Highly Salasie
Ay...
More than 100 episodes of Dr Who, featuring William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, have been unearthed from archives in Ethiopia. As happened with so much TV heritage of the era, the cost of tape and the cost of storage meant an awful lot of program material has been lost forever, since it was always cheaper to record over …
Apart from the 'hobbyist' production values of the early episodes, something that I always notice is that the body language and vocal delivery of the actors was notable 'stagey', probably because the actors had more experience of theatre productions than television. They were used to delivering a performance that had to satisfy the audience on the back row. Also, they probably had it in mind that it was 'only children's entertainment'.
Nowadays it's cool to be a guest actor on Doctor Who and the agents are making discrete phone calls to let the BBC know that their clients would be very interested.
This is true of all early TV productions. The actors all learnt their craft on stage and the the performance best for TV wasn't yet appreciated. Actors who'd done films were better equipped. But the best of them wouldn't wish to do cut-price children's TV productions, which is what Dr Who was. Consequently some of the acting, "stagey" or not, was pretty dire.
That's not going to stop me eagerly waiting to see some of these new finds.
It's very easy to criticise 60's Doctor Who but the earliest episodes were recorded "as live" with a couple of recording breaks per episode (usually where there is a fade to black or a film insert).
You can't compare modern single camera drama shot on location with a series pretty much confined to a studio shot at the rate of an episode a week and with very little opportunity to do anything but the most rudimentary editing.
With multi-camera you have to know your positions, a vision mixer is effectively editing live. Everything looks stagey because everyone is trying to hit their marks so they don't obscure other actors and that at any given moment the right camera can see them.
+ for the first few years Who was stuck in one of the most antiquated studios Lime Grove had most of the time.
The 90/100/106 episode rumour seems to be bunk. It started off in the summer as "90 missing episodes found" and even some big name fans were taken in by it, but the BBC (and those in a position to know and/or find out) always rubbished it. The story seems to be this: in the summer, someone in Africa (probably an old TV company, but a private collector has also been mentioned) sent a large package of old TV material to a company in the UK. The shows were to be remastered from old, obsolete formats into something that could be played with modern technology, something that the company specialised it. Somehow this news got picked up by the Dr.Who fraternity who made 2+2=106. So, almost certainly its a case of "move along, nothing to see here."
At any rate, if Ethiopia has got anything, they never bought the broadcast rights to the Troughton era, so all we'd have to recover at best would be a handful of Hartnells, but still better than nothing.
BUT just suppose the rumour is true, could the BBC have kept it quite for all these months? Ostensibly yes. The two episodes found in 2011 were "found" in the summer but this was a well kept secret until "Missing Believed Wiped" at the British Film Institute in December. Even the programme said they would be showing "1960s BBC Science Fiction" with no mention as to what it was. No one had a clue until much closer to the event. And when "Tomb of the Cybermen" was found in 1991, the BBC put out a cover story that it was simply four episodes of an already existing story. The secret was apparently kept hidden for at least a few weeks; all other missing episode "finds" have been quite quickly reported.
But there is always the caveat that the Radio Times seems sure that something has been found, even though they can't deny the story from the BBC itself! I don't know if you remember in late 1993 when it was reported widely that over a dozen episodes from Scandinavian countries had been found and were being rush released onto video? It turned out to be a hoax, but the interesting thing here is that the rumour was never confirmed or denied by the BBC (much like the current situation) and that it started within the corporation.
If it is an episode find, I think it'll be a couple - and not the massive hoard reported breathlessly in the press.
If you want to know more about the archival situation with regard to Dr.Who (and the cornucopia of existing formats and clips), have a look at http://www.paullee.com/drwho
Dear Honorable Freind
GREETINGS!
Allow my to introduce myself, I am Wami Abdul, the only son of great Mr ABDUL, esteemed program manager of ETV. I have sad news my friend, my father Mr ABDUL is now deceased and I am now I contact with his collegues from ETV who are to eliminate the purchases of my father to store new series of Ethiopia’s got Talent. I pleed very much with them to save OLD EPISODES OF DC WHO but they say tape is expensive and I must pay €50,000 US Dollar to have them. I contact BBC for assist and they will pay owner ONE MILLION POUND DOLLARS but I am poor man with little money to raise to buy these precious tapes having only 10,000. I contact you my friend with proposition that for just your investment of 40,000 I will offer to return NIN HUNDRED THOUSAND EURO from BBC. This is approved and guaranteed under Mr Lord Reith, the head of BBC himself.
