Slashdot Mirror
Lost Doctor Who Episode Found
JSDopefish writes "In an event that most Doctor Who fans thought couldn't happen, another lost episode of Doctor Who has turned up. It's Episode Two of the 1965 William Hartnell serial, 'The Dalek Masterplan.' No word yet as to how it will be released, this news is just breaking today apparently. This is great news for fans, as the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999, and most folks had given up hope there were any others left to be discovered. For those who don't know, in the '70s the BBC routinely junked old stories. Not just Dr Who, but all their shows. Repeats and sales weren't an issue then. There's something like 115 or so lost Doctor Who episodes total."
they used to record over stuff all of the time.
The question we can ask is were the Daleks meant to live forever, or was there some facility for biological reproduction of the software. We know the original facility that grew the mutated kaleds and produced the containers was destroyed. Presumable another facility was created, as we know that the original produced could not have produced the numbers that were to later antagonized the universe.
In summary, this is a really dorky and embarrassing post. My only defense is that I grew up with dr. Who. I will not date myself by indicating how much of my life the series covered. I think we need a poll of our most embarrassing trivia knowledge.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Simpsons reference.
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/3F12.html
The really old Dr Who shows are being repeated (possibly in order) on the ABC in Australia.
They are in order, but they're skipping the storylines for which they don't have all the episodes.
This does mean things seem to jump occasionally, and you have to resort to the BBC website to work out what was supposed to have happened in between.
I wonder if they're planning this run to finish up around the time the new Dr Who series broadcasts here, sometime in 2005 or 2006?
deus does not exist but if he does
Man, I'm gonna have a field day with this thread.
m l
http://nitro9.earth.uni.edu/doctor/lost/lost.ht
Essentially, after the episodes were initially transmitted they were stored in a warehouse. As the early 70s approached the re-saleability of old black and white shows was decided to be essentially nil. So, the tapes and films were scheduled to be destroyed. Old cellulose is a bit of a fire hazard.
Many old shows like Z-Cars and Softly, Softly were destroyed as well.
They're being recovered VERY slowly these days, as all of the foreign stations that episodes were sold to have been searched, etc. The above URL explains a lot.
From memory (and much much geekiness) there were many many more daleks created than were destroyed by 'peter davidson' (i think) in Genesis of the Daleks. Some were sent off-world.
Also in later stories it was discovered the Daleks worked out ways to convert 'humans' into Daleks. This resulted in two 'races' of daleks, one lot who were loyal to Davros (the Emperor darlek) and the other lot that were humanized and somewhat insane.
Also, I understand they have lifesupport built in that lets them live indefinately until some twit blows them up with Nitro-9.
Yes, I have watched far too much Dr Who in my life.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie...."
Nimheil
Actually, what happened was the Dr at some point froze up old Davros in suspended animation as a kind of imprisonment. The Daleks at the time were commanded by the Emperor Dalek, successor of the Supreme Dalek (not a pizza).
Now, the Daleks were at war with the Movellans, a race of very humanoid androids. Since both the Movellans and the Daleks were entirely logical creatures, they were at a stalemate. The Daleks then went in search of Davros, their creator, because they knew he was illogical and therefore could break the stalemate and allow them to win.
Davros, being the ultimate evil genius mad scientist that he is, really knows his stuff so he managed to "hack" the Daleks sent to get him, so he could set himself back up as leader of the Daleks. The Emperor didn't like this. Davros grew himself a new bunch of Daleks, and set himself up as the new Supreme Dalek, as the civil war raged on.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
There is an updated version of that article available at http://www.geocities.com/TelevisionCity/Lot/8256/l andf.htm.
"Old, low-quality B&W TV footage wouldn't take up anywhere near the same space as a modern show shot in color and on (reasonably) high-quality film."
Actually, old low-quality footage, in many ways, would be worse. Though the imagery would be considerably softer (easier to compress), it'd also be noisier as well. The more noise to the scene, the harder of time the compressor has getting a decent pixel-per-data-rate ratio. They would undoubtedly have to use some modern technology to make the footage useful. Noise reduction, image stabilization, etc.
I don't you'd get that many more minutes of acceptable quality on the DVD. This is especially true if they're going to go through the effort to restore as much of the footage as possible. Remember, DVDs are supposed to be very clear. They'll try to adhere to that.
