determine exactly
what did happen to these viewing prints sent to ABC TV.
Unfortunately, although a paper trail was found, it seems likely (late
2003) that the film recordings sent to Australia do not exist.
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This
episode was returned to the BBC early in 1999 and was released in
mid-1999 on a special BBC Video release (BBCV 6805, released July 1999)
together with all four
episodes of The Space Museum. The episode was actually
discovered in the care of a New Zealand film collector by a prominent
New Zealand fan, Neil Lambess. Later, Neil contacted Paul Scoones who
arranged for it to be returned safely to the BBC for them to make a
copy. The full story of how the episode was discovered is told in
issues 17,
18 and
19 of
The Disused Yeti
newsletter and Steve Roberts describes the work undertaken to clean up
the recovered print in his
Restoration
Team pages.
Back to contents
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2.0
Visualising/recreating the missing episodes
This
section deals with the ways in which it is possible to get an idea of
what a missing episode was like, from other material that might exist
pertaining to the episode in question (such as the soundtrack, clips or
amateur-shot footage of the making of the episode).
|
Graham Strong's reel-to-reel recorder
One of Graham's original tapes
Richard Landen's recorder
David Butler's recorder |
During
the original broadcasts of the Hartnell and Troughton episodes, some
more dedicated fans would place their reel-to-reel tape recorders near
the TV speaker and record the soundtrack of the episode (it should be
noted that, although primitive sets did exist, home video recording
was almost unheard of at this time). Bearing in mind the quality of
the components making up both the TV sets and the tape recorders, it
is not surprising that the sound quality of many of these recordings
is absolutely awful! Some of the
best quality recordings of this type came from the collections of fans
like James Russell and Richard Landen, and were used by the BBC for the
release of their four Doctor Who — The Missing Stories audio
tapes. These were The Evil of the Daleks (1992),The Macra
Terror (1992) and The Power of the Daleks/Fury From
the Deep (both released in 1993). None of these tapes are still
available in the UK, and only the first two were released in the US.
In addition The Tomb of the Cybermen (audio provided by
David Stead) was prepared for this series,
narrated by Jon Pertwee; however before it could be released the film
recordings of the serial were returned from Hong Kong and the story
was released on BBC Video. The audio version was released in 1992 due
to contractual obligations with Pertwee but was not marketed as part
of the same series as the other releases. Most of the audios in
fan circles for years consisted of recordings beginning with The
Daleks' Master Plan. For many years audio recordings of the
missing portions of The Reign of Terror, The Crusade
and Galaxy
4 were simply not known to exist. (A very poor quality copy of the
audio track to Marco Polo was known about, held by Richard
Landen, who did also have complete audio recordings of The Crusade and
Galaxy
4 but had kept them back as potential bargaining ammunition).
A
major breakthrough came in 1994, when a fan called Graham Strong
approached the BBC with very high quality audio recordings of most
episodes from The Daleks' Master Plan:Volcano (episode eight) to The
Dominators. There are several gaps in the Strong collection – these
are The Daleks' Master Plan episode 11 (The Abandoned
Planet),The
Celestial Toymaker (which Strong thought at the time was "a silly
story") and The Gunfighters. Strong had actually taped Doctor
Who right from the first episode, albeit with a cheap second-hand
tape recorder which did not have a good quality microphone, but later
wiped most of his early recordings for re-use (three episodes
survived unwiped, but they are of poor quality and are of existing
episodes anyway; namely The Sea of Death (The Keys of Marinus:1), Strangers in Space (The Sensorites:1) and The
Space Museum (The Space Museum:1) although part of World's
End (The Dalek Invasion of Earth:1) also survived). He had
also approached the BBC before about his recordings, when the hunt
for missing episodes was at its peak, but had been told that they
were only interested in video material at the time. Later however,
the newly-formed Doctor
Who Restoration Team became interested and borrowed Strong's tapes,
which were transferred to DAT (Digital Audio Tape) by Paul Vanezis
and are retained by the BBC for future use. The quality of Strong's
recordings is so high that some are even superior to the soundtracks
on the telerecordings of existing episodes held by the BBC, and his
recording of The Tenth Planet episode 2 was used to redub the
film print. This quality stems from the fact that Strong had a good
quality tape recorder (which he bought early in December 1965) and
he
discovered a way to connect his tape recorder directly to the
television, thus producing the recordings of outstanding quality that
became known as the "crystal clear" recordings.
This
still left early stories either with no audio at all known to exist or
only very poor quality copies. The final gaps were plugged in 1995 when
another fan, David Holman, came forward with his own high quality
recordings of many episodes. Holman began recording Doctor Who with Marco
Polo using a good quality microphone (and managing to keep the
other
people in his house quiet for nearly a year's worth of Saturdays!). He
continued to record well after Strong had lost interest and it is
believed his collection extends up to The Three Doctors.
Whilst the quality of his recordings was not as high as Strong's they
were far superior to the other copies of some episodes, particularly Marco
Polo. Some small problems were found with Holman's recordings: he
had edited the episodes together into compilations, and quite often
parts of an episode just after the overlap sections would be missing
and must be patched in from other (poorer quality) fan recordings
before the audio of the complete story can be released. It is assumed
that Holman did this to make the stories "flow" better – it seems
unlikely he was trying to save tape as several of his reels have a
few blank minutes at the end. Some of his episodes were also recorded
too loud and some distortion occurs, however this can be overcome with
modern digital technology. Holman's collection included The Crusade
and Galaxy 4 as well, and so the current, very
fortunate state of affairs was reached, whereby high quality audio
recordings of all missing Doctor Who episodes are known to exist. The
Restoration Team also borrowed Holman's tapes to allow the BBC to
have copies.
In the years since the initial rediscovery of
these audio recordings other fans have taken both sets of recordings
and have increased the sound quality even further using the latest
digital technology. Some problems still remain as artefacts of the time
when the recordings were made; for example Strong's recording of The
Massacre :4 suffers from highly variable sound levels towards
the end of the episode caused by interference from a French radio
station (Strong lived in Exeter at the time, and such interference
could cause problems at certain times of the year). This fault was
successfully overcome by Mark Ayres for the BBC Radio Collection
release
of the story in August 1999. One thing that should be cleared up
however, is that Holman and Strong recorded every
episode of Doctor Who (with the exceptions listed above) during the
periods they were taping the show. They didn't magically predict which
episodes would be missing in 30 years' time and only record
them! Of course, only the recordings of episodes no longer extant
in the BBC archives are of interest (with a few exceptions such as the
aforementioned Tenth Planet:2) as, although the quality might
not always be as good, it is far simpler to use the soundtrack of the
film prints for episodes which do still exist. One further use of the
audio recordings is to dub over clips which are either silent or have
an incorrect soundtrack (some clips from The Power of the Daleks
episodes 4 and 5 fall into this category) or to help in the
restoration of material known to be missing from prints of episodes
recovered from overseas (as in the case of the BBC Video
release of The War Machines [BBCV 6183, released June 1997]).
Most
recently audio recordings made by other fans (David Butler and Allen
Wilson) have come to light. They are of similar quality to Holman's
recordings but not edited together so the recordings are more
complete. Butler would often record only record one or two episodes
from a serial as he notes:
"...cost
prevented me from recording every episode. It was rarely possible for
me to record more than one, or at most two, episodes of a story. The
only exceptions being The Evil Of The Daleks and The Web Of
Fear, where I managed to get enough tapes to record the whole
story."
Butler's
recordings are still useful however (the reconstruction of The
Invasion episodes 1 and 4 uses Butler's audio of episode 1 and
Holman's audio of episode 4). Wilson's audios were only discovered
recently by Mark Ayres – at this time only recordings for Galaxy 4
and The Daleks' Master Plan are known to exist, but some of
these are complete with continuity announcements.
Full
interviews with Graham
Strong, David
Holman and David Butler can be found in various issues of the Change
of Identity newsletters.
BBC Worldwide has since
begun releasing these audio recordings again, with linking narration
provided by actors playing characters in the story. The Massacre was
released in August 1999 and further releases, as well as restored
versions of the previous releases, are planned and have continued to
emerge ever since. The sound quality of
these releases is far higher than the previous BBC releases thanks to
the restoration work of Mark Ayres and they are additionally available
on CD. Fan-restored versions, taken from the same master recordings,
formed the backbone of the reconstructions
project. In addition, the
redubbed version of The Tenth Planet
episode 2 was used on the BBC Video release of the story (BBCV 7030,
released November 2000).
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A
reel of footage, almost certainly shot by a fan pointing his 8mm cine
camera at a domestic TV set during the original transmissions of the
Hartnell and early Troughton episodes, began circulating through
fandom in April 1996. Because of the differing frame rates of the
cine camera and the TV screen, the images on the film are afflicted
with
some "cut off" interaction between the camera shutter and video scan of
the TV
which is seen as dark lines that slowly move up the picture, plus
typical 8mm vignetting (darkening of the images towards the corners of
the screen). The resolution of the camera is poor and hence the images
lack detail when compared to professionally-copied clips. Many
of the clips are very brief, lasting no more than a few seconds (some
last less than half a second) and all of them are of course
silent.
The
reel is of interest however because of the material included –
many classic scenes are only preserved as moving images in this way.
Such treasures include Steven's leaving scene (The Savages
episode 4), the prelude to the regeneration sequence (The
Tenth Planet episode 4, left), early shots of the new Doctor in the
TARDIS (The Power of the Daleks episode 1, left) and scenes
from The Macra Terror episode 3 (left). Some stories such
as The Myth Makers and The Savages have the only known
existing TV material from them preserved in this way – see
Steve Phillips' clips article
for full details on what the reel contains, and what other clips are
known to exist from missing episodes.