We must contact soon to ensure safety of time space adventures
Wami ABDUL
It was sold off in 2011. It's an independent publication now, likely no more connected than El Reg for this sort of story. They're likely doing the same as everybody — reporting that a tabloid reported than someone not connected to the BBC heard that the discovery had been made.
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There are 99 of them.
There *were* 100, but one of them turned out to be the early-1990s Children in Need atrocity^w special "Dimensions in Time".
"Christ, every time you think you've burned the last copy of that piece of s**t, another one turns up", said Who archivist Phil York-Hunt as he set fire to the tape.
A lot of the "not lost" ones are edited to hell and back thanks to syndication (stations would cut film to fit adverts and drop the ends on the floor). Finding another archive helps piece together the originals.
The same phenomenon was noticed with Star Trek TOS. Entire scenes were found to have been chopped out to make eps fit into advertising schedules (syndicated series are passed from station to station) and restoring them from the canonical archives (which someone at paramount had the sense to preserve) during the 1980-90s made things make a lot more sense.
Been watching this rumour with amusement for the last 6 months, and there's been a lot of conflicting reports. Like the "large cache of old films cargo" story seems to have been debunked a few months back. The fact that 106 stories are missing, and (allegedly) 106 have been found tells us that if there is a grain of truth to the rumour, that grain is well hidden and the rest is just wish-list. Because we will never find 106. Part 7 of The Dalek Master Plan - "The Feast of Steven" (actually the original first Doctor Who "Christmas Special") - was never recorded onto film and never sold abroad. So the number of 106 doesn't originate from someone in the know but from fan speculation. As I suspect is "where" it comes from and "who" has found it.
It's quite possible something has been found, but the BBC has kept quiet for various reasons. The main reason being that if you're negotiating to buy old Doctor Who film, you don't want other Collectors getting wind and offering a price you can't match. The BBC may be a big corporation, but it has a budget like anyone else, it's pockets aren't bottomless. There are Doctor Who fans out there who would love to get their hands on cans of film containing stories that no-one else has (or is likely to) see, and some of them could easily outbid Auntie.
Then of course there's this rumour: http://www.radiotimes.com/news/2013-10-06/doctor-who-newly-discovered-missing-episodes-to-be-released-for-sale-this-week
Who knows? (lol). Personally, you can keep your old scratchy Hartnell. I'll be over the moon if only Troughton's "Web of Fear" or "Evil of the Daleks" is rediscovered.
Re copyright. This has already been addressed before in "The Lion's Tale":
http://doctorwho.org.nz/archive/tsv57/lion.html
You're only infringing copyright if you copy the film or attempt to show it for profit. Purchasing the film acetate itself is not a problem.
In fact technically (since it should have been returned to the BBC back in the 60s) the film is stolen property and anyone who sells or buys it is committing a crime, although (see above) practically the BBC would never do this, otherwise nobody would ever offer any old 60s TV programmes up for sale ever again for fear they would have to blow most of their profit on a defense lawyer.
You philistine!
Will it Blend, though...
That said, I just need to add one story from season 1 and 2 from season 2 to have all existing First Doctor in my collection, so yeah, I'm a fan. (Hope to fill those holes before the anniversary)
I have both Torchwood and Doctor Who stored in subfolders on the same drive. Is that bad?
"Because we will never find 106. Part 7 of The Dalek Master Plan - "The Feast of Steven" (actually the original first Doctor Who "Christmas Special") - was never recorded onto film and never sold abroad"
Thank god for that!
Dalek Master Plan is better with just that whole episode represented by a "Scene Missing" card.
Though the embarising 4th wall christmas greeting from Bill to the camera would make a funny dvd easter egg.
If they have found 100 Doctor Who episodes I'll eat my collection of Dapol figures..
