Doctor Who missing episodes
Many episodes of the long-running British science fiction television programme Doctor Who are missing, like many other BBC television series produced prior to 1978 such as Z-Cars and The Wednesday Play. Efforts, however, continue to be made to recover or restore them, both by the BBC and by fans of the series.
Background
Sometime between about 1967 and 1978 large amounts of older material stored in the BBC's video tape and film libraries were destroyed or wiped to make way for newer material. This happened for a number of reasons, the primary one being that agreements with the actors' union Equity and other trade bodies limited the number of times a single programme could be broadcast (usually only twice). These showings were also limited to within a set time period, such as five years. This was due to the unions' fear that if the channels filled their schedules with repeats, it could lead to fewer new shows being made, putting actors and other production staff out of work. This attitude by the unions also had the unintentional side effect of causing many programmes to be junked after their repeat rights had expired, as they were considered to be of no further use to the broadcasters.
Most episodes of Doctor Who were made on two-inch quad videotape for initial broadcast and then telerecorded onto 16mm film by BBC Enterprises for further commercial exploitation. The BBC had no central archive at the time — the Film Library kept programmes that had been made on film while the Engineering Department was responsible for storing video tapes. BBC Enterprises sold the programmes to overseas broadcasters (generally as 16mm telerecordings) and thus kept copies of programmes they deemed commercially exploitable.They also had little dedicated storage space and tended to keep piles of film canisters wherever they could find space for them.
From around 1972 until 1978, Enterprises had a big cleanout of older material, including many old episodes of Doctor Who. This was mostly done because Enterprises' rights agreements with the actors and writers to sell the programmes abroad had expired, and with many broadcasters around the world now switching to colour transmission, it was not deemed worthwhile extending agreements to sell the older black and white material.
Meanwhile, as the Engineering Department library had no mandate to archive programmes, older tapes were regularly wiped for reuse and to free up space. The Film Library had no responsibility for storing programmes that had not been made on film and there were conflicting views at the Film Library and Enterprises over who had the responsibility for archiving programmes. These combined factors resulted in the erasure of enormous quantities of older black and white programming from the BBC's various libraries. While thousands of other programmes have been destroyed in this way, the missing episodes of Doctor Who are probably the best-known example of how the lack of a consistent programme archiving policy has caused lasting damage.
The degree of incompleteness varies — some First and Second Doctor stories have only one episode missing, while others are lost altogether. All stories starring Jon Pertwee as the Third Doctor are only complete in the sense that all the episodes are present, but some only survive as black and white telerecordings. Archival holdings are complete from the advent of the programme's move to colour television which coincided with the beginning of Jon Pertwee's time as the Doctor, though a few Pertwee episodes have required substantial restoration work due to loss or damage of the original 625-line PAL transmission masters and a few episodes are still only held as 16mm black and white telerecordings.
The wiping policy officially came to an end in 1978, when the means to further exploit programmes by taking advantage of the new market in home videocassette recordings became apparent. The idea also arose that programmes should, in any case, be preserved for posterity and historical and cultural reasons. The BBC Film Library was turned into a combined Film & Videotape Library for the preservation of both media. At this stage, there were over 150 episodes of Doctor Who no longer held by the BBC.
Currently, 108 episodes of Doctor Who from the black and white era are still missing from the BBC's archives despite ongoing attempts to recover them. The most sought-after lost episode is Part Four of the last William Hartnell serial, The Tenth Planet, which ends with the First Doctor transforming into the Second. The only portion of this still in existence, bar a few poor quality silent 8mm clips, is the few seconds of the regeneration scene which had been rebroadcast as part of a 1973 episode of Blue Peter.
In 1992, a fan named Roger K. Barrett claimed to have a videotape of the episode, and offered to sell it to some Doctor Who fans and the BBC. However, Barrett turned out to be an alias, and the existence of the episode a hoax. Unfortunately, hoaxes of this kind are not uncommon in Doctor Who fandom, with people willing to exploit the hope that copies of the missing episodes may still exist somewhere, waiting to be recovered. See List of incomplete Doctor Who serials for a listing.
Compared to many BBC series broadcast in the 1960s, Doctor Who is comparatively well-off in terms of missing episodes, mainly due to wide overseas sales which has aided in recovery of episodes (see below). This is reflected in the nature of the surviving episodes — Seasons One and Two, the most widely sold abroad of the 1960s episodes, are missing only nine and two episodes respectively, whereas Seasons Four and Five, which sold to fewer countries, have only one complete serial in existence between them.
