Particularly in the case of long-running sci-fi series such as Dr Who, I like to remind people that it had many eras and many styles, that disliking (or even being allergic to) one style doesn't necessarily mean the rest will provoke the same reaction. It's not a case of trying to push the series onto others, it's more a case of not wanting people to be deprived of making a choice. (When you don't know the choice is there, you can't make it.) The series isn't for everyone, even with the diverse styles, but I'd rather that be your decision and not that of one producer.
The same is true even of shorter-running series like Blake's 7 - if I'd only ever seen season 4 I'd want to burn the memory of the show even existing from my brain. With the help of some home brewing, I've largely erased season 4 and have no intention of ever donating brain cells to that season ever again. The writing and production is really that different, even over such a short timeframe.
Those times I've introduced Brit shows to others, I've started by trying to match up what I know the other person looks for in telefantasy and start there. I've been wrong a couple of times, but not often, which shows the method is reasonably sound. If I were you, I'd use that as the selection criteria of the starting point of any show and indeed to select the shows themselves. Even the closest of friends won't necessarily like the same shows for the same reasons, which can be a source of serious show allergies.
...that according to the BBC, there was a lot of pushback against some of Newton's workings because they weren't very good. I've not studied the papers that are up enough to verify the accuracy of the BBC's claim but if there is any basis to the statements then this may damage Newton's place in history as it will give credence to the view that he "acquired" material from Huygens and Descartes on the grounds that if he didn't really grasp the material he was writing about then he was less likely to be the original author of it.
He also became a significant political figure and sent more than a few people to the gallows. Not the sort of figure I'd want DMCA advocates knowing about, let alone emulating!
The Prisoner was made by an English studio, written and played by an English actor, and location footage was in North Wales. It's thus 2/3rds English, 1/3rd Welsh.
if you like The Prisoner, then early Who might actually appeal to you. My suspicion is that you've only (or primarily) exposes to JNT's travesty of an era, or the later debacles that claim to be Who but clearly aren't. (The TARDIS has no scanner, no blast doors, no HADS -- for crying out loud, it doesn't even have the internal hum! That proves, beyond all doubt, it can't be Who.)
I'd add one further clause: "Copies that are made purely for archival purposes but never played in public OR in private are exempt from copyright, provided the conditions of the exemption are wholly and provably adhered to. Copyright is retroactively applied for the entire duration of the existence of copies allegedly made for archival purposes but then used in violation of the exemption clauses."
This would make collecting (where playing isn't generally the point) both safer and on sounder legal ground, which in turn would boost the material preserved.
"Missing, Presumed Wiped" is a superb conference. Probably the most remarkable recovery of theirs was the episode "Girl on the Trapeze" of "The Avengers" as the surviving recording notes had indicated that this had never been transferred onto film - and thus it was presumed lost forever.
It is likely that a few more episodes will be recovered -- I really, really want the whole of Evil of the Daleks! -- and I would not be surprised if there's at least one more completed story in the archives by 2020. However, I don't expect more than a few. We'll never see Dalek Masterplan, unless time travel is invented, or any of the other long stories (such as Marco Polo or Myth Makers) that are largely to wholly missing. Which is why I'm still holding out the hope that CERN will announce that FTL neutrinos exist and Higgs doesn't, as that's our last hope.
Only if you want the version as broadcast. A more complex, but superior, solution would be to use time travel to break into the studios, hardware hack the cameras to use high dynamic range, high resolution CCDs and wirelessly transmit the feed from that to a storage device concealed in the room. You then merge the video recorded footage (which will include all the SFX and edits) with the high quality video to produce a cinema-grade version of each episode.
Not trivial, by any means, but much better results!
I dunno, if you include the Big Finish material then there's quite a healthy stockpile of episodes. Do an animated "reconstruction" (it's not a real reconstruction since there was never any video) in the same way fans have done for things like Evil of the Daleks -- or as Chatsworth Hall did for The Invasion -- and you've got a "proper" episode.
Actually, yes. Australia was fairly bad about it back then, though the US could be worse at times. Probably one of the most edited scenes was with body bits oozing out of a Cyberman in Tomb of the Cybermen, but stories featured drug taking (Aztecs), assassinations (Romans), religious extremism (Crusades) and other stuff that we'd think nothing of today but was really shocking back then.
Probably the most heavily-edited story was Masterplan, where episode 7 was entirely edited out of all foreign sales by the BBC for religious reasons. This is the only episode definitely never transferred to film and is therefore lost forever in video form. (The audio exists, thanks to fans soldering tape decks to the speakers of their TVs.)
