6 ms·

Doctor Who archive expert shares positive update on missing episode

123 points by gnabgib 1y ago

giancarlostoro 1y ago
My biggest annoyance is that it wasn't until Matt Smith that they started recording the new Doctor Who episodes correctly with film, everything including David Tenant was all camcorder.
- afavour 1y ago
  Who is such an interesting show, in the sense that it’s cultural footprint has always stood in contrast to a relatively tiny production budget.
  - goalieca 1y ago
    Disney blew the budget up and the quality went down.
    - tredre3 1y ago
      Uh I didn't realize that Disney was involved in production, I thought they were merely distributors. But yeah, since 2023 Disney has been co-producing. It certainly explains some of the choices, but I don't know if they can be entirely blamed for the decline of the franchise.
      - pndy 1y ago
        Bad Wolf-Disney co-op was seen by some people as salvation which would bring new fresh approach but in the end they just speed up the decline of this franchise. And that started most likely somewhere around Capaldi's time - with prolonged focus on Clara. BBC should back then pause everything and let fans take a break but instead they decided to continue with new companion. When that didn't go as expected they tried with new showrunner and Doctor; Moffat knew how to run this playground, Chibnall despite earlier good contributions did not. Then pandemics happen which resulted in delays - they tried with shorter series a'la classic show format of story split into parts but it was already too late. Not mention the stinking bomb Chibnall decided to launch to get few minutes of cheap thrills, nullifying over 50 years of creative contributions to this franchise. Then there are socio-political elements but that just a minuscule of the whole problem.
        vintagedave 1y ago
        > the stinking bomb Chibnall decided to launch to get few minutes of cheap thrills, nullifying over 50 years of creative contributions For a casual viewer like me — I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — I’m struggling to find what this is referring to. What happened with Clara and the doctors, and Capaldi, and what was this thing that nullified 50 years of the show?
        ZiiS 1y ago
        The doctor is no longer Gallifreyan/Timelord.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        afavour 1y ago
        The criticism around Clara is an extension of the criticism that’s existed since the start of the reboot: that the companions get too much focus. Rose was very much the entry angle to the revival and made sense but the argument goes that Clara took that too far. She feels like the main protagonist in a lot of stories and her departure is a little controversial in that vein but I’ll avoid spoiling that. The nullified thing is known as the “timeless child” storyline. The Doctor is retconned to not be a Gallifreyan at all and also the source of everyone’s regenerative powers (or something, I honestly forget). It was a totally unnecessary retcon but IMO much worse it was incredibly self indulgent. Most of the audience cares very little about the Doctor’s backstory, they just want enough setup to enjoy the adventures.
    - pndy 1y ago
      I'd say that happened already with 13th Doctor. Bad Wolf-Disney DW comes with this "plastic oversaturated filter" effect that plagues media productions for 10 years if not longer.
  - FridayoLeary 1y ago
    The old episodes are very quaint. They are quite clearly produced on shoestring budgets, some of the plots are quite weak and i found it hilarious how bad the actors were at faking violence. But none of that mattered, because the team were clearly passionate and enjoyed what they were doing and did a good job so the end product is charming. Production standards have obviously moved on massively since the 1980's and we are better off. The modern episodes are much more highly polished and coherent but not necessarily more popular. Like someone else pointed out the massive influx of disney money did nothing and only exacerbated the train wreck which was the recent doctor who seasons. Another film that had a huge impact was monty python and the holy grail which was produced with a budget of 75p and ends abruptly because the money ran out. But they just turned that into a running joke throughout the whole movie.
    - scubbo 1y ago
      > ends abruptly because the money ran out It is a literal cop-out.
      - wcarss 1y ago
        That cop was later my landlord -- he was also the art director of the film, and a wonderful storyteller.
  - pndy 1y ago
    The 2005 return/reboot had a small budget and that could be seen in the props which mostly were ordinary items repurposed as out of this world technology. But that worked on the overall charm of this period - I dare to say that show felt realistic in that cheapness. The regained interest surely allowed to assign more money to the series. DW was at the peak during 11th and 12th Doctors tenure with BBC America involvement in production - the low-quality is mostly gone and more CGI was utilized, and so the stories were good. Not mention the good chemistry between all main actors.
    - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
      This is a pretty common scifi thing. The Borg antennas being built on the Enterprise's deflector in First Contact were bird feeders. Odo was once contained on DS9 in a bread maker.
      - pndy 1y ago
        A bread maker? My eyes always focused on these plastic pallets used as wall, ceiling panels in DS9...
        AmbroseBierce 1y ago
        Cypher -from the Matrix franchise- said it best, "Ignorance is bliss". Fun fact about that scene: Studio executives wanted it cut but Keanu Reeves insisted on using it.
      - wlesieutre 1y ago
        Luke’s lightsaber was famously a Graflex camera flash
      - dcminter 1y ago
        Inevitably there's a reddit sub for it (I adore the name of it): https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/
    - hdgvhicv 1y ago
- MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
  I remember seeing Doctor Who for the first time circa 2011 when it was on Amazon Prime. First few seasons were very much early 2000s TV, and then suddenly it got all big budget Netflix style in season five. The older look doesn't bother me, though. The same thing happened with The Expanse.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    The Eccleston episodes are a bit on the rough side.