Since
its initial rediscovery, the footage has been cleaned up as far as
possible by many fans, mostly those also involved in the telesnap
reconstructions project. The first fan copies were transferred to video
at 25 frames per second (fps), which was about a third too fast in
places (this could be established as the reel also contains many scenes
from existing episodes, particularly The Chase). It was
slowed down to c. 18fps by Michael Palmer who also removed various
tints from the raw footage. The other obvious thing to do was to mate
the clips up with the correct audio track and this was done by Mal
Tanner. The footage was used in many fan reconstructions,
particularly Bruce Robinson's The Savages and Michael Palmer's The
Tenth Planet episode four. It was also instrumental in finally
dispelling a long-held fan myth: for many years it was believed that
the first episode to feature the new Troughton title sequence (with
the Doctor's face) was The Faceless Ones :1, however the reel
contains a 17 second clip of the opening titles to The Macra Terror
(from the start of the sequence to the story title caption appearing,
probably from episode 3). As can be
seen from the third screen grab from the bottom (left), The
Macra Terror clearly has the later Troughton title sequence.
It
should be pointed out that to preserve the full detail of the image
would have required equipment far more powerful than Michael Palmer and
Mal Tanner had available. However Mal in particular deserves
commendation for his careful research that pinned down accurately the
locations within the individual episodes of much of the footage and
enabled the appropriate audio track to be added. For some time however, one clip on the reel could not be
precisely identified: a scene of Hartnell apparently talking to
himself inside the TARDIS. Suggestions that it was from The Daleks'
Master Plan could be quickly discounted as the reel was
definitely shot by an Australian fan and Master Plan was not
shown in Australia (evidence in support of this is that the camera
does not move at all between episodes one and two of The Power of
the Daleks – these were shown back-to-back on the same day in
Australia). The mystery was eventually solved through careful study and
the clip was pinned down to episode four of The Myth Makers –
full details are available in
issue 13 of
The Disused Yeti.
The
different sections of the reel (containing clips from different
stories, whether existing or not) have different tints which could
easily have arisen during the telecine process (for example, the
section containing clips from The Chase has a pale brown wash
over it, whilst the sections from The Savages and The Power
of the Daleks are strongly blue-tinted). The different sections seem to have been shot at
different
speeds (The Chase clips are way off but The Macra Terror sections
are almost at the correct speed, although the camera appears to have
been running as slow as 10fps in places) which points to a
clockwork camera (fondly remembered for their variable speeds!). A
possibility is that two cameras were used (as a roll of film would
only last four minutes or so) and that the colour tints arise from
shooting on different stocks of film (possibly even some colour and
some monochrome film stock). The
Doctor Who Restoration Team
were able to borrow a fan's film print of the footage, extracts from
which were used the recreate the events surrounding the Doctor's
first regeneration for the BBC Video special release The Missing
Years in November 1998 (catalogue number BBCV 6387). Longer
clips from the reel were also used on this release.
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Two
distinct batches of material excised from Doctor Who episodes purchased
by overseas TV stations for broadcast have been discovered in recent
years. Before explaining each find in more detail, a short
explanation of the formats each station received the episodes in is
needed. When BBC Enterprises originally offered the Hartnell and
Troughton episodes for sale to overseas TV stations, the format was
16mm black and white telerecordings (this was partly to avoid the
question of which TV system and transmission formats the country
used, as film was a universally-accepted medium from which to
broadcast). The telerecording process produced a master negative from
which the appropriate number of prints could be struck, depending on
how many companies wished to purchase the programme in question. The
16mm prints were then supplied to the TV stations that had purchased
the programme as their transmission masters. In the case of Australia,
strict censorship laws were then in force regarding what
could be shown on Australian TV and at what times of day. All new
programmes had to be passed before the censors for review and if
necessary, editing, before the programme could be transmitted. In
the case of Doctor Who, the censors deemed that several scenes had
to be cut before the programmes could be transmitted – usually these
were scenes of "excessive" violence (such as fights or stabbings, or
other death scenes). This was done by physically cutting the film
and splicing it back together, and the censorship laws decreed that
all material cut had to be kept in government repositories. In 1996 an
Australian fan, Damian Shanahan, began researching the days of the
censorship laws (which had since been repealed), and with some help
from another Australian fan, Ellen Parry, discovered paperwork
pertaining to the material that had been excised from early Hartnell
episodes of Doctor Who (such as Marco Polo and The Reign
of Terror) broadcast by ABC TV Australia – however Shanahan could
find no evidence of the cut material and it seems it was destroyed
some time previously (evidence suggested cut material had to be
preserved for 30 years and then destroyed). He then found more
paperwork detailing cuts to later Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee
episodes and followed the trail, eventually coming to the actual
film, which had been held in a government archive near Sydney. An
interview with Damian Shanahan can be found in Bruce Robinson's Change
of Identity newsletter, issue 5. All the clips discovered in this find are on
16mm monochrome film, as physical extracts from the original
telerecordings supplied to ABC TV Australia. (This also means
there are no colour extracts in this find from Pertwee episodes that
the
BBC have no colour copies of).
Between
this find and the original process of excising the material, the BBC
Enterprises sales copies and the ABC Australia transmission masters had
been destroyed, leaving the cut material as clips from episodes which
no
longer exist in their complete form. When the BBC Archives, and in
particular Steve Roberts, found out about the material, they took swift
action to recover it and after negotiating some diplomatic obstacles,
a copy of all the material was returned to the BBC on a Digital
Betacam video cassette (a broadcast standard). As the original means
of editing the film prints had been simply cutting and splicing them
back together, no account had been taken of the 16 frame offset
between the pictures and associated soundtrack present on all 16mm
film (originating in the distance between the parts of a projector or
telecine machine which reproduce the pictures and those which deal
with the optical soundtrack), hence there is an audible click at the
start of each clip and the soundtrack runs on for half a second or so
at the ends of the clips. The find was very important in providing
clips from stories for which very little or no TV material at all was
known to exist (such as The Smugglers, The Highlanders
and Fury From the Deep) and for helping to fill known cuts in
the prints of existing episodes which had been returned from overseas
(such as The War Machines). Some of clips make an appearance
on the end of the BBC Video release The Missing Years
(BBCV 6387, November 1998), and they played an important role in fan
reconstruction projects such as the Joint Venture reconstructions of Fury
From the Deep and The Wheel in Space.
A
further find of similar material came early in 2003. Prominent
New
Zealand fan Graham Howard was
assisting a
private film collector with cataloguing some reels of film when a
selection of extracts from season five Troughton stories, totalling
just
over a minute, were discovered. The footage had been cut out of
New Zealand broadcasts of the episodes in a similar manner to the
Australian clips. Unlike in Australia though, the New Zealand
Broadcasting Corporation was not under a statutory obligation to retain
the censored extracts. The clips found their way to a private
individual as part of a much longer reel of censored material from
contemporary programs (including other Doctor Who episodes; these clips
being unimportant as the BBC holds complete copies of the episodes in
question). Pleasingly, the majority of the clips are from episode
4
of The Web of Fear, a story
which relies heavily on visuals for its impact and for which only the
first episode was held as TV material prior to this discovery.
Full details of these and other clips from missing Doctor Who episodes
can be found here. The
discovery of these clips does alter the received wisdom concerning
NZBC's censorship policy; it is now clear that they did show cut
episodes instead of rejecting an episode outright from screening if it
was felt to need cuts making. Howard himself states in
an
interview that this does leave open the possibility of more missing
Doctor Who footage existing in New Zealand. Meantime the clips
are
available for viewing on the
official
BBC Doctor Who website (Real Player required) and the clips from The Web of Fear are included in The Reign of Terror box set (BBCV
7335, November 2003).
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Yes.
The extract (from a 16mm telerecording) exists in private hands and
originates round about the time of the making of the 1977 Lively
Arts
documentary Whose Doctor Who. Several prominent fans were
seconded to the production team on an unofficial basis to help choose
a selection of clips to be used in the programme. BBC
Enterprises at this stage still held their film recordings of all four
episodes of Galaxy 4 at their headquarters, Villiers House
and
it was decided to use a clip from episode one in the documentary. The
Doctor Who Appreciation Society attempted to negotiate the rights to
re-screen the story at Panopticon II in 1978, but unfortunately whilst
this process was going on all copies of the episodes were destroyed by
BBC Enterprises – this discovery was one of the major factors in
bringing a halt to the junkings. A substantial portion (nearly six
minutes) of Four Hundred Dawns was duplicated but eventually it
was decided to use only a 30 second clip in the finished documentary
from near the middle of the portion duplicated – leaving two
substantial offcuts. These were given to the fans concerned (who
probably realised that the complete episodes were in danger of being
junked at any moment) as a token of
gratitude for their help in compiling the programme. For various
reasons the footage was not officially returned to the BBC for many
years, although a different collector kindly loaned his (somewhat
substandard) VHS copy of the footage to the Restoration
Team. With the clip used in the finished Whose Doctor Who
the footage forms an almost complete sequence from the episode,
although as it is actually made up of three separate clips there are
slight jumps at the junctions, and a line of dialogue is missing at
one such join. The film has now been returned and the extract features
as part of The Missing Years – a documentary devoted to the
junking and recovery of early Doctor Who episodes which was released in November 1998 as part of The Ice Warriors box set (BBCV
6387, released November 1998). Screen
grabs from one copy and precise details on the clips concerned
can be found on Steve Phillips'
site. Rumours have abounded in fan circles that the
delayed recovery of this footage was an example of "fan hoarding" of
missing material (see I hear loads of rumours about
private film collectors who have missing material but won't surrender it)
but this is not accurate. The individual in possession of the
footage had offered it back to the BBC on several previous occasions
but it had been politely declined as the BBC was only interested in
complete episodes at the time. Given that complete episode
recoveries are now few and far between and the ideal nature of rare
clips as extras for DVD releases, this policy has been revised.
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Many,
often through having been featured in another BBC programme that
survived the seventies junkings. As a result of the Australian
censor clips find and 8mm cine footage, only
three stories are now left with no TV material (such as a clip or an
episode) known to exist from them: these are Marco Polo, Mission
to the Unknown and The Massacre. See
Steve Phillips' clips article
and Doctor Who in the Archives
pages for full details.
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The making of The Smugglers – note how all the
stills from the reel give some idea of what would have been seen in
the finished programme.