Well, be fair. The first season, at least, was entirely funded on the basis that it was educational material for kids (it's the only way the light entertainment department would pay anything for it at all) and so naturally that's exactly what it looks like. But, having said that, it is precisely for that reason that the early episodes have a high sci-fi value -- the history was usually well-researched and the science was generally provided by a scientific advisor (Kitt Peddler, for example). The later stories have better production values, yes, but the accuracy falls off. Modern Who has great production but scores absolute zero on either science or history.
Perhaps, but think of it this way -- they *could* have sold tapes instead of trashing them. Which is cheaper - holding an auction that would likely recoup the costs of the process and may even help fund new work, or piling the tapes into trucks and driving them to a landfill?
It would also have been cheaper to offer tapes to cast and crew (many of whom are now known to have "lifted" tapes that were set aside for being junked). There's no cost involved letting employees drive at their own costs to the archive, take the tapes they want, and store them at own cost at home. Less liability, too - that film was combustible, so there's risks involved in trucking the stuff to a landfill. If it's someone else's problem, that's no risk to the company at all.
I agree, but as a BBC license fee payer - when I was still living in the UK - I feel entitled to denigrate the BBC all I like after the cancellation of Blake's 7 and The Tripods, and doubly so after they considered Eldorado to be the height of entertainment. Sorry, the BBC Controllers can say what they like about sci-fi, but B7 and Tripods were highly rated and widely sold, Eldorado was neither. (it had, what, 5 viewers?) I will never, ever forgive the BBC for considering a pathetic, unwatched soap as superior material to some of the greatest television of its era.
And, sorry Val, but your ghost STAYS in purgatory until you apologize for defending it.
Nonetheless, when The Lion was found in New Zealand, the finder was served with a copyright infringement statement by the BBC lawyers. (See the Slashdot story on the subject.) Pragmatic they may be, polite --- not so much. They need to work on that part.
I'd also note that the BBC version of events on the missing episodes makes no mention of the telerecordings or the BBC Archives and is highly revisionist. This demeans, quite considerably, the efforts of collectors, fans and studios alike who go to a great deal of effort to locate and return the film canisters. (How do you get credit for returning that which officially never existed?)
Very true, and it is widely circulated (I've posted links elsewhere) that at least one round of junking was due to a request from the fire department to do something about the highly combustible archives they had. Please note that the prevailing belief is that there was more than one round of junking - probably at least two - at the BBC Archives (as opposed to BBC Central, which only housed the magnetic tape copies) and the different accounts are likely explained by being references to different events rather than confusion over the same event.
it wouldn't surprise me if you actually did find a few people mixed in with the canisters. It may be urban legend, but it's still widely held that organized crime in the UK was very much linked to motorway construction back then, particularly in regards to concealing those that they'd made missing.
Worse was to come. Universal Studios actually held on to a few audio and film recordings, then digitized them. Very old tape and film degrades, requiring baking to turn the tape into something usable, which can destroy the original after transfer. It never does the original any good, after a run-through. The fire at Universal Studios a few years back destroyed all of their remastered material - which, annoyingly, they'd failed to back up anywhere and had totally failed to release. That which they'd actually bothered to keep was, in consequence, lost to the world because they'd stopped bothering.
The problem with libel in the US is that it's almost impossible to prove to the current standard and the defense can often get it dismissed under one pretext or another. In this case, they'd probably claim a DMCA takedown notice is Commercial Free Speech, since they're regular communications and not really legal documents.
Yes, there are penalties for frivolous legal claims --- if it's proven that the claim is indeed frivolous. You'll have noticed that a lot of claims reported by Slashdot never make it to court. They're either settled or the victim wilts under pressure. Because of that, the claims are safe from court scrutiny. Even if the claim does get to court, awarding fees only is not much since this is usually one of the first motions to be put forward if it's going to be. $3.25 isn't much of a penalty.
No, to deter frivolous claims, the penalties have to be a lot more severe. If the person targeted can show probable intent to harm (versus intent to recoup losses), then that should automatically kick in a criminal investigation for 'demands with menaces' (commonly referred to as blackmail). Criminal cases aren't funded by individuals, so individuals don't have to pay for the cost of two competing lawsuits at the same time.