Of all the long-running popular series shown by the Corporation throughout the decade, only Steptoe and Son can be said to have a better survival record, with all episodes existing, albeit some only in early domestic videotape copies created by the writers of the programme. Other programmes have few or no episodes in existence; United!, a football-based soap opera which broadcast 147 episodes between 1965 and 1967 has no episodes surviving at all. Doctor Who's popularity and high profile has ensured the return of episodes which, for other programmes, might never have occured.
Restoration
While the original 625-line PAL videotapes of some Pertwee serials were wiped for reuse and a few episodes are still held as 16mm black and white telerecordings, some colour versions survived in the form of 525-line NTSC colour videotapes that were sent for broadcasting overseas. In the 1990s, some of these tapes were returned to the BBC, and their colour signals were used (along with traditional colourisation techniques where necessary) to colourise the 16mm monochrome film copies. Other early colour videotape recordings made off-air by fans have also been retrieved. Whilst of poor quality, these have proved invaluable for restoring colour information to some of the black-and-white Pertwee telerecordings found in the archives.
The serials that were restored in this way (and thus no longer incomplete) were Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons and The Dæmons. NTSC colour tapes are held for all the episodes of The Ambassadors of Death, but are too badly damaged to permit anything more than a partial restoration, with the cost of repair being prohibitive. A new "Reverse Standards Conversion" process was used for the first time on the 2005 DVD release of The Claws of Axos. Driven by computers and using a system designed by James Insell, with algorithms written by Jim Easterbrook, it has the potential for use on other videos recovered from North America. Using other modern digital image processing techniques such as VidFIRE, the Doctor Who Restoration Team is using available professional and amateur film and video recordings to generate digitally re-mastered versions of the early episodes for DVD release.
Recovery
Since the archive was first audited in 1978, a number of episodes thought missing have been returned from various sources. An appeal to broadcasters in other countries who had shown the programme (notably Australia and African nations such as Nigeria) produced "missing" episodes from the archives of those television companies (The Tomb of the Cybermen was recovered in this manner from Hong Kong in 1992). Some clips cut from these overseas copies by the Australian and New Zealand censors (for being too violent or frightening for the programme's early time slot) have also been recovered — several from episodes which do not exist in their entirety.
Episodes have also been returned by private film collectors who had acquired 16mm copies from various sources. Perhaps the unlikeliest story to have had episodes recovered is The Daleks' Master Plan, a serial which was never sold abroad (only Australia ever requested viewing copies, eventually electing not to purchase the serial). Nevertheless, 16mm copies of three episodes have been recovered — two from an ex-BBC property which had been purchased by a Mormon church group in the early 1980s. The group came across the films when tidying the basement and offered them back to the corporation. The third was returned in 2004 by former BBC engineer Francis Watson. Watson had taken the film home in the early 1970s after being instructed to dispose of junk material from a projector testing room at the BBC's Ealing Studios. Instead of throwing the film away, Watson kept it, eventually returning it when he realised the value of the material.
Some of the surviving episodes were always held at the BBC. When the archive was first checked in 1978, forty-seven episodes were held by the BBC Film Library, in addition to those still held by BBC Enterprises. These Film Library copies were mostly the few episodes that had originally been telerecorded onto film for transmission rather than recorded onto videotape, and had been stored in the library rather than stored in the engineering department with the videotapes.
However, not all of these film-recorded episodes exist, which ought to be the case given the Film Library's remit. There were also some unexplained items in the film library, such as 16mm copies of the first three episodes of The Tenth Planet, presumably viewing prints which were mistakenly returned to them at some point instead of BBC Enterprises. Perhaps most surprisingly of all, they also still held a 16mm telerecording copy of the original untransmitted pilot episode of the programme, presumably a viewing print made in 1963 and subsequently lodged at the library. The Film Library also held original film sequences made for insertion into videotaped episodes. Some of these, such as those from the opening two episodes of The Daleks' Master Plan, survive to this day, but there is evidence to suggest that some film inserts were considered to be of lesser value than complete programmes and were junked as late as the early 1980s.