On location in
Wales for The Abominable Snowmen.
Scenes of location filming in Aldbourne for The
Dæmons.
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Several reels of
footage showing work in progress on various stories are now known to
exist. There are three very common reels plus two which were a lot
rarer in fan "bootleg" circles. The common reels show location work in
progress on The
Smugglers (shot on 16mm colour Ektachrome film by the owner of the
farm being used as the location, durn. 2'37"), The Abominable
Snowmen
(shot on colour standard 8mm film by director Gerald Blake, durn.
3'26",
though other footage shot by Fraser Hines exists, some of which is
included on the re-release of his Myth Makers tape) and The
Daemons (believed to have been shot by a local 8mm enthusiast in
Aldbourne, the village which appears on screen as Devil's End, again
on colour standard 8, durn. 6'16"). [Timings are for PAL
(European/Australian) video]. The current fan versions of these
first three reels circulating are very high quality, and unlike the
cine-clips from missing episodes the footage does not suffer from
cut-off to any great degree (as it was shot in a conventional manner,
as opposed to pointing the camera at a TV screen!). The first
two reels appeared on the Mastervision release The Doctors –
Thirty Years of Time Travel and Beyond in 1993.
Recent
research has cleared up the mystery surrounding two other reels of
film, the existence of which had long been rumoured in fan circles.
One reel shows studio work in progress on Fury From the Deep which
was for a long time believed to have been shot by the director, Hugh
David. The other reel shows studio work in progress on The Evil of
the Daleks. A VHS copy of these two reels were anonymously sent to
the BBC in August 1998, and extracts from both sets of footage
appeared on the BBC Video release The Missing Years (BBCV 6387)
in November
1998 (see the article on
Steve
Roberts' Restoration Team pages on The Ice Warriors Box Set).
Working on research for his documentary The Making of Fury From the
Deep, which can be found on the JV reconstruction of the story,
Richard Bignell discovered that the actual owner of the films was
Tony Cornell, a designer who had worked at Ealing Studios and who had
shot both films himself. Cornell was contacted and eventually
unearthed his original films, allowing the documentary to use the
highest quality source available.
Other reels of
footage do exist from stories that are not missing from the BBC
Archives and it seems others may exist. Footage from existing episodes
falls outside the scope of this FAQ and will only be covered briefly.
The current tally of other cine reels is as follows:
-
The
Abominable Snowmen : Gerald Blake's footage
clearly shows another person with a cine camera filming at the same
time as Blake. This person may have been a member of the production
team, but he has yet to be identified.
-
The
Abominable Snowmen:
Frazer Hines also shot some cine footage during the location filming
of this story (included on the re-release of his Myth Makers interview tape).
-
Fury From the
Deep: It seems possible that some film was taken during the beach
sequences; it is not known if this film still exists.
-
The
Invasion: Location stills clearly show a man
filming the Cyberman emerging from the manhole at the bottom of St.
Peter's Hill. Again, it has not been established if this was a member
of the production team.
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The
War Games:
Footage
showing filming on the Brighton rubbish tip reportedly exists.
-
The
Dæmons: A small slice of cine footage
exists, shot on 28th April 1971, of Yates and Garvin fighting by the
helicopter on the village green. It is unknown if this is an excerpt
from a different reel of footage or not. This footage can be found on
the original release of Reeltime Pictures' Return to Devil's End
video documentary. It is possible that a further reel of location work
in progress for this story exists – this is currently being
investigated.
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The
Sea Devils: Local
newspaper reports show a naval rating (named as Dave King) holding a
cine camera in his hand as he talks to Jon Pertwee. Mr King has not
yet been traced.
-
The
Mutants: The cave
mouth scenes were shot at Stonehouse Farm, Kent and the production
file for the story includes a letter from the BBC to the then-owner of
the farm, a Mrs Castle, responding to a query as to whether it would
be possible for her to take some cine footage during the filming. The
letter notes that would be all right provided she did not shoot any
footage during the actual take. Mrs Castle has been contacted and is
currently attempting to determine if she did ever take any footage
and if she still retains it.
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The
Sontaran Experiment:
A local press photo shows a man with a cine camera to his eye.
-
Shada: Cine footage appears on the
1993 Mastervision release The Doctors – Thirty Years of Time
Travel and Beyond (the full film appeared on a special extended
version of the release which was available through Doctor Who
Magazine), taken by Stephen Camden (the assistant K9
operator).
-
The
Leisure Hive:8mm
footage from the Brighton beach sequences exists, also shot by Camden,
duration unknown.
-
Full
Circle : more footage shot by Camden of work
underway at Black Park, Buckinghamshire, exists. Camden also tracked
down footage shot by one of the professional divers employed to help
out with the lake scenes – it was taken by Robin Bierton and it appears
to be a single reel of 8mm material.
(UPDATE November 2003: no
progress has been made yet on any of the uncertainties listed above and
it appears the footage from The War
Games may just be rumour. Active efforts are however
continuing to research these matters).
Recently (mid-2003) some further material from the studio filming of
Fury From The Deep was
discovered. It consists of off-cuts from filming (at Easling
Studios) for the
weed creature attack scenes in episode 6; duration 3' 32" and
silent. This footage comprises takes not chosen for use in the
programme as broadcast and is not
therefore a source of clips from the episode. It is expected to
feature as an extra on the next BBC DVD release of a Troughton story.
On a similar note,
two professional-standard tapes exist from Pertwee era stories,
showing studio recording under way and giving a genuine look "behind
the scenes" of the stories in question. The first story in question is The
Claws of Axos (studio recordings for episodes one and two exist on
2-inch PAL colour Quad videotape). Interestingly this 90 minute tape
starts with a title sequence using the working title The Vampire
From Space which was abandoned at the last minute in favour of the
final transmission title, and the studio recordings include the only PAL
material known to exist from episode two (the episode itself exists as a
Canadian NTSC videotape converted back to PAL – see
Robert
Franks' Archive Pages for full details) This material comprises most scenes
in episode 2 apart from those set inside Axos – it was planned to
attempt a restoration of the episode for a BBC2 repeat in 2000, by
editing this material back in. Unfortunately
however, the Doctor Who repeats were been abandoned after only three
stories, allegedly due to poor viewing figures, so this work was
cancelled along with several other restoration projects. The
prospect of future UK repeats of Doctor Who has been mentioned in
conjunction with the build up to the transmission of BBC Wales' revival
of the series, however, and this together with the continued release of
Doctor Who stories on DVD may see the idea revisited. The other
story for which studio recordings exist is Death to the Daleks
(a single 90 minute tape exists, containing studio recordings of scenes
from all four episodes, on the same format). Such tapes would have
existed from all Doctor Who stories but many were wiped as they were
considered unnecessary – the two Pertwee tapes managed to slip
through the net. Other professional-quality footage exists from Colony
in Space (a 20 minute tape of trims from location footage) and Underworld
(giving a revealing insight into how the extensive CSO used on that
story was executed in the studio).
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"Tele-snaps" was
a service offered to television production teams or departments by
freelance photographer John Cura. For a fee, he would take a series of
still photographs off screen during the broadcast of the programme
and then make copies available to all interested parties. In the days
before home video was a practical prospect, this was one of the only
ways that actors, directors and producers could keep a visual record of
their work. Full details of the discovery of telesnaps from missing
Doctor Who episodes can be found in Bruce Robinson's Change of
Identity newsletter, issue
4. Although "telesnaps" is often used as a generic term for any
off-screen photos or screen grabs from television programmes it should
strictly be used only to refer to Cura's work (other people offered a
similar service to Cura at the time). Recently telesnaps from The Crusade have been rediscovered,
to add to the collection of telesnaps known to exist covering The Gunfighters to The Wheel in Space. In
some cases there are sufficient photographs (such as the designer's
record of the sets he constructed, or publicity photos for the likes of
Radio Times listings
magazines)
available from stories that the telesnaps are less important. A
good example of this is The
Celestial Toymaker.
One point should
be cleared up: there is NO POSSIBLE METHOD of recreating
a
complete episode of Doctor Who from the telesnaps (usually Cura would
take about 60 photographs per episode, which represent an accurate
description of 60 frames on the original telerecording of the episode –
this equates to about 0.16% of the 37,500 frames of a 25 minute
programme telerecorded at 25 frames per second). Current morphing
techniques have difficulty bridging gaps of 10 frames or so, and it
would require enormous technological breakthroughs to contemplate
bridging gaps of 500+ frames. All that can be done with current
technology is to produce "slide-show" type reconstructions (commonly
referred to as "telesnap reconstructions") as done by fans such as
Richard Develyn and Bruce Robinson. Distribution of some of
these reconstructions has been discontinued for a variety of reasons
but copies are widely available in fandom and the creators of the
discontinued productions encourage fans to trade the tapes in the usual
manner.
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BBC employee Andrew Martin had decided (in
his own time) to review the recordings of programmes retained by the
BBC Film and Videotape Library, which had been transmitted live.
In particular he was checking the beginnings and ends of such
recordings (which were obtained by recording the output-as-broadcast of
a BBC television channel rather than simply recording the feed from a
television studio) to determine if any extra material had been recorded
before the programmes in question began. An important find came
in October 2003 when the recording of Beyond
The Freeze - What Next? (a political debate show, broadcast
November 4th 1966) was ordered up. This 16mm film recording
contained a partial copy of a trailer for the next episode of
Doctor Who (The Power of the Daleks episode 1,
which was transmitted 5th November 1966). It is believed the
operator of the film recorder was recording the live output of BBC 1
and before the political show began, decided to test the film recording
equipment. The material recorded was the
Doctor Who trailer, however the
film recorder was stopped and restarted partway through the
piece. The usable portion of the extant recording is 36 seconds
long, however about 17 seconds of this consists of a "BBC 1 Tomorrow"
slide and the Doctor Who
title sequence. The remainder (c. 19 seconds) is a professional
quality recording of the sequence from near the end of episode 1 as the
Doctor, Ben and Polly enter the Dalek capsule. It includes the
Doctor's line "Ben, Polly... Come and meet the Daleks!" and several
shots of the new Doctor. Given the non-constant speed of the film
recording, much restoration work had to be performed to extract the
footage and, as there appears to be no complete audio recording of the
trailer on fan recordings of the serial itself (unsurprising, as the
trailer was not broadcast before or after an actual Doctor Who episode, so none of the
fan audio recordists would have been expecting it) the duration of the
complete trailer is not known. The recovered footage can be
viewed (Real Player required) on the BBC's
website
and it is expected to appear as an extra on a future DVD release.