Further, I'm not keen on this absolute frivolous-or-not thing. The UK provides the judge with the right to divide up costs as appropriate according to how frivolous either side is being. It's not either/or. Of course, this only works in theory, as judges in the UK (anyone remember Judge Pickles?) can be incredibly......strange at times and are just as prone to bias as any other judges, and Legal Aid won't help civil cases. (IMHO, it should help in any case where either one of the sides has an unfair advantage likely to pervert the course of justice or where the penalty for losing the case would likely exceed the limits traditionally considered acceptable under Common Law. But that's just me, I like justice to not merely be done but to be SEEN to be done.)
I believe New York ruled a few years back that there was no such thing as "public ownership" and that "public domain" does not exist, so there has been a steady deterioration of public rights for some time.
When I retire, my plan is to buy some woodland (if there's any still left) and put up notices "trespassers will be served tea and cookies". The total lack of discussion on the idea of Common Land, the total lack of awareness in many places that such a thing could, or ever has, existed -- these things horrify me. Private property has a place and a time, and that's good, but it shouldn't be the ONLY place and time you're ever allowed to have, whether it be land, ideas, whatever. The exclusive existence of private ownership is a monoculture and we know that in EVERY field of endeavor that monocultures are toxic. We NEED discussion and awareness, even if the conclusions from that are that public ownership has no place. If we don't discuss it and it simply bleeds away, as it is doing, we won't have a choice in the matter and we won't have an opportunity to seriously examine if it is the appropriate mechanism for avoiding the lethality of monocultures.
At the present time, there is a prevailing belief that ownership is everything - that what isn't owned doesn't exist, that if it exists, it's owned. I have seen no studies, no analysis, no proofs that this is either necessary or even useful. Without a methodical approach to the issue, what you have is not modernization but religion. It is merely an article of faith, until the actual legwork is done to establish if the belief has credibility or not. We should not be running a 21st century (AD) country on articles of faith. 21st century BC, it might be more excusable. If the stone-age tribes of Papau New Guinnea or the Amazon wish to run their societies by articles of faith, well, that seems fine to me. It suits the culture and technology they're using, so it's appropriate to do that. I like balanced societies where all aspects are working at the same level. By the same logic, a modern, high-tech, scientific culture, to be balanced, has no business picking the rules of society from political theology. Regressing science is stupid, so advance the culture.
It's a PR stunt - they're at grave risk of another anti-trust lawsuit with the extras they're building directly into Windows 8, so if they can show that they're not really trying to "knife the baby" (their words, not mine) then they're less likely to face the intense scrutiny they got in the last lawsuit. It's hard to be clear if the whole "EFI only boots Windows" scandal was real and Microsoft backed down or if it was simply a misinterpretation, but it's safe to say that stories like that emerging before things become a done deal will give MS' top execs and lawyers a case of the chills. They're not averse to complete pwnership of the computing industry, they're just averse to getting caught.
All the content was on film, through the telerecordings process. Overseas sales were done exclusively through film, not video, so all episodes (barring Feast of Stephen) were telerecorded onto film for sales. These telerecordings were held in the BBC Archives. The magnetic tape copies held temporarily by the BBC were in part because editing film is a bastard and it's hard to add effects. The initial masters were therefore mag tape, but once the recordings were telerecorded (re-mastered) onto film, the mag tape was marked for recycling. It wasn't useful after that point, since they could always broadcast off the film copies if they wanted to repeat anything.
The BBC's current version of events is highly edited, to the point of being "economical with the truth" (ie: lying through their teeth.) The junkings were a terrible event in history (even the Apollo moon landing footage was destroyed!) but this revisionism is an insult beyond insults. Do they take us for fools? (You don't have to answer, it's bloody obvious they do or they wouldn't be revising extremely well-documented events to make themselves look better.)
These are the accepted accounts - two junkings (one for fire safety reasons, one to make space) with absolutely nothing to do with contracts or magnetic tapes (beyond BBC central not having a copy) - along with a description of the transfer from video to film.
As far as I'm concerned, the current BBC description is a highly edited description of the events with NO mention of the telerecordings and the Wikipedia account seems to be pure mythology. I can find ZERO evidence for it. Almost everything definitive known about the early Doctor Whos was written in the Disused Yeti newsletters, with articles contributed by BBC staffers with inside knowledge, often due to being there at the time. This link gives you the archive for it:
Absolutely no story whatsoever should be accepted on face-value if it contradicts an official or semi-official statement in the newsletters. They're the premiere source of authenticated information.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks.