However, I think you'd be absolutely right if we were talking about internet downloads. I wish the BBC would consider taking the early seasons of Dr Who and allowing me to watch them for a modest subscription fee. I would whip out my cc right now to do that. Heck, I might even install RealPlayer!
"Derp de derp."
26 seasons of, on average, 13 hours each. There's some debate in fandom about the box set approach.
;)
At present, we get single stories (mostly 4-6 half hour episodes per story) per DVD, with heavy restoration / rework by the BBC's Restoration Team (descratching, cleaning up the soundtrack, a wondrous process called VidFire developed by Peter Finklestone to restore the original smooth 50 fps video look to grainy 25 fps film stock, on The Ark In Space and Dalek Invasion Of Earth, alternative CGI'd versions of some of the grottier FX), plus usually a good hour or so of extras, commentaries, old documentary footage, newly filmed documentaries and so forth.
It takes a while to make a package that lavish, and I for one would be very disappointed to see the approach change to 'slap it all onto disc as quick as possible for a quick buck'.
Also bear in mind that only two seasons of Doctor Who were Arc-based (Season 16 'The Key To Time' and Season 23 'Trial Of A Time Lord'). Otherwise it's all standalone stories.
Though the 12-part "Daleks' Masterplan" and the ten-part "War Games" could be considered Arc-y, they're not complete seasons.
Only 108 lost episodes to go. It's 5 years since 'The Lion' was found, so we should have the lot back by 2544, just in time for the Dalek-provoked Galactic War against the Draconian Empire
The BBC did not "junk" its episodes. It archived them very poorly, and a single wharehouse fire wiped out most of the missing 1st and 2nd Doctor episodes.
You're completely wrong. Actors' union contracts at the time the episodes were made specified only one repeat max, and that within 5 years of first broadcast. Also Dr Who was videotaped and later recorded onto film (what the US refers to as "kinescope" recordings) for overseas sale. The main BBC library only had a mandate to keep filmed shows until the late 1970s, and the film recordings mostly stayed with BBC Enterprises (the comercial arm of the BBC). When Enterprises needed space they junked a load of their films, thinking the BBC Film Library had them safe and that these were only their sales prints. Unfortunately, they were wrong...
I get that from a 30-year familiarity with Doctor Who.
;)
For example, Season 1 ran from 23rd November 1963 (An unearthly Child ep 1) to 12th September 1964 ( Reign Of Terror ep 6). The stories that season were:
An Unearthly Child (4 parts)
The Daleks (7 parts)
The Edge of Destruction (2 parts)
Marco Polo (7 parts)
The Keys of Marinus (6 parts)
The Aztecs (4 parts)
The Sensorites (6 parts)
The Reign of Terror (6 parts)
giving a total of 42 half hour episodes.
Season 2 had 39 episodes.
Season 3 had 45 episodes.
By Jon pertwee's time (seasons 7 to 11), things had settled down to a fairly routine 26 episodes per season.
In Tom Baker's first season (season 12, 28 Dec 1974 to 10 may 1975) this dropped to:
Robot (4 parts)
The Ark In Space (4 parts)
The Sontaran Experiment (2 parts)
Genesis Of The Daleks (6 parts)
Revenge of The Cybermen (4 parts)
giving a total of 20 half-hour episodes.
Seasons 13 to 17 were stable at 26 episodes, Season 18 had 28 eps.
By the mid-80's Colin Baker 'hiatus' phase the seasons were getting a lot shorter admittedly. Season 23 (Trial Of a Time Lord) only had 14 episodes. Each of Sylvester McCoy's seasons (seasons 24 - 26) had just 2 4-parters and 2 3-parters, or 14 episodes a season. Hence the average over the 26 year run comes in around the 13-hours per season mark.
In any case, current trends in 2004 (which incidentally don't seem to match the BBC I watch) aren't all that relevant to a show that ran for 26 years from 1963 to 1989.
For the new series starting in 2005, Mal Young (Exec Producer and Head of Drama Serials at the BBC) has said there will be around 13 episodes of 45 minutes each. I suspect he may have some clue as to the nature of current trends in Drama Serials at the BBC
Here
Doesn't mention this recent news, but is rather interesting as it explains what they do with such old recordings.
R Tape loading error, 0:1
You do realise that the US Doctor Who fan club dwarfs it's British, Canadian, Australian, etc counterparts by an order of magnitude?