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Film recording was an
established practice for monochrome productions as a cheap, robust and
reliable distribution method for overseas sale. However once colour was
introduced, it was also realised that extending the principle to produce
colour film recordings of colour broadcasts was not simple. One
particular problem is that, if a film recorder of the type used for the
production of monochrome recordings is adapted for colour work (by
fitting a colour screen and loading it with colour film), undesirable
artefacts in the form of severe inteference between the dye grains in
the film stock and the phosphor group patterns of the monitor screen are
evident on the film recording. In theory, this could be overcome by
dividing the monitor into three areas (one for each primary colour of a
colour signal, namely red, green and blue), recording the separated
colour components onto film in this manner and then reconstructing the
original colour signal during later playback of the film recording thus
created. The minor drawback of this is that resolution is decreased (as
the "same" information has to be stored three times in each frame of
film so the effective area for the picture information is reduced to a
third of a frame). The major drawback is that it would require extreme
care (and more particularly, expense) in aligning and maintaining both
the film recorders and the telecine playback devices to overlay the
three colour sections with almost 100% accuracy – failure to do so would
result in colour fringing, which would be even less acceptable in a
broadcast context than the original interference patterns. These
technical problems were never overcome since overseas broadcasters
upgrading to colour transmissions invested in one of two videotape
standards (PAL or NTSC) and it was far simpler to provide them with a
colour videotape to transmit from, rather than a colour film recording.
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Some sections of video have little
interference noticeable, some have only mild patterning, but
other sections are very badly affected. Compare the images above for an
indication of the intermittent nature of the problem (some of
the images are separated by only a few frames).
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A complete NTSC
colour version of The Ambassadors of Death does exist. This
was recorded off-air from WNED Channel 17 Buffalo, an American PBS
station, for a gentleman named Tom Lundie in 1977. This broadcast was
in colour and the serial was one of the very first Doctor Who stories
shown by the station. On a technical note, the story was recorded
onto Betamax tape, not U-Matic as was long rumoured in
fandom! Ian Levine later obtained U-Matic copies of all Lundie's
tapes and these were the versions supplied to the BBC for restoration
(and are the source of the long-held fan myth that the original
recordings were made on U-Matic tape).
Unfortunately,
the recording machine was in Toronto (it seems Lundie paid a friend up
there to tape the serial for him, and later bought copies of other colour Pertwee serials off other people) and was attempting to record a
New York station - it's not surprising therefore that the signal was
weak. This manifests itself as "rainbows" of colour, most of the
time fairly weak and superimposed over the original colour picture (see
the images, left). The only episodes not to suffer excessively from
this are episodes 1 and 5 (the interference is still present but is
not nearly so noticeable). The original 2-inch PAL colour transmission
tape for episode one survives and it is far superior in quality to
the off-air version of the episode, hence there is no need to
colourise this episode. Episode 5 has also been restored to colour by
the Doctor Who
Restoration Team and has been broadcast on BBC Prime. Episode 6 has
also been restored, however it suffers from a brief burst of rainbowing
near the beginning of the episode and so is only suitable as a source
of colour clips. The colourised versions of episodes 5 and 6 have
been transferred to D3 digital videotape and have been given to the
Film and Videotape Library at Brentford, however episode 6 is
apparently only usable with the permission of the Archive Selector.
The vaults of WNED 17 have already been searched; nothing has been
found.
The rest of the
story is similarly afflicted with colour blurs. Episodes 3 and 4
are very badly affected, as here the rainbows are so strong that the
entire colour signal has been lost, and even if the rainbows could be
removed the resulting picture would have very little original colour
(see left). Removing the rainbows is in itself a very difficult task –
the biggest headache is that they are rarely static and their nature
changes from scene to scene (sometimes they are diagonal lines across
the picture, sometimes they are vertical bars). This means that any
algorithm to remove them must be capable of self-adaptation – a
difficult thing to program. Two examples of the problem are
available, captured from episode 3 of a fan copy of Lundie's recording
(MPEG-1 files, 2.5 MB
and 3.6 MB [the
video and audio bitrates of these files have been set deliberately low
in order to keep the file sizes down for readers who may only have 56k
dialup connections]). All attempts so far to remove the
colour interference patterns have so far been unsuccessful although the
BBC do retain a copy of the raw colour version of the serial, derived
from the original Betamax tape (albeit a generation removed from it).
Despite the picture
interference, the raw NTSC colour version of the serial is very
watchable. In particular, the sound remains excellent throughout (even
when the interference is strongest in episodes 3 and 4). Attempts
have been made to establish contact with Tom Lundie but have not been
successful. It is almost certain that the colour faults were not
introduced during the copying from Lundie's Betamax recordings to Ian
Levine's UMatic tapes and, even if Lundie still retains his tapes, the
degradation of his recordings over 25 years and more makes it highly
unlikely that there would be any gain from sourcing colour footage from
them.
BBC Worldwide, as
BBC Enterprises has become, was keen to complete the range of existing
Doctor Who episodes available on BBC Video releases (a task completed
with the release of The Reign of
Terror box set in November 2003) but the technical problems with
The Ambassadors of Death
meant it
was left until late in the project, partly in the hope that a better
colour source may be discovered. Ultimately it was decided that
the story should be released on VHS video with as much usable colour as
possible being extracted from the Betamax recording to colourise the
monochrome film copies, as for the other colourised Pertwee
stories. A Restoration Team article describes the process in
detail; suffice it to say here that colour sections of usable quality
and of length suitable to avoid repeated distracting changes between
colour and black and white were used on the final BBC Video release
(catalogue number BBCV 7265, released May 2002). Transitions
between the formats were handled by
cutting directly between them if a scene change coincided with the
transition, otherwise a gentle mix in and out of colour footage was
employed. Examples (X-Vid MPEG-4 AVI files) include transition from colour to black
and white (2.0 MB, from episode 2), the opposite effect (2.6 MB, again from episode 2)
and a straight cut from
colour to monochrome (1.1 MB, from episode 3). A longer excerpt from
episode 3 (4.7 MB) also shows the faint rainbow colour patterning which
was deemed acceptable for the VHS release. The film recordings of
episodes 5
and 6 were treated with VidFIRE processing before
the usable colour from the Lundie recordings was overlaid again.
The results for episode 5 in particular are highly impressive and worth
the purchase price of the release alone.
Whilst on the
subject of this story, another frequently asked question concerns the
quality of the (monochrome) episode five that often airs, for example
on UK Gold and in US syndication. The print is very poor quality with
a blurred picture and muffled soundtrack; the UK Gold broadcast
often includes a "Do not adjust your set" disclaimer caption.
However, the BBC Video release is much better in this respect,
especially after the extensive restoration work carried out on episodes
5 and 6 (including making use of the Betamax soundtrack rather than the
optical soundtrack on the film recordings). Since the major picture
source for this episode is a monochrome film print specially struck
for the video release, it is most likely that the BBC Worldwide library
master
(from where both the UK Gold and US syndication prints are ultimately
derived) of this episode was just a poor film print.
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Colour extracts from episode 6 of The
Mind of Evil.
|
No complete
colour episodes exist from this serial. However three brief colour
clips from episode six do still exist. They are:
Description
|
Duration
(mins,secs)
|
From the
beginning of the episode (including opening titles) to Yates
telling the Brigadier where the missile is
|
3'58"
|
From Jo
bringing in a meal for Barnham to Benton's phone ringing
|
0'21"
|
From the
Doctor finding the body outside the process room to the Doctor
saying "...it's stronger than ever now!"
|
0'15"
|
NOTES:
-
Timings are
for PAL (European/Australian) video, the overall duration in NTSC
(North America) is 4'36".
-
On all
copies of these clips the picture breaks up during the first and
last few seconds of each clip. The picture element of the last
clip breaks up before the Doctor speaks his line.
-
It has been
rumoured for some time that another clip (or a longer version of
the final clip) exists, including colour footage of the Keller Machine
going wild. These scenes are not present on any fan copies nor were
they on the version supplied to the BBC for restoration.
-
Other
rumours suggest that the colour clips are merely a "teaser" and
that Ian Levine possesses a full colour copy of the story. Ian
Levine has denied this and further investigations have confirmed Levine
is not hoarding any missing Doctor Who material.
-
Originally
the raw colour footage was used to colourise
the appropriate sections of the black and white telerecording of the
episode, held by the BBC Film and Videotape Library, in the same manner
as the three complete Pertwee stories. This was done in a hurry and the
results (extracts from which were used on both More Than Thirty
Years in the TARDIS and the UNIT Recruitment Film
broadcast before episode six of the 1993 UK repeat of Planet
of the Daleks) are not very good. The original BBC copy of Lundie's
raw footage (the quality of which is equivalent to some sections of Doctor Who and the Silurians; i.e.
not very good) has since been unearthed and a
straightforward standards conversion done on it and was used
to colourise the black and white footage again. This is included
as a
short bonus on the end of the BBC Video release of The Mind of Evil
(catalogue number BBCV 6361, released 5th May 1998).
-
By the time
the serial was broadcast in colour on WTTW it is highly probable
that the original BBC colour tapes had already been wiped or
destroyed.
-
For full
details of all the clips known to exist from missing episodes of
Doctor Who, see Steve Phillips'
clips
article.
The colour clips survive
by pure chance. Two competing theories are offered for their existence:
either that a full colour off-air copy of The Mind of Evil
existed in the hands of a US fan, or that the same fan could only afford
enough tape to record extracts from the story.