Particularly in the case of long-running sci-fi series such as Dr Who, I like to remind people that it had many eras and many styles, that disliking (or even being allergic to) one style doesn't necessarily mean the rest will provoke the same reaction. It's not a case of trying to push the series onto others, it's more a case of not wanting people to be deprived of making a choice. (When you don't know the choice is there, you can't make it.) The series isn't for everyone, even with the diverse styles, but I'd rather that be your decision and not that of one producer.
The same is true even of shorter-running series like Blake's 7 - if I'd only ever seen season 4 I'd want to burn the memory of the show even existing from my brain. With the help of some home brewing, I've largely erased season 4 and have no intention of ever donating brain cells to that season ever again. The writing and production is really that different, even over such a short timeframe.
Those times I've introduced Brit shows to others, I've started by trying to match up what I know the other person looks for in telefantasy and start there. I've been wrong a couple of times, but not often, which shows the method is reasonably sound. If I were you, I'd use that as the selection criteria of the starting point of any show and indeed to select the shows themselves. Even the closest of friends won't necessarily like the same shows for the same reasons, which can be a source of serious show allergies.
...that according to the BBC, there was a lot of pushback against some of Newton's workings because they weren't very good. I've not studied the papers that are up enough to verify the accuracy of the BBC's claim but if there is any basis to the statements then this may damage Newton's place in history as it will give credence to the view that he "acquired" material from Huygens and Descartes on the grounds that if he didn't really grasp the material he was writing about then he was less likely to be the original author of it.
He also became a significant political figure and sent more than a few people to the gallows. Not the sort of figure I'd want DMCA advocates knowing about, let alone emulating!
The Prisoner was made by an English studio, written and played by an English actor, and location footage was in North Wales. It's thus 2/3rds English, 1/3rd Welsh.
if you like The Prisoner, then early Who might actually appeal to you. My suspicion is that you've only (or primarily) exposes to JNT's travesty of an era, or the later debacles that claim to be Who but clearly aren't. (The TARDIS has no scanner, no blast doors, no HADS -- for crying out loud, it doesn't even have the internal hum! That proves, beyond all doubt, it can't be Who.)
I'd add one further clause: "Copies that are made purely for archival purposes but never played in public OR in private are exempt from copyright, provided the conditions of the exemption are wholly and provably adhered to. Copyright is retroactively applied for the entire duration of the existence of copies allegedly made for archival purposes but then used in violation of the exemption clauses."
This would make collecting (where playing isn't generally the point) both safer and on sounder legal ground, which in turn would boost the material preserved.
"Missing, Presumed Wiped" is a superb conference. Probably the most remarkable recovery of theirs was the episode "Girl on the Trapeze" of "The Avengers" as the surviving recording notes had indicated that this had never been transferred onto film - and thus it was presumed lost forever.
It is likely that a few more episodes will be recovered -- I really, really want the whole of Evil of the Daleks! -- and I would not be surprised if there's at least one more completed story in the archives by 2020. However, I don't expect more than a few. We'll never see Dalek Masterplan, unless time travel is invented, or any of the other long stories (such as Marco Polo or Myth Makers) that are largely to wholly missing. Which is why I'm still holding out the hope that CERN will announce that FTL neutrinos exist and Higgs doesn't, as that's our last hope.
Only if you want the version as broadcast. A more complex, but superior, solution would be to use time travel to break into the studios, hardware hack the cameras to use high dynamic range, high resolution CCDs and wirelessly transmit the feed from that to a storage device concealed in the room. You then merge the video recorded footage (which will include all the SFX and edits) with the high quality video to produce a cinema-grade version of each episode.
Not trivial, by any means, but much better results!
I dunno, if you include the Big Finish material then there's quite a healthy stockpile of episodes. Do an animated "reconstruction" (it's not a real reconstruction since there was never any video) in the same way fans have done for things like Evil of the Daleks -- or as Chatsworth Hall did for The Invasion -- and you've got a "proper" episode.
Actually, yes. Australia was fairly bad about it back then, though the US could be worse at times. Probably one of the most edited scenes was with body bits oozing out of a Cyberman in Tomb of the Cybermen, but stories featured drug taking (Aztecs), assassinations (Romans), religious extremism (Crusades) and other stuff that we'd think nothing of today but was really shocking back then.
Probably the most heavily-edited story was Masterplan, where episode 7 was entirely edited out of all foreign sales by the BBC for religious reasons. This is the only episode definitely never transferred to film and is therefore lost forever in video form. (The audio exists, thanks to fans soldering tape decks to the speakers of their TVs.)