This all stems back to fan rumours going back months. These rumours circulate in fandom from time to time whenever some saddo wants some attention.
What is possible is that a hoard of film cans have been recovered from a foreign TV station and there are a few of the missing episodes in there among a load of other BBC shows.
But 100 episodes? Rubbish! Given the way the film cans were "biked" around TV stations, how did 100 end up in one place? The BBC only made a few copies and when a TV station was finished with them it had to follow instructions from the BBC to forward it on to the next people who wanted it. It's inconceivable that 100 prints would end up at one TV station.
I suggest that anyone interested further in the subject and the work already done to hunt down missing episodes and how the few that do appear come about, listen to the interview with Richard Molesworth in the Radio Free Skaro podcast (episode 357) earlier this year.
http://www.radiofreeskaro.com/2013/03/10/radio-free-skaro-357-wiped-clean-by-the-wrath-of-pamela-nash/
Assuming the prints where being handed down a long chain it is entirely reasonable for all or a large number of the prints to end up at one place, namely the end of the chain. That said these rumours have been going around for a while now, and until they are confirmed by the BBC I would take them with a bucket load of salt.
The BCC apparently has 106 40+ year old videotapes labeled "Dr Who".
If they can find equipment to run the tapes - The Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe may be a good start -, the tapes may well turn out to be unplayable and/or disintegrate at the first attempt to digitise them.
Conservation of magnetic tape is a serious problem. According to Sarah Everts
(New Scientist, 24 Aug 2013) some 200 million hours of culturally valuable audiovisual content is in danger of disappearing entirely.
May be we should equate digitising analog videotapes with baking Babylonian clay
tablets by accidental fire which conserved them for millennia.
No Doctor Who exists on broadcast video tape prior to episode 1 of The Ambassadors of Death from 1970. None. Nothing. There is zero chance of any broadcast video tape turning up before this date. The BBC even have the documentation that shows when each tape was junked.
Doctor Who in the 60's was recorded onto 2 inch Quadraplex video tape. Every single tape recorded between 1963 and the aforementioned 1970 episode was erased and reused. Tapes were never sold overseas, no tape to tape copies were ever made.
HOWEVER - for all but one episode, each 60's Doctor Who story was transferred to 16mm film (and occasionally 35mm for reasons best known to the Beeb). They are the copies that survive. Film was cheap and durable and could be played at any TV station worldwide without having to worry about TV standards or expensive VTR's (which were still new and very expensive so not everyone had them). Additionally tape cost upwards of 2 grand per half hour in todays money so the BBC had to reuse each tape several times to get its moneys worth.
So any discussion of Doctor Who being recovered on video tape is a moot point, it's never going to happen.
No the tapes were (most likely) all wiped, though there is a slim chance someone working at a facility with VTRs recorded it of the air. That's how the first day of BBC two got preserved.
Playing those tapes, if they are in a decent condition, is fairly simple. There's plenty of old Quad machines out there. Considering that Quadruplex was popular from the 1950s till the 1980s that's hardly surprising.
However as the original tapes are most likely wiped (there are records indicating that, of course there could always have been a lucky mistake) all we have is 16mm prints, which are usually monochrome, but may have recoverable colour in there. People have worked out ways to guestimate chroma by the "chroma dots", caused by the chroma signal not filtered out before going to film.
When a few years back it seemed likely no more lost episodes were out there to be found, even finding clips drew a lot of interest.
Just finding 2 episodes in 2011 caused a major reaction.
As someone who saw from Pertwee on at the time (from behind the sofa of course), any lost episodes they find are something I've not seen or had ever expected to see. From that perspective, how many is less important.
That's not to say I'd complain at them finding a lot, there are stories I'd give my right wossname to see.
or invent FTL travel attach a large receiver to the ship just outside the 50 or so light year range**** and try to piece together the original broadcast... no problem, Elon Musk and Ricky B could do it in their sleep at least we know what we are looking for
I wonder if they have TV detector vans at 50 light years away... maybe something they need to look at Mork and his ilk are getting BBC TV for free!
***I have no bloody clue how far, if we are early we can watch first runs of andy pandy while we wait.