The first theory states
that Tom Lundie, the ultimate source for several off-air colour copies
of Pertwee stories passed to the BBC via Ian Levine, had in his
possession a full colour off-air copy of The Mind of Evil but
that he had later taken a dislike to the story and had re-used the
Betamax tapes to save the expense of buying new ones (see also a
1979 advert
detailing UK prices - a good quality 3 hour VHS tape can now be bought
for £2.00 or less). According to this theory, episodes 1 to 5 were
replaced by an American football match but episode 6 was on a different
tape and portions of the beginning of the episode survived because this
tape was not rewound fully before being recorded over.
In early 2006, Ian
Levine posted on the Restoration Team Discussion forum that he had
re-established links with Tom Lundie and denied that the wiping theory
was true. According to Levine, Lundie could not afford a further set of
tapes to record The Mind of Evil and so only recorded selected
clips. This version of events would explain why the colour material that
survives from episode six of the story is actually composed of three
separate sections, as detailed above.
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A few minutes of the opening portion of Invasion
were hand colourised by a fan.
|
The main problem
with computer colourisation is that it is very expensive – the current rate is around US$2000
per finished minute of
programme. Actually this works out at only $1.33 per frame, but with 25
frames per second the costs tend to mount up rather quickly. The
technique usually carried out is to have a human operator colourise
one frame and then to allow the machine to interpret this frame and
the colour information in it, and to try to apply it to the next
frames, until the operator judges that the results are no longer
satisfactory and the process is stopped and repeated. Such a process
was used during the colourisation of Doctor Who and the Silurians
to overcome a colour fault on the NTSC tape similar to those on
various episodes of The Ambassadors of Death, around the
junction of episodes five and six, and a sample of The Ambassadors
of Death has been colourised in this way. The results are very
impressive, but the deciding factor is the cost, and it is doubtful
that a video release of The Ambassadors of Death, for
example, would give BBC Worldwide a return on its outlay of $200,000
to have the four episodes of the serial that cannot be colourised in
the conventional way, restored to colour. The Mind of Evil
was released on BBC Video in May 1998 in black and white format and The Ambassadors of Death in May
2002 using as much colour as possible from the
defective
off-air recordings. It must be
remembered that the computer colourisation process has its limitations
– where there is no original colour source (such as an off-air
recording) to work from, the original colours can only be
approximated to, not matched exactly. This would especially be the
case for something like a computer colourisation of all six episodes of
The
Mind of Evil where only a few minutes of original colour footage
exist, together with a handful of colour production stills.
Whilst cheap colourisation techniques are available, as used for a
series The First World War in Colour
shown by Channel 5 in the UK in 2003, the results are distinctly
unimpressive (skin tones looked rather unreal and clothing worn by
different people was all shown
in exactly the same colour shade, particularly military uniforms).
Some enquiries
were made in late 1999 as to the possibility of colourising the
monochrome episodes from Planet of the Daleks and Invasion
of
the Dinosaurs for repeat on BBC 2. However the Pertwee repeats were
abandoned after Doctor Who and the Silurians had completed
its run and it seems therefore that the project has been shelved
again. BBC Video released Planet of the Daleks in November
1999,
however episode three was not colourised, likewise Invasion was not colourised when Invasion of the Dinosaurs was
released in October 2003. For the foreseeable future it is
unlikely that these episodes will be colourised; the next logical
policy review being as and when they are scheduled for release on
DVD. Steve Roberts of the
Restoration Team
believes that costs will remain too high for such a project to be
viable, however.
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Test work was in
progress (see left and above) on colourising this episode using
computer software (Adobe PhotoShop and Premiere mainly, with some help
from After Effects and Commotion) and lots of man-hours. Four
minutes in total were completed. Initial results were promising but the
project is now four years old and advances in computer power in the
meantime effectively make the footage obsolete. Far better
results could be achieved with up-to-date equipment but the original
volunteers no longer have the time to devote to the project.
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An early fan camera copy of Invasion
which led to rumours that the episode existed in colour.
|
This fan rumour
has circulated for many years, and it alleges that the colour
transmission tape of Invasion of the Dinosaurs episode one was
accidentally wiped whilst the season six Cybermen story The Invasion
was being junked. It is propagated by those who assume that all
videotapes and film recordings were held in one library at the BBC. By
studying the dates of tape wiping and the dates of the films being
junked and by bearing in mind the roles of the three separate
departments involved (see Introduction) we
can attempt to determine whether the rumour is true or not. Invasion
of the Dinosaurs episode one went out with an on-screen title of Invasion
(presumably to avoid giving away the presence of the dinosaurs) in
January 1974. In August of that same year, the original 2-inch PAL
transmission tape was wiped or destroyed. BBC Enterprises never held
copies of any of The Invasion episodes on videotape, even
during the original telerecording process (as the telerecordings would
have been made by Engineering on behalf of Enterprises). The videotapes
of The Invasion were wiped by Engineering on 20th May 1971,
well
before Invasion of the Dinosaurs was even recorded, but this
does not rule out the possibility that the tape of Invasion
was wiped in mistake for the Troughton story in 1974 (i.e. it was
thought that one episode of the Troughton story had somehow survived
being wiped). However, whilst the on-screen title was just "Invasion"
the documentation and the label on the tape spool would have
undoubtedly referred to the episode as "Invasion of the Dinosaurs
:1". (It is worth noting here that several tapes ordered up to
have clips taken from them for the Thirty
Years in the TARDIS documentary in 1993, were still labelled
with working titles of stories such as The Talons of Greel [The Talons of Weng-Chiang]).
Furthermore, tapes were never wiped on title alone – the technical
code of the tape would have been checked and it would have
been obvious that the tape was 625 line PAL colour. Close examination
of the wiping forms held at the BBC Film and Videotape library would
probably answer the question fully, but all available evidence
suggests strongly that the tape of Invasion was not
wiped in mistake for an episode of the Patrick Troughton story The
Invasion. Similar logic can be applied to prove that the Pertwee
episode was not wiped through confusion with the Hartnell episode Invasion
(The Web Planet :5) either.
For some years
after it was discovered that no colour transmission tape existed of Invasion,
the episode was not known to exist, until
a 16mm monochrome film recording was returned by a private film
collector in 1983.
Further investigations
have shown that the likely origin of this film recording is an official
BBC Enterprises film recording session. Documentation has recently been
found to suggest that The Time Warrior and Invasion of the Dinosaurs
were film recorded for BBC Enterprises to sell abroad – however there
were no purchasers in this format as the only remaining customer for
film recordings (Australia) had recently invested in colour broadcasting
equipment and decided to purchase the season 11 stories in colour. Given
the lack of customers, policy at BBC Enterprises was probably revised
and they ceased ordering film recording sessions from BBC Engineering.
Such a policy review would probably have applied to all new material
that Enterprises was offering for sale to overseas broadcasters, not
just Doctor Who. The film recordings of the first two stories of season
11 may well have been junked relatively quickly once it became apparent
that they were not required and it is possible that no technical
assessment of the recordings was made (or that no-one complained since
no countries purchased copies). Hence these recordings were not found
with the other Pertwee films at BBC Enterprises in 1978, and a technical
problem with the film recording was never detected. Whatever, the film recording negative of
episode 1 was used to produce at least one print which has survived in
the hands of the private collector who originally returned it in 1983.
Invasion of the Dinosaurs was not sold abroad until this date, when it
could be marketed as a complete story once again.
It is also interesting to
note that, had the film recording been made through conventional
channels,
it would almost certainly have been rejected on technical grounds (as
it is rather out of focus on one side – this is not easily spotted on
a domestic TV set due to overscan).
Fan rumours constantly suggest the existence of colour versions in
American fan circles, however it is far more likely that those
reporting a colour version have in fact seen an old camera-converted
copy of the episode. These stem from the fact that the story was
initially distributed in the US in a five episode format by
Lionheart, the then-holders of the US Doctor Who licence, with episode two
renumbered as episode one and episode three renumbered as episode
two, etc. – omitting the monochrome-only (real) first episode. For many
years
the only copies of the genuine episode one in US fan circles stemmed
from amateur PAL to NTSC standards conversions, usually achieved by
pointing an NTSC camcorder at a PAL TV set which was fed with a British
standard 625 line PAL VHS copy of the episode. Due to the differing
frame rates of the devices the end result is very poor quality,
suffering from cut-off similar to the amateur-shot
8mm cine clips, and with spurious colour introduced.
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Between its
original broadcast on 24th June 1972 and 1977/8, when the
newly-appointed BBC Archive Selector Sue Malden began investigating
what material still remained in the hands of various BBC departments,
the original 2-inch PAL transmission tape of The Time Monster
:6
(and indeed, the PAL tapes of the entire serial) had been wiped. In 1977, 16mm monochrome film recordings of
all six episodes were discovered at BBC Enterprises (a clip
from this version can be found on the 1977 documentary Whose Doctor
Who), however in 1979 2-inch NTSC colour transmission tapes of all
six episodes were returned to the BBC by TV Ontario, Canada. A similar
process occurred with several other Pertwee stories, including Colony
in Space and The Curse of Peladon, and in such cases the
only option was to reconvert the Canadian NTSC tapes to PAL – however
even with 1990s standards conversion equipment, the reconverted tape is
left with motion artefacts from the original crude 1970s PAL to NTSC
conversions that produced the NTSC tapes in the first place.
This was
apparently the only option for all of The Time Monster until,
in
1987, a 625 line monochrome videotape of episode 6 was discovered at
the BBC's Engineering Department (early reports of the discovery stated
that the tape was colour, which is not the case). This tape seems to
have come into existence by pure chance – someone needed a tape for a
training exercise and chose this particular programme. The tape
however would have arisen directly from the original PAL tape of the
episode (i.e. it has not been through any PAL/NTSC conversion process)
and as such is not prone to the motion artefacts the colour copy of
the episode now held. A colour TV picture is actually two components
– a highly detailed monochrome picture (the luminance signal) and a
weak colour signal superimposed over it (the chrominance component).