Well, be fair. The first season, at least, was entirely funded on the basis that it was educational material for kids (it's the only way the light entertainment department would pay anything for it at all) and so naturally that's exactly what it looks like. But, having said that, it is precisely for that reason that the early episodes have a high sci-fi value -- the history was usually well-researched and the science was generally provided by a scientific advisor (Kitt Peddler, for example). The later stories have better production values, yes, but the accuracy falls off. Modern Who has great production but scores absolute zero on either science or history.
Perhaps, but think of it this way -- they *could* have sold tapes instead of trashing them. Which is cheaper - holding an auction that would likely recoup the costs of the process and may even help fund new work, or piling the tapes into trucks and driving them to a landfill?
It would also have been cheaper to offer tapes to cast and crew (many of whom are now known to have "lifted" tapes that were set aside for being junked). There's no cost involved letting employees drive at their own costs to the archive, take the tapes they want, and store them at own cost at home. Less liability, too - that film was combustible, so there's risks involved in trucking the stuff to a landfill. If it's someone else's problem, that's no risk to the company at all.
I agree, but as a BBC license fee payer - when I was still living in the UK - I feel entitled to denigrate the BBC all I like after the cancellation of Blake's 7 and The Tripods, and doubly so after they considered Eldorado to be the height of entertainment. Sorry, the BBC Controllers can say what they like about sci-fi, but B7 and Tripods were highly rated and widely sold, Eldorado was neither. (it had, what, 5 viewers?) I will never, ever forgive the BBC for considering a pathetic, unwatched soap as superior material to some of the greatest television of its era.
And, sorry Val, but your ghost STAYS in purgatory until you apologize for defending it.
Nonetheless, when The Lion was found in New Zealand, the finder was served with a copyright infringement statement by the BBC lawyers. (See the Slashdot story on the subject.) Pragmatic they may be, polite --- not so much. They need to work on that part.
I'd also note that the BBC version of events on the missing episodes makes no mention of the telerecordings or the BBC Archives and is highly revisionist. This demeans, quite considerably, the efforts of collectors, fans and studios alike who go to a great deal of effort to locate and return the film canisters. (How do you get credit for returning that which officially never existed?)
Very true, and it is widely circulated (I've posted links elsewhere) that at least one round of junking was due to a request from the fire department to do something about the highly combustible archives they had. Please note that the prevailing belief is that there was more than one round of junking - probably at least two - at the BBC Archives (as opposed to BBC Central, which only housed the magnetic tape copies) and the different accounts are likely explained by being references to different events rather than confusion over the same event.
it wouldn't surprise me if you actually did find a few people mixed in with the canisters. It may be urban legend, but it's still widely held that organized crime in the UK was very much linked to motorway construction back then, particularly in regards to concealing those that they'd made missing.
Worse was to come. Universal Studios actually held on to a few audio and film recordings, then digitized them. Very old tape and film degrades, requiring baking to turn the tape into something usable, which can destroy the original after transfer. It never does the original any good, after a run-through. The fire at Universal Studios a few years back destroyed all of their remastered material - which, annoyingly, they'd failed to back up anywhere and had totally failed to release. That which they'd actually bothered to keep was, in consequence, lost to the world because they'd stopped bothering.
You will be glad to know that hell failed to pay its electricity bill last month and was cut off.
The problem with libel in the US is that it's almost impossible to prove to the current standard and the defense can often get it dismissed under one pretext or another. In this case, they'd probably claim a DMCA takedown notice is Commercial Free Speech, since they're regular communications and not really legal documents.
Yes, there are penalties for frivolous legal claims --- if it's proven that the claim is indeed frivolous. You'll have noticed that a lot of claims reported by Slashdot never make it to court. They're either settled or the victim wilts under pressure. Because of that, the claims are safe from court scrutiny. Even if the claim does get to court, awarding fees only is not much since this is usually one of the first motions to be put forward if it's going to be. $3.25 isn't much of a penalty.
No, to deter frivolous claims, the penalties have to be a lot more severe. If the person targeted can show probable intent to harm (versus intent to recoup losses), then that should automatically kick in a criminal investigation for 'demands with menaces' (commonly referred to as blackmail). Criminal cases aren't funded by individuals, so individuals don't have to pay for the cost of two competing lawsuits at the same time.
Further, I'm not keen on this absolute frivolous-or-not thing. The UK provides the judge with the right to divide up costs as appropriate according to how frivolous either side is being. It's not either/or. Of course, this only works in theory, as judges in the UK (anyone remember Judge Pickles?) can be incredibly... ...strange at times and are just as prone to bias as any other judges, and Legal Aid won't help civil cases. (IMHO, it should help in any case where either one of the sides has an unfair advantage likely to pervert the course of justice or where the penalty for losing the case would likely exceed the limits traditionally considered acceptable under Common Law. But that's just me, I like justice to not merely be done but to be SEEN to be done.)