Not surprising since the US population is an order of magnitude greater than those places as well.
--
In London? Need a Physics Tutor?
American Weblog in London
The videotape machines and the cameras themselves were also huge and unwieldy compared to film equipment - hauling them around was a major undertaking. When a large proportion of an episode was going to be shot outdoors - like the aforementioned 'Stones of Blood' - it was worth taking the video equipment out for a spin because the videotape could be reused after the episode had been edited down, while film couldn't.
The interior shots, at least for Doctor Who, were always recorded on video in a multi-camera studio. Only sitcoms and game shows really use this method any more. Anyway, as you say, it wasn't a requirement or anything - just practicality.
"the last time a lost episode was turned up was in 1999"
Several short clips from lost episodes have turned up as recently as 2003.
The original broadcast of Fury from the Deep was censored in New Zealand. Certain scenes (eg, "the weed creature attack" scene) were deemed to be too violent or explicit. Ironically for the censors, these censored clips are now all that is left of some episodes.
A selection of scenes from episode six of the 'lost' Troughton tale Fury from the Deep have been found.
link
THE DOCTOR WHO CLIPS LIST by Steve Phillips
link
You're both right and wrong. I was incorrect when I stated that 115 episodes were missing, but the number of lost episodes is still in the triple digits. The recovery of this one brought the number down to 108.
The thing is, many early episodes have been recovered. The bulk (though not all) of the first two seasons were returned in the early 1980s, and throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, numerous episodes were discovered in the possession of private collectors, or other television stations, and so on. But after the recovery of all four episodes of The Tomb of the Cybermen in the early 1990s, the speed at which episodes were being returned slowed to a trickle, as most of the obvious channels had been exhausted. The only significant finds in the past couple of years have been an episode of The Crusade five years ago, and now this episode of Daleks' Master Plan.
The thing is, this was all perfectly normal. Every episode of the show (and, indeed, of most BBC programs at the time) were shot on video cassette. Because of the PAL formatting of the tapes, though, these masters were then transferred to film and handed over to another division of the BBC, BBC Enterprises, so that they could be more easily sold to foreign distributors. This was all well and good, except that BBC TV had a relatively small facility for storing tape masters, and routinely had to cycle out older tapes to make room for newer rooms, a process which accelerated in the early 1970s, when most BBC1 shows started switching from black and white to color broadcasts. When Doctor Who made the switch at the start of the 1970 season, BBC TV figured it would be highly unlikely that they would ever rebroadcast the old B&W episodes, and so basically junked the lot of them. With almost no exception, every single video cassette master of every episode of the show produced from its creation in 1963 through 1969 was erased. It was figured that if anyone wanted a copy of these episodes, they could go bug BBC Enterprises for the film transfers.
This left the film transfers being held for oversea sale. The problem here was that the nature of copyright law made it extremely difficult to sort out the rights issue after a couple of years. After this initial period had expired, it wasn't economically practical for BBC Enterprises to store all of the film, and so they were incinerated. BBC Enterprises, for its part, assumed that if anyone wanted copies of the episodes that badly, they could go bug BBC TV for the tape masters because, after all, they created them. This was, in general, a slower process than the video erasing, and took place throughout the 1970s.
There were a few exceptions here, though. BBC TV held onto a more or less random assortment of episodes as examples of BBC work of the time period, so some of these have survived. And, towards the tail end of BBC Enterprises's pyro-spree a number of individuals within the BBC finally figured out what was going on, as fan groups began to ask around at the BBC for copies of early episodes, and managed to put at stop to the practice. After 1978, a new BBC group, the Film and Videotape Library, was created to provide storage for BBC programs so that this sorry experience (which had affected a lot more than just DW episodes) would not be repeated. From abroad, distributors who had purchased episodes from BBC Enterprises had occassionally stored them, and obligingly returned to them to a very humbled BBC in the 1980s.
But this is all incomplete. Not every episode was sold to every foreign distributor, and not every foreign distributor kept every episode they had purchased. So, aside from the few private acquisitions squirelled away from the BBC by collectors, the only real remains of these lost episodes are the audio recordings made (illegally, no less) by fans back in the 1960s, a few short video snippets made on extremely primitive equipment, and the work of a photojournalist named John Cura who had been hired by BBC TV to snap a photographic record of the prod
Sean Daugherty "I have walked in Eternity -- and Eternity weeps."