The human brain responds more rapidly to luminance changes and hence
is fooled into believing it is seeing a detailed moving colour
picture. Hence if the chrominance component (converted back to PAL
colour) of the Canadian-sourced
tapes was used to add colour to the 625 line monochrome engineering
tape, the motion artefacts arising from the standards conversions would
be rendered less noticeable and a better quality PAL colour
version of the episode would be obtained.
This
colourisation was also easier on technical grounds – since the
engineering tape was derived directly from the original PAL tape of the
episode it did not suffer from any of the problems introduced by the
telerecording process (such as cropping and non-linearities – see the
Restoration Team
article on the colourisation of the other Pertwee stories for
details). Only one small problem was encountered during the restoration
of this episode – the monochrome tape was recorded on the earlier,
low-band type of Quad videotape, and Paul Vanezis only had access to a
high-band machine when he came to replay it. This resulted in some
blurring to the right of picture highlights as the wrong equalisation
characteristics were used to replay the tape (this is analogous to
playing an audio cassette recorded without Dolby noise reduction but
with the noise reduction system switched on). This can be fixed
fairly easily and was indeed corrected when the story was released by
BBC Video (BBCV 7175, released November 2001). The results of this
colourisation are however
noticeably better than those which relied on off-air colour signals
and film recordings for their component parts, and this version of the
episode was shown on UK Gold in 1995. No new tapes have been
produced for the US market for several years now, and hence the
colourised version of this episode was not generally available in US
fan
circles prior to the commercial video release of the story (US release:
Warner Home Video catalogue number E1729).
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Two consecutive frames from The Faceless
Ones:3 – note the jump.
The same two frames from the restored version - note the zoomed shot cut
to hide the missing section
|
This episode,
although rumoured to exist as early as 1985, was finally returned to
the BBC in April 1987 (the same person returned The Evil of the
Daleks episode 2 a month later). The print had suffered badly in
the hands
of the film collector who returned it, and had been played often on an
old and badly-maintained projector. As a result the film had
physically snapped several times and had been crudely sellotaped back
together. These breakages resulted in the loss of perhaps four frames
each time the film broke, and the sellotaped portions were now even
more likely to stick in the projector and break again. This continued
abuse has left the print with many small jumps where a few frames are
missing, but also with some rather large jumps where upwards of half
a second of material is missing (it is possible these result from
even more severe projector damage such as a rip or even punching the
sprocket teeth through the film – see the screen shots on the left
which are taken from consecutive frames as they appear on the currently
held print).
It is a long held
fan myth that the episode is "untransmittable" though. The BBC have
transmitted far worse, notably the Steptoe and Son episodes
recovered from CV2000 tapes. In November 2003 the episode was finally
released on video after a lot of work was put in to repairing as many
of the gaps as possible by the Doctor Who Restoration Team. The
work, as described in an article on
their website, involved
creating some entirely new sequences to bridge the gaps and has been
made possible by the advances in computer technology since the episode
was originally returned. Whilst not perfect, it is as close to
the original version as is likely to be achieved barring discovery of
an undamaged copy of the episode. Peter Finklestone describes one such shot,
"[A] problematic shot was where Ann Davidson closes the bulkhead door
between the passenger and crew cabins. This is completely absent from
the existing print. Jonathan [Wood, a BBC film operator] had used a
cutaway of a zoomed-in intercom panel but, arising for no good reason in
the scene and lasting a little over a second, I felt it was little less
distracting than the jump cut. Therefore a combination of interpolation
and paintbox techniques was used to create a composite image of Ann
actually closing the door, as seen on one of the Chameleons’ monitors.
While not perfect (as the shot is still short) it is now more
sympathetic to the flow of the scene." In the images presented the first and last are the two
consecutive frames in the print now, the middle image shows the
reconstructed footage the Peter describes. Examples of the scene
before and
after can be downloaded for viewing
(X-Vid MPEG-4 AVI files)
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There is a slight
edit to the copy included on the BBC compilation video The
Troughton
Years, released in 1991. This edit was necessary due to an audio
fault that leaves nearly 8 seconds of the print mute. As this same
audio fault appears on all audio recordings made by fans it appears as
though it existed on the original videotape of the
episode.
The two scenes
affected are near the end of the episode after Jamie and Krissong have
captured a Yeti outside the monastery. From the end of a lingering
close-up of the control sphere in the monastery, to the first part of
the Doctor examining the deactivated Yeti, the sound is mute. The edit
removes all of the mute audio (including the Doctor's line "You were right about one thing, Victoria! This creature
certainly doesn't seem to be flesh and
blood…" The text in red is missing completely from all known
soundtracks of the episode and the final portion in green is muted on
the BBC Video release of the episode). To avoid possible
complaints that
the BBC Video release was
faulty, the 8 seconds or so of mute audio was cut out of the version of
the episode included on The Troughton Years. It is also
worth noting that the 16mm location film inserts for this episode exist
(but not for any other episodes of the story). They are of far
superior quality to the film recording (which lacks picture detail and
is slightly cropped) but were not used for the BBC Video release.
Comparison frames are shown (top
left, film recording; bottom, film insert; picture courtesy Steve Roberts/BBC).
(UPDATE November 2003): Careful
research by a film collector has shown that the running time of the
episode as released on video is actually the same as the uncut
version. It appears that the scene preceeding the section of
missing audio, starting with the monk setting down the Yeti control
sphere, is slowed down and replaces the beginning of the next shot in
the version of the episode used on The
Troughton Years (BBCV 4609). A short MPEG file (1.1 MB)
of the original damaged section can be downloaded here.
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In answering this question, it must first
be noted that many BBC Video releases of 60s stories, prior to the
involvement of the Restoration Team, were edited in the sense that "Next
Episode" captions were frequently removed from the last episode of a
story (in the alleged words of a BBC Video manager at the time: "Because
why would anybody want them?").
In the specific cases of
The Time
Meddler and The War Machines, both stories were completed in the
archives in 1985 when a Nigerian TV station returned 16mm film
recordings of all four episodes of each story (it was discovered in 1984
that the TV station in question held the films, but strained diplomatic
relations between the UK and Nigeria at the time delayed their return).
Upon closer inspection it became apparent that the Nigerian prints had
been quite severely edited - the prints in question had been cycled
(passed on) to Nigeria from New Zealand (rather than BBC Enterprises
sending fresh copies direct to the Nigerians). It is uncertain which
station performed the original edits, and until 2003 and the recovery of
censored extracts from season 5 stories from New Zealand, the belief was
that the New Zealand Broadcasting Corporation (NZBC) would either reject
a story outright or broadcast it complete and unedited - in other
words, they didn't make cuts in the same manner as the Australian
broadcasters did. Given the fresh evidence of the New Zealand censor
clips the question remains
even more open, as NZBC cannot be completely eliminated from the
suspects list! Although complete, off-air audio recordings were
available for all of these episodes, they would be of little use without
the corresponding picture elements.
As events transpired,
The Time Meddler
was being prepared for repeat (in edited form) on BBC 2 in 1991 and Ian
Levine stepped in. Levine had actually held uncut copies of The Watcher
(episode 1) and A Battle Of Wits (episode 3) from The Time Meddler for
some time, but had not realised that the BBC's copies were inferior to
his. Fortunately he found out in time and was happy to lend his complete
copies for use in the repeat broadcast. As a complete copy of episode 2
was held by the BBC Film Library upon its initial audit in 1978, only
episode 4 remains edited. The cuts to this episode are very minor:
scenes of the Saxon characters stabbing some of the Viking invaders have
been trimmed but research suggests these cuts may amount to only a few
frames in total.
The edits to The War Machines were
similarly extensive and with the Nigerian prints being the only
near-complete sources of episodes 1, 3 and 4 (an Australian film
collector had returned a poor quality, but complete, copy of episode 2
in 1978) the reconstruction of this story has been a greater challenge.
The Nigerian print of episode 1 is actually complete, with the exception
of odd single frames removed, presumably to cover up jarring edits and
shot transitions. Episode 2 was restored by splicing sections from the
collector print into the better quality Nigerian film. Many portions
removed from the last two episodes were contained in the Australian
censor clips, and a scene from episode 4 had been incorporated into a
contemporary Blue Peter episode (a film recording of which survives to
this day). Other short sections which were still missing were covered up
by using cutaway shots and Graham Strong's audio recordings of the
episodes.
Two sequences from the story are still
missing - these comprise a further minute of action from the warehouse
fight in episode 3 (the audio exists but is of little use since no
characters speak during this section of the fight) and a short section
of dialogue from episode 4. This dialogue occurs when Polly reports back
to WOTAN:
Brett: WOTAN will consider your case
later. If found guilty you will be destroyed. Polly:
I understand. Krimpton:
For the moment
your help is needed here.
(The
RED text indicates the missing
portion.)
Owing to the offset between sound and
picture on prints with a combined optical soundtrack (as the standard
BBC Enterprises overseas sales prints were), and the fact that the
original edits were made simply by cutting and re-splicing the film, the
last half of Krimpton's line is seen but not heard. The Restoration Team
had planned to cover this gap by using cutaways to other shots, but no
suitable candidates could be found and the edit therefore had to remain
in the finished video. A more in-depth article concerning the
restoration of The War Machines can be found under the VHS Releases
section of the
Restoration Team website.
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No! This is
another very common misconception, which stems from the earliest
bootleg copies of the episode that were floating around fan
circles. Unlike many episodes of the
era, The Wheel in Space episode six was telerecorded directly
onto 35mm film out of the studio (as from a live broadcast, although
the episode itself was not
transmitted live), rather than recorded
onto videotape as was the more normal case – this was almost
certainly because it would have required more extensive editing than
usual, which was easier to do on film than videotape in those days. (It
should be pointed out that even 16mm telerecording systems, if handled
correctly, are capable of delivering results comparable in picture
quality to videotape, and 35mm systems are even better). The
studio sound was recorded onto the optical soundtrack of the film, as
well as onto a separate 35mm magnetic film soundtrack. The film was
edited in the conventional way, with pictures and magnetic sound
being edited and then the sound mixed down onto another 35mm magnetic
film for use on transmission. The crucial point here is that the
edited film still contained the parts of the optical soundtrack
recorded from the studio, although it was never intended to be used. Because there is a physical offset of 20
frames between sound and pictures on 35mm film (or 26 frames on
16mm), whenever the pictures are edited the optical soundtrack runs
on for a fraction of a second after the cut into the beginning of the
next shot– and the sound for the new shot hence starts slightly late (a
similar an effect can be seen on the raw versions of the Australian censor clips, where, because the edits to the original episodes had been
made
by physically cutting the film and splicing it back together again,
the soundtrack contains a few fractions of a second of sound from the
portion of the programme immediately following the cut). Also,
because the optical soundtrack contains only material recorded from
the studio, it will not contain some music and effects added in
post-production.