I believe New York ruled a few years back that there was no such thing as "public ownership" and that "public domain" does not exist, so there has been a steady deterioration of public rights for some time.
When I retire, my plan is to buy some woodland (if there's any still left) and put up notices "trespassers will be served tea and cookies". The total lack of discussion on the idea of Common Land, the total lack of awareness in many places that such a thing could, or ever has, existed -- these things horrify me. Private property has a place and a time, and that's good, but it shouldn't be the ONLY place and time you're ever allowed to have, whether it be land, ideas, whatever. The exclusive existence of private ownership is a monoculture and we know that in EVERY field of endeavor that monocultures are toxic. We NEED discussion and awareness, even if the conclusions from that are that public ownership has no place. If we don't discuss it and it simply bleeds away, as it is doing, we won't have a choice in the matter and we won't have an opportunity to seriously examine if it is the appropriate mechanism for avoiding the lethality of monocultures.
At the present time, there is a prevailing belief that ownership is everything - that what isn't owned doesn't exist, that if it exists, it's owned. I have seen no studies, no analysis, no proofs that this is either necessary or even useful. Without a methodical approach to the issue, what you have is not modernization but religion. It is merely an article of faith, until the actual legwork is done to establish if the belief has credibility or not. We should not be running a 21st century (AD) country on articles of faith. 21st century BC, it might be more excusable. If the stone-age tribes of Papau New Guinnea or the Amazon wish to run their societies by articles of faith, well, that seems fine to me. It suits the culture and technology they're using, so it's appropriate to do that. I like balanced societies where all aspects are working at the same level. By the same logic, a modern, high-tech, scientific culture, to be balanced, has no business picking the rules of society from political theology. Regressing science is stupid, so advance the culture.
It's a PR stunt - they're at grave risk of another anti-trust lawsuit with the extras they're building directly into Windows 8, so if they can show that they're not really trying to "knife the baby" (their words, not mine) then they're less likely to face the intense scrutiny they got in the last lawsuit. It's hard to be clear if the whole "EFI only boots Windows" scandal was real and Microsoft backed down or if it was simply a misinterpretation, but it's safe to say that stories like that emerging before things become a done deal will give MS' top execs and lawyers a case of the chills. They're not averse to complete pwnership of the computing industry, they're just averse to getting caught.
All the content was on film, through the telerecordings process. Overseas sales were done exclusively through film, not video, so all episodes (barring Feast of Stephen) were telerecorded onto film for sales. These telerecordings were held in the BBC Archives. The magnetic tape copies held temporarily by the BBC were in part because editing film is a bastard and it's hard to add effects. The initial masters were therefore mag tape, but once the recordings were telerecorded (re-mastered) onto film, the mag tape was marked for recycling. It wasn't useful after that point, since they could always broadcast off the film copies if they wanted to repeat anything.
The BBC's current version of events is highly edited, to the point of being "economical with the truth" (ie: lying through their teeth.) The junkings were a terrible event in history (even the Apollo moon landing footage was destroyed!) but this revisionism is an insult beyond insults. Do they take us for fools? (You don't have to answer, it's bloody obvious they do or they wouldn't be revising extremely well-documented events to make themselves look better.)
http://www.btinternet.com/~m.brown1/intro.htm
https://www.msu.edu/~gobeski1/Missing.htm
http://www.paullee.com/drwho/missingwithouttrace.html
These are the accepted accounts - two junkings (one for fire safety reasons, one to make space) with absolutely nothing to do with contracts or magnetic tapes (beyond BBC central not having a copy) - along with a description of the transfer from video to film.
As far as I'm concerned, the current BBC description is a highly edited description of the events with NO mention of the telerecordings and the Wikipedia account seems to be pure mythology. I can find ZERO evidence for it. Almost everything definitive known about the early Doctor Whos was written in the Disused Yeti newsletters, with articles contributed by BBC staffers with inside knowledge, often due to being there at the time. This link gives you the archive for it:
http://archive.whoniversity.co.uk/dy/dy_main.htm
Absolutely no story whatsoever should be accepted on face-value if it contradicts an official or semi-official statement in the newsletters. They're the premiere source of authenticated information.
It's not pirating if you go back in time and watch them before they were made.
Damn keyboard, that's Feast of Stephen.