    - cm2012 1y ago
      But, some of the better storytelling.
      - astrange 1y ago
        I watched some of it at the time and thought it was cool, but never paid much attention. When I checked in again around the Matt Smith era it seemed to have become, um, unwatchably twee[0]. Was that on purpose or are the people who work on it just permanently like that? [0] if you need an American English translation, maybe "theater kid energy".
        cm2012 1y ago
        Theater kid energy is a great description of the Matt Smith era onward.
        saghm 1y ago
        IIRC the show runner changed at the same time that Matt Smith became the new doctor. The tone change is pretty noticeable pretty much right at the start of Season 5 in my opinion, even as someone who enjoyed pretty much all of it before and after (although I haven't kept up with it the past few years mostly due to my TV watching habits having changed due to different life circumstances).
        pndy 1y ago
- alternatetwo 1y ago
  That’s not true. With Planet of the Dead it was filmed in HD. And no NuWho was ever shot on film.
JKCalhoun 1y ago
Related? There are also missing Beatles performances that were also recorded over by the BBC — one of which (do I have this right?) made an appearance in an early Doctor Who episode? I think that Doctor Who episode is still in tact.
- mikehall314 1y ago
  Correct. The Beatles appearance on Top of the Pops survives only because a clip from that show was used in episode 1 of The Chase. Ironically, The Chase often has rights clearance issues when it comes to home release because of this. Beatles music costs a fortune to clear, making releases untenable. Double ironically. This is because the Beatles chose to mime to their studio record for Top of the Pops. If they had played live, it would have been less of a problem.
  - maxfurman 1y ago
    FYI pretty much nobody played live on Top of the Pops
    - hdgvhicv 1y ago
      Nobody sang live, but they were on stage while the filming took place
  - qingcharles 1y ago
    I seem to remember looking into this once. Aren't large swathes of TOTP itself missing? Like, entire early decades?
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  Also NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage in the 1980s and it is likely that Apollo 11 data tapes containing the raw video feeds from the moon were erased and reused at this time. (per Wikipedia, and sometimes claimed as "evidence" that the entire mission was faked).
ant6n 1y ago
The irony is that the animated versions of lost episodes are probably much more watchable for most people today than the actual episodes, should they ever be found.
doctor_radium 1y ago
"Since 2023, I and a couple of other key members of the Film is Fabulous! team have been aware of a large collection of films, thousands of films, that have become vulnerable. That collection contains some very important material including a missing episode of Doctor Who." I assume this refers to Network (now defunct UK home video company) founder Tim Beddows, who passed away unexpectedly in 2023. I remember reading an article about the drama that unfolded thereafter (sorry, no links), which mentioned him having a large, private collection of vintage material, and the first thing I thought is that he probably has a missing episode or two of Who. Obviously the missing episode of The Web of Fear is out there somewhere [0], and I recall speculation, probably from the Roobarbs web board [1] that "a couple lost episodes of The Dalek Masterplan are in private hands". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear [1] https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php
- b112 1y ago
  Not sure it's obvious it's anywhere. Things can be lost. Unless you mean we manage faster than light speed, and we get ahead of it.
  - mikkupikku 1y ago
    Apparently it and other missing episodes were found and shipped to the BBC archives in 2013, but that one episode never arrive. It was presumably stolen en route and sold to a private collector.
    - b112 1y ago
      Fair in one respect. Yet 'presumably' is just that, and it could have been lost forever.
Keyframe 1y ago
These type of things is what gets me excited about video genAI. Audio is available, presumably scripts and production notes as well. People have done animated reconstructions as well. AI reconstructions will probably play in rather well into the effort in the future.
- 7jjjjjjj 1y ago
  That's disgusting.
  - Keyframe 1y ago
    why would it be? I'm the first one against genai, my nickname tells the story, but this isn't different from restoration or poorly animated reconstructed scenes they've been doing.
alexpotato 1y ago
I upvoted on the title of this post alone. Always great to see folks trying to save history (of any kind).
ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
These kinds of shenanigans (BBC not keeping a copy of their productions) is one of the reasons that I'm a datahoarder and keep a large library of films/tv series that I'm interested in (mainly Scifi and horror). The scary thing with streaming services is that even modern productions can become inaccessible via legal means e.g. the 28 Days Later film wasn't available when the 28 Years Later film was being shot. Personally, I'm not a fan of the BBC as their online iPlayer service is terrible at letting me (a license payer) watch older productions that my money has contributed towards. Even shows from a few months ago become inaccessible as their default lifespan is 30 days on iPlayer. Some real old classics are easier to find on YouTube than BBC's iPlayer service. There's definitely a "dark ages" of TV shows and films from the 70s/80s/90s as digital recording wasn't as common, so unpopular shows will just slip through the cracks as no streamer will be interested and there won't be decent copies available to be pirated.
- Ylpertnodi 1y ago
  >There's definitely a "dark ages" of TV shows and films from the 70s/80s/90s as digital recording wasn't as common, so unpopular shows will just slip through the cracks [.] Perhaps letting a few 'slip through the cracks' is the Bbc's way of purging the "dark ages...of TV shows". A lot of strange things were happening around TV during those times.
  - ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
    It's not just the BBC - there's lots of less popular broadcasts that will be lost to time.