The early fan
copies mistakenly used the optical track, instead of the final mix
magnetic master, hence the audio is unfinished and out of synch with
the picture edits – and thus was the myth of the slash print
born! The complete version of the episode is available on the
compilation tape Cybermen: The Early
Years (BBCV 4813, released in 1992).
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Yes, but the problem is not serious.
The BBC Film Library held episodes 2, 5, 8 and 9 of this story when
catalogued in 1978, however at some point prior to this the
British Film Institute (BFI) had
been donated all ten episodes (along with two other season six stories,
The Dominators and
The Krotons). The BFI copies
were used to complete the story in the BBC Film and Videotape library
and that appeared to be the end of the story. In 2003 however a
routine check of the BBC's 16mm film recordings revealed water damage
to episodes 1 to 4 and 6 which would make them unsuitable for mastering
a DVD release. The BFI have since confirmed that they hold what
are almost certainly the original film recording negatives of all ten
episodes and that they will grant BBC representatives access to these
when required. This will not be until the serial is prepared for
DVD release but the alternative, superior quality source of master
material means the damage to the BBC prints is not as problematic as
was first thought.
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In short:
theoretically, yes but in practice almost certainly no. To
explain more fully: when a colour videotape was used as the source for
monochrome film recordings (as for the majority of the Pertwee stories
made available for overseas sale) the "best practice" was to use a
notch filter to remove the colour signal centred on 4.43 MHz, as the
film recorders used by the BBC were sensitive enough to pick out this
information and record it. A recording not so treated would be
liable to reproduce spurious colour on professional playback equipment,
as the colour information would be detected but is present in a
scrambled form (this
is a similar
phenomenon to that seen when multi-generational VHS copies of
monochrome material are made and may play back with spurious colour on
some systems).
Theoretically it would be possible to recover this colour signal and
descramble it to reconstruct the original colour signal. In
practice this is fraught with difficulties including the fact that film
recordings are invariably slightly cropped compared to the originals
(meaning loss of some of the colour signal) and that the signal is not
only scrambled within each frame but there may well be
cross-contamination between frames as well. To recover even a
partial signal requires reconstruction (most likely by trial-and-error)
of the scanning pattern of the film recorder device, which would not
only vary between recorder machines but quite possibly between
individual recordings made on a particular machine. At the peak
of the film recording system, the BBC had over 20 machines which were
of several different specifications. Ian Williams
considers
the matter in some detail at his
Doctor
Who Technical Forum FAQ page. Test footage from a Top of the Pops film recording was
analysed some
years ago and produced results which were acceptable in some areas of
the picture but were by no means usable as anything other than a
reference for other methods of introducing colour.
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When it was
discovered that many Pertwee-era episodes of Doctor Who that had been made in
colour, were now only held by the BBC as black and white film
recordings, a search for colour copies was instigated. This bore
fruit with NTSC colour 2" broadcast quality tapes of over 30 episodes
being returned by TV Ontario in Canada between 1979 and 1985. The
conversion process by which these 525-line, 30 frames-per-second tapes
were made from the original BBC 625-line, 25 frames-per-second tapes
was somewhat crude and often relied on creating new (duplicated) video
fields to achieve the required 30 frames-per-second rate. These
were then converted back to 625/25 tapes for use in BBC Video releases
and future repeats/sales abroad. The crude early 1970s standards
conversions result in jerky motion and other undesirable artefacts
which are still evident even if modern standards conversions (using
digital technology and motion vector prediction) are done on the 525/30
tapes. A software system has been developed to predict how the
original (wiped) 625/25 tapes would have looked and to "unpick" the
525/30 conversions to recreate the original images. Until recently, the
software required expensive SGI/Irix computer systems and was not
considered financially viable. As generic PC power increased according
to
Moore's
Law it has now become viable to run the process overnight on a standard PC
to process an episode. As a result it is expected that BBC DVD releases
will begin to showcase this restoration technique from 2005 onwards.
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VidFIRETM
is a method of recreating the fluid, video-look that most 1960s Doctor Who episodes had when
originally broadcast. It is an acronym for VIDeo Field Interpolation
Restoration Effect and was developed by members of the
Doctor Who
Restoration Team. Ian Williams'
pages have
more
detail, but briefly the method works by analysing adjacent frames
on a film recording of a programme (which are 1/25th of a second apart
in time) and attempting to create a new frame between the original two,
1/50th of a second apart from each one. VidFIRE made its public
debut in late 2001 when two episodes of Dad's Army were repeated on BBC
2. The effect was highly convincing for static studio shots but
produced some noticeable side effects on areas of fast motion as well as scenes with complex
backgrounds. As
the method has been refined, some of these problems have been
overcome. Problems remain with certain types of film recording,
where two fields from the original videotape (which are 1/50th of a
second apart in time) are recorded onto the same frame of the
film. Effectively they are now "locked together" but scenes of
fast movement mean they may differ substantially, as fast-moving
objects may move relatively long distances in 1/50th of a second!
The latter effect may still cause problems when programme material is
treated with the VidFIRE but is much more difficult to overcome.
The use of VidFIRE is now commonplace on Doctor Who DVD and VHS releases and
it must be said that the DVD release of The Aztecs (BBCDVD 1099, released
October 2002) and The Seeds of Death
(BBCDVD 1151, released February 2003) benefit greatly from the effect.
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Q. Can you think of any
other questions to add to this FAQ?
If so,
mail me!
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Betamax – the first widely accepted format for home
video recording, introduced by Sony in the mid to late 1970s. NTSC
Betamax machines were
brand-new at the time the colour Pertwee stories were taped off
American
PBS stations in c. 1977 to 1978 although VHS was also around at the
time (a VHS version of the original colour compilation of The
Daemons was used to patch a gap where the Betamax tapes used by
the person recording the show on behalf of Ian Levine had to be
changed over. See the
Restoration
Team article on the colourisation for full details). Betamax tapes
are more compact than VHS cassettes and the format is believed by many
to have a superior picture quality over VHS. Despite these
advantages, in the UK at least, Betamax is dead as a home
format, having been out-marketed in the crucial areas of machine and
tape rental by VHS. It survives, in evolved form, as Betacam and
Digital Betacam, two professional formats.
Magnetic
soundtrack – there are two ways of
recording
the soundtrack associated with the pictures of a film print. Magnetic
soundtracks use a separate spool of film to store the sound, and a
large area of the film is used (as it does not need to store any
picture information). This area is in the form of two strips, each
approximately 4mm wide, on 16mm film (referred to as the "centre" and
"edge" tracks) and up to 4 tracks on 35mm stock – these tracks are
very wide and hence give a good signal-to-noise ratio. The master
telerecordings of Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee episodes originally
held by BBC Enterprises were equipped with magnetic soundtracks, for
use in a domestic repeat situation, although for overseas use the
optical track was considered adequate (see the entry for optical
soundtracks).
NTSC – National Television Standards Committee, the
colour system used by the US, Canada and Japan. In the US it is used to
encode the
colour on a 525 line TV system with 30 frames per second. It was
developed before PAL, and has a lower colour bandwidth (i.e. it is less
efficient at reproducing subtle colour graduations), plus it is more
prone to colour reproduction errors than PAL. It is hence informally
known as "Never Twice the Same Colour" among TV engineers. The
National Television Standards Committee was set up in the early fifties
specifically to frame a standard for a compatible colour TV system to
replace the existing monochrome service. The first public colour
transmission using the NTSC's "Standard for Colour Television
Transmission", known from then on as NTSC, was the Rose Parade
Colorcast on 1 January 1954. High quality conversions between
PAL and
NTSC are nowadays available to private individuals, not just
television companies, and fan copies of NTSC recordings such as the
colour Ambassadors of Death and the colour clips from The
Mind of Evil now circulate in both standards.
Optical
soundtrack – The other (and
most
economical) method of storing the sound associated with the pictures of
a film print is to use the space between the edges of the picture
frames and the sprocket holes of the film to record an extra strip of
information, in the form of a narrow band of varying exposure level
(in very early systems, c. 1930). When played back on a projector or
telecine machine, a beam of light is directed through this
additional strip towards an optical detector. The reproduced sound
level is dependent upon the intensity of the light reaching this
detector (when the sound level on the original recording is very low,
the strip on the negative is very light, and hence very dark on the
print, so little light reaches the detector and a low sound level is
reproduced). Later systems used variable area soundtracks (the sound
level modulated the width of the track). On 35mm film, the strip is
recorded between the edges of the picture frames and the left hand
sprocket holes; on 16mm it is recorded down the right hand side of
the film (only the left hand side has sprocket holes on 16mm).
Optical soundtracks have the great advantage of compactness (one
film carries both sound and picture information) but they are poorer
quality (in terms of both signal to noise ratio and the dynamic range
of the sound recorded) and less robust than magnetic tracks. For these
reasons the optical track is never used for domestic repeats of a
programme if the original magnetic soundtrack is also available.