Audio versions of all of the lost Doctor Who episodes exist from home viewers making tape recordings of the show. Small excerpts have also been recovered on 8mm cine film taken by a fan in Australia during repeat showings of various episodes, who filmed certain scenes directly from the television screen.
Most recently, two further short clips from the first Second Doctor story The Power of the Daleks — along with a higher-quality version of one of the extant scenes — were discovered in an episode of the BBC science series Tomorrow's World from 1966. The clips, lasting less than 10 seconds each and on film (as opposed to film recordings), only came to light when the Tomorrow's World segment was broadcast as part of the September 11 2005 edition of the clip-based nostalgia show Sunday Past Times on BBC Two. Several sharp-eyed fans noticed that these clips were not among those extant in the archives and informed the BBC.
Reconstruction
In addition to these short video clips and audio soundtracks, there also exist still photographs taken by photographer John Cura. Cura was hired by the BBC to document the filming of many of their most popular programmes during the 1950s and 1960s, including Doctor Who. These "tele-snaps" were generally used to promote BBC programmes, and are, in many cases, the only visual evidence remaining of several missing episodes.
Since the late 1990s, reconstructions of many of the missing serials have been also been made by fan groups such as Loose Cannon Productions, who distribute them for free. These "recons" are based on the directors' original camera scripts, and use a combination of the surviving soundtracks, surviving footage, photographs, still images (especially Cura's tele-snaps) and specially recreated material. Although technically infringing copyright, these recons have been tolerated by the BBC, provided they are not sold for profit and distributed as low quality VHS copies. "Official", high quality reconstructions using the same methods were made for the BBC Video releases of The Ice Warriors and The Tenth Planet.
In June 2005, BBC Audio began to release reconstructions as part of their "MP3 CD" line. Under the Doctor Who: Reconstructed banner, the CDs include the same audio portions as the previous audio CD releases, but are on a single disc with Macromedia Flash-animated and synchronised slideshow of tele-snaps and other material. The tele-snaps play in sequence when viewed on a computer, or a listener has the option to play the audio portion only on an MP3-compatible CD or DVD player. The Power of the Daleks was the first such reconstruction to be released.
The survivors
The surviving episodes which do not form up complete stories — often referred to as "orphan" episodes — have been released by the BBC in one of three ways:
- The Hartnell Years and The Troughton Years on VHS tapes, released in the early 1990s
- Abridged releases, with the surviving episodes and one or more of the following:
- Linking material recorded by actors (The Reign of Terror, The Crusade and The Invasion)
- Audio CDs with recordings of the missing episodes (The Crusade and The Ice Warriors)
- Reconstructions with photographs, surviving clips and soundtrack (The Tenth Planet and The Ice Warriors)
- The Lost In Time DVDs in 2004.
Starting in the early 1990s, the BBC began to release existing audio recordings of serials with all or a majority of episodes missing on audio cassette and compact disc, with linking narration provided by former series actors such as Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Peter Purves, and Frazer Hines. Serials with only one or two episodes missing have also been released in complete soundtrack format.
By 2005, the soundtracks for all of the missing episodes will have been released.
See also
- List of incomplete Doctor Who serials
- List of Doctor Who serials
- Doctor Who on Region 1 DVD
- Doctor Who on Region 2 DVD
- Doctor Who audio releases
- Doctor Who Restoration Team
References
Books:
- Fiddy, Dick. Missing, Believed Wiped – Searching for the Lost Treasures of British Television. London: British Film Institute. 2001. ISBN 0851708668.
- Howe, David J; Stammers, Mark & Walker, Stephen James. The Handbook – The Second Doctor. London. Virgin Books. 1997. ISBN 0426205162. Chapter Junking by Andrew Pixley and Jan Vincent-Rudzki.
Magazines:
- Molesworth, Richard. Out of the Vaults – The Sixties. "Doctor Who Magazine". Issue 257. Cover date October 22 1997.
- Molesworth, Richard. Out of the Vaults – The Seventies. "Doctor Who Magazine". Issue 256. Cover date September 24 1997.
- Pixley, Andrew. No Further Interest. "Nothing at the End of the Lane". Issue 2, Summer 2005.
- Bignell, Richard. Withdrawn, De-Accessioned and Junked. Ibid.
- Molesworth, Richard. Out of the Vaults Revisited!. Ibid.
- Parmeter, Mark. Out of the Vaults Continued!. Ibid.