The past week or so has been interesting in the world of Doctor Who fandom. Honestly, I’ve almost forgotten that we’re supposed to be taking bets on who replaces Matt Smith at this point. On the off-chance that you’re not really a Doctor Who fan yourself… well, first off, what on Earth are you doing at this web site, which is fairly dripping with Doctor Who?
But, beyond that, all you really need to know is this: during the 1960s, Doctor Who was produced in black & white on video, and the series was made almost year-round to the tune of one 25-minute episode per week. The videotapes were transferred to a more universal medium – film – and sold abroad, often dubbed into the local language. From various points in Europe to the Middle East and beyond, these films were “bicycled” from broadcaster to broadcaster, a practice that was still in force as recently as my early years in the TV biz (I distinctly remember that, at the station where I worked in the early ’90s, episodes of Mama’s Family were bicycled from station to station; no, I don’t know why either).
And then, in the late ’60s, staring down the barrel of an impending change of video format with little reasonable expectation that programs recorded in the older, lower-resolution format could ever be exploited commercially, and knowing that yet a further new format would be introduced in due course (namely, color television), the British Broadcasting Corporation issued internal instructions to its videotape archive: get rid of these old shows. Get rid of everything that isn’t of obvious historic value (such as footage of the Queen’s coronation). In the BBC’s view, there was no point in wasting all of that valuable space to preserve programming which had no commercial future.
If only they’d known.
But there were other things they didn’t know: not all of the films sold overseas had been returned in a timely manner as per the terms of sale. A handful of members of the viewing public who latched onto the series very early as being something special recorded every episode in audio form in English, enabling any re-dubbed episodes to be re-re-dubbed into their native tongue. And not even the BBC’s own archivists had necessarily found every episode due for erasure.
Thank goodness for that.
If one ignores the ever-shifting lengths of episodes (25 minutes for most of the original series’ 26 years on the air, except for that one season where episodes were 50 minutes, and that pair of 90 minute TV movies, and the more recent 45 minute episodes), this fall’s 50th anniversary special will be the 800th individual episode of Doctor Who. But due to the BBC’s quest to save archive space, which was a reasonable practice at the time, 106 episodes from the 1960s are missing, all but wiping out the era of the show’s second leading man, the late and much-loved Patrick Troughton.
Recent developments – all of them in the “rumor” column – have suggested that the number of missing episodes may soon drop to a mere astonishing 16 episodes thanks to an incredible find that, according to some of the more vague parts of the rapidly-morphing rumor, originate in Africa. Nigeria, maybe.
Wait, Nigeria? Oh, my giddy aunt.
I have no racial or cultural beef with Nigeria, but it’s hard to turn a blind eye to the country’s apparent surfeit of scam artists. You know, all those spam e-mails you get offering untold and untraceable bajillions of dollars, if only you’ll help some war-scarred refugee set up an American bank account? Yeah.
I sure hope it’s nothing like this:
Now, let’s be clear – the above isn’t real. (It is, however, morbidly funny, and you can click on it to see it in a readable resolution.)
I’d really like to think there’s a chance this rumor could be the revelation of a real find. But when folks like Paul Vanezis, who personally restores many of the classic episodes to just-like-new quality for DVD release, goes on the (Twitter) record as saying that he’s heard of no such find, it’s also hard not to be skeptical. The BBC’s own official silence is, frankly, deafening.
No one will rejoice more than me if there are 90 episodes recovered. Hell, if there are 9 episodes recovered, it’s nothing short of a reason for a party at my place during which all 9 episodes will be watched back-to-back, likely with minimal potty breaks. Even if it’s just The Smugglers and The Highlanders and another random episode of The Enemy Of The World. But I won’t be too shocked if it’s all for nought. We’ve been down this road before.
As with all things, will believe when seen.
If it does turn out to be true, I’ll figure out some addendum to VWORP!1 when the time is right; either a further revision (third edition!?), or an addendum section in a future book. That’s something that, quite frankly, I’d love to have to do.
In the meantime, we just have to endure more waiting and more silence. Hey, we’re Doctor Who fans. We can handle silence, right?
ADDENDUM 1: If you want to see this whole thing unfold in forum form, complete with links and quotes and reactions and a bunch of geeks alternating between stone cold cynicism and big watery trembling slowly-opening anime eyes, there is indeed a thread on this very topic in theLogBook’s own forum.
ADDENDUM 2: Of course, as of June 20th, we all know now that this was, while perhaps not a deliberate hoax, not something that was going to pan out the way we all wanted it to. It was fandom clicking its ruby slippers together and insisting that it does, in fact, believe in fairies. This being the internet, recriminations are, of course, forthcoming, and will solve nothing. I’ll have some further thoughts on this down the road.
+ There are no comments
Add yours