"Optical pop" – a problem experienced during the
restoration of The War
Machines – is caused by dust particles settling on the
optical track and obscuring the light beam for a split second, and
manifests itself as the crackle and pop often associated with vintage
film material. Episode 2 of The Tenth Planet was redubbed with Graham Strong's audio due to a poor quality optical
soundtrack, although it is not clear how it arose – since the print
of the episode held is probably several generations removed from the
original master negative it could be due to the loss of quality
inherent in such a process. The other possibility is that the
original telerecording was never much good. All overseas sales prints
of the Hartnell, Troughton and Pertwee eras (originating from the
master 16 mm film recording negative held by BBC Enterprises) of Doctor
Who were equipped with optical soundtracks (so that only one can of
film needed to be sent per episode, although many recovered episodes
had magnetic soundtracks made by the
BBC Film & Videotape library that were just safety copies of the
optical track – this was to allow the sound to be edited cleanly,
avoiding complications from the 16 frame offset between sound and
picture on 16mm film [the offset is 12 frames on 35mm film], should the
picture film become damaged and require frames removing).
PAL – Phase Alternation Line encoding, a television
colour
system, usually used with a system of 25 frames per second of 625 line
pictures. Used in various slightly different flavours in Australia/New
Zealand and most of Western Europe (the exception is France, which uses
a different system called SECAM – this stands for "SEquential
Couleur Avec Memoire" [trans. "Sequential Colour With Memory"] but
is jokingly referred to as "Something Essentially Contrary to the
American Method"). PAL is technically superior to NTSC (of which it
is a specific development, designed to overcome NTSC's colour
reproduction errors by incorporating a sort of self-checking mechanism
which can eliminate colour errors with the aid of dedicated circuitry
in PAL TV sets) and is more efficient at reproducing subtle
colour graduations. It is often affectionately known as "Peace At
Last" in professional circles. It should be emphasised that PAL and
NTSC are colour systems and are not restricted to a particular
line count or frame rate; the numbers quoted are those that are
usually used (in the countries of interest in this article) with each
means of encoding the colour signal.
Quad – 2-inch broadcast standard videotape, the
earliest form used
in TV recording. Developed by the Ampex Corporation in the late
50s/early 60s, it was a ubiquitous format for TV broadcasting for over
twenty years. The original Quad was 405 lines and monochrome, however
this was later developed into 625 line low-band (monochrome) or
high-band (colour) formats. All three types have been used to record
Doctor Who throughout the programme's history. Quad employed a drum
containing four video heads (hence the name) spinning at 15,000 rpm,
almost perpendicular (i.e. at right angles to) the direction of tape
travel. This produces superb picture quality (which was not bettered
until the advent of digital formats in the early 1990s) but it means
that Quad lacks both still frame and visual search facilities. Quad
also has to be correctly aligned in the replaying machine for optimum
performance, otherwise a "stair step" effect results, due to
misalignment of the playback heads with the recorded video fields
(each of which is stored in 20 or so different tracks on the actual
tape). Steve Roberts
discusses the advantages and disadvantages of Quad compared to modern
formats in his article on the repairing of the scratch on the Quad tape
of The Sea Devils episode five. Peter Finklestone also
has a page
discussing Quad and the problems that its use could incur.
Slash
print – a rough edit of a programme on film
(in the case of Doctor Who, as a 35mm film recording) which would be
refined into the
transmitted version through post-production and editing. A slash print
contains an unfinished soundtrack (missing things such as incidental
music and possibly sound effects) and also possibly missing some
visual effects which would have been added in post production.
Telerecording – the official BBC definition is "the recording
of an
electronically-produced programme directly onto film." This
definition is rather broad, but in the case of Doctor Who,
"electronically-produced" can be taken to mean videotaped (it is also
possible to telerecord a live broadcast, as in the case of the 1953
BBC serial The Quatermass Experiment, which was transmitted
live – however the first two episodes were preserved as 35 mm film
recordings which still exist to this day). Again, whilst the film
used can be either monochrome or colour (some ITV programmes are
preserved on 16mm or even 35mm colour film telerecorded from 625 line
colour
videotape), in the case of Doctor Who exclusively monochrome stock was
used (even for the colour Pertwee serials; colour film recording
processes tended to employ cameras that were too sensitive and picked
out the individual phosphor dots on the film recording machine's
monitor). The telerecording process was usually carried out by the BBC
Engineering department on behalf of BBC Enterprises for the purpose
of preserving episodes of a show for overseas sale (although some
episodes of Doctor Who were originally broadcast from telerecordings –
see Is it true a "slash print" of The Wheel in Space episode 6 exists?
for more information). By the time the Doctor Who episodes were
telerecorded, the process had been almost perfected – it involved
sophisticated purpose-built devices containing a high-resolution
flat-screen monitor which was fed with the pictures from the videotape
of the episode in question. Built in to the device was also a
high-speed film transport unit (not just a film camera
pointing at a TV screen) which pointed at the screen and could
therefore make a film recording of the programme. The devices were
extremely sophisticated with many pieces of circuitry to control the
process and keep the film transport synchronised to the video signal
being fed to the monitor. The last Doctor Who episodes to be so
recorded for overseas sale were episodes 1 to 6 of The
Green Death as at this stage only one country (Australia) was
still interested in purchasing monochrome copies. The rollout of
colour broadcasting by ABC Australia in 1975 lead to the
discontinuation of the practice as there was no market left for new
black and white recordings of Doctor Who, although some later material
was subjected to the process such as Tom Baker material included in the
Whose Doctor Who
documentary in 1977. Peter Finklestone maintains an excellent
page giving a detailed
overview of the process and its technological evolution.
16mm
telerecording – 16mm monochrome film,
telerecorded from a 405 line source (or 625 line from The Enemy
of the World episode 3 onwards). Although it may sound strange,
there is mounting evidence that the changeover to permanent use of
625 line tape really did occur partway through a story – the change
is first noted on the scripts for The Enemy of the World episode
3 and programme documentation also notes this. Even more conclusively,
the wiping forms for the original videotapes have been discovered: all
are described as 625 line recordings but the person assigned to wipe
episodes 1 and 2 crossed this out and wrote "No – 405" on top. 16mm film was used for telerecording within the BBC
exclusively by Enterprises, as for domestic transmissions 35mm film
was used for making telerecordings intended to be transmission masters
(due to the superior picture quality arising from the larger frame
size).
35mm
telerecording – 35mm monochrome film,
recorded from a 405 or 625 line videotape source – 625 line being
used continuously from The Enemy of the World episode 3
onwards. (The
Power of the Daleks :6 was transmitted from 35mm monochrome film,
telerecorded from a "live" 625 line broadcast as for The Wheel in Space : 6 – possibly the 625 line cameras were used to enhance the
resolution of the film recording). Any 35mm telerecordings which
exist today arise from film recordings used for the original UK
broadcast of a programme (BBC Enterprises dealt solely with 16mm film
for overseas sales copies).
U-Matic –
an industrial videotape standard, pioneered by Sony. It is not usually
up to broadcast quality but has been a ubiquitous standard for many
years (it predates formats such as VHS and Betamax, and dates back to
the early 1970s). In NTSC it comes as lo-band and SP (Superior
Performance) and in PAL also as hi-band (with increased frequency
response – this is above lo-band but below SP in terms of
performance). The colour Pertwee stories supplied to the BBC for
restoration by Ian Levine were on lo-band NTSC U-Matic tape (although
the originals were recorded on Betamax cassettes).
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This section is a
list of other sites of interest, formalising into a list those
references scattered throughout the text of this article.
The Restoration team pages:
these detailed pages cover the work of the self-styled "Restoration
Team" with articles written by team members on all aspects of their
work. Lots of detail on many of the
special Doctor Who releases and material recoveries of the past few
years. Also a lively
discussion forum for technical matters.
Robert
Franks' Archives Guide: a season-by-season guide to holdings and
formats of major Doctor Who episodes and related programmes.
Steve Phillips' site: home of the
most accurate guide to clips existing from missing episodes plus
several other items of interest.
Brian
Hass' Lost and Found Episodes of Doctor Who: a useful, if
slightly outdated, article on junkings and subsequent recoveries.
Mark Parmerter's Doctor Who Gateway: interviews
and articles on missing episode material.
The Change of
Identity/Disused Yeti newsletters: discussing the missing
episodes phenomenon and related concepts. Sadly discontinued.
Peter
Finklestone's site which discusses television recording technology
and how the processes evolved before becoming obsolete.
Ian Williams
maintains the
official
FAQ page for the Restoration Team discussion forum.
Other non-web resources
worth reading are:
Doctor
Who in the Archives by Richard Molesworth (published in The
DWB Compendium): a worthwhile, if slightly flawed, look at how
material was lost and rediscovered.
Out
of the Vaults by Richard Molesworth
(published in Marvel Comics' Doctor Who Magazine issues 255 to
257): three comprehensive articles on the eighties, the seventies and
the sixties including lists of archive holdings both of complete
episodes and other material such as studio recording tapes. Well worth
reading. (UPDATE: These
articles are now online at the
Restoration Team Website:
click "Articles and Information" then "BBC Archive Holdings").
Nothing At The End of the Lane: a spin-off magazine from The Disused Yeti
newsletters, edited by Bruce Robinson, Robert Franks, and Richard Bignell. Issue 1 contained an in-depth examination of the various
missing
episode audio recordists and archive holding formats for seasons one
to three of Doctor Who. Issue 2 will be released shortly and contains many
updates to archive information previously published as well as an
in-depth article on John Cura and his Tele-Snaps service.
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Thanks to Richard Bignell,
Robert Franks,
Steve Roberts, Bruce Robinson and Graham Strong for their help in
compiling this FAQ. Thanks also to Roger Anderson for the logos.
This FAQ
is written and maintained by Dominic Jackson. Please e-mail any
suggestions or corrections to Dominic Jackson.
I cannot help with obtaining material mentioned in this FAQ; nearly all
of it is commercially released as noted at various points in the
text. Please feel free to distribute this FAQ either in text or
HTML
format, but on the conditions that you acknowledge me as the author and
that you keep the end credits section and Creative Commons licensing
information intact. Follow the Creative
Commons link below for further details on the redistribution of this
FAQ. Text © Dominic Jackson
1997-2003.
This work is
licensed under a Creative
Commons License.
Dedicated
to the memory of Michael Palmer, reconstructor
extraordinaire, who sadly passed away 21st June 2002.
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