123 points by gnabgib 1y ago

My biggest annoyance is that it wasn't until Matt Smith that they started recording the new Doctor Who episodes correctly with film, everything including David Tenant was all camcorder.

afavour 1y ago
Who is such an interesting show, in the sense that it’s cultural footprint has always stood in contrast to a relatively tiny production budget.
- goalieca 1y ago
  Disney blew the budget up and the quality went down.
  - tredre3 1y ago
    Uh I didn't realize that Disney was involved in production, I thought they were merely distributors. But yeah, since 2023 Disney has been co-producing. It certainly explains some of the choices, but I don't know if they can be entirely blamed for the decline of the franchise.
    - pndy 1y ago
      Bad Wolf-Disney co-op was seen by some people as salvation which would bring new fresh approach but in the end they just speed up the decline of this franchise. And that started most likely somewhere around Capaldi's time - with prolonged focus on Clara. BBC should back then pause everything and let fans take a break but instead they decided to continue with new companion. When that didn't go as expected they tried with new showrunner and Doctor; Moffat knew how to run this playground, Chibnall despite earlier good contributions did not. Then pandemics happen which resulted in delays - they tried with shorter series a'la classic show format of story split into parts but it was already too late. Not mention the stinking bomb Chibnall decided to launch to get few minutes of cheap thrills, nullifying over 50 years of creative contributions to this franchise. Then there are socio-political elements but that just a minuscule of the whole problem.
      - vintagedave 1y ago
        > the stinking bomb Chibnall decided to launch to get few minutes of cheap thrills, nullifying over 50 years of creative contributions For a casual viewer like me — I haven’t seen any of the new episodes — I’m struggling to find what this is referring to. What happened with Clara and the doctors, and Capaldi, and what was this thing that nullified 50 years of the show?
        ZiiS 1y ago
        The doctor is no longer Gallifreyan/Timelord.
        deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
        afavour 1y ago
        The criticism around Clara is an extension of the criticism that’s existed since the start of the reboot: that the companions get too much focus. Rose was very much the entry angle to the revival and made sense but the argument goes that Clara took that too far. She feels like the main protagonist in a lot of stories and her departure is a little controversial in that vein but I’ll avoid spoiling that. The nullified thing is known as the “timeless child” storyline. The Doctor is retconned to not be a Gallifreyan at all and also the source of everyone’s regenerative powers (or something, I honestly forget). It was a totally unnecessary retcon but IMO much worse it was incredibly self indulgent. Most of the audience cares very little about the Doctor’s backstory, they just want enough setup to enjoy the adventures.
  - pndy 1y ago
    I'd say that happened already with 13th Doctor. Bad Wolf-Disney DW comes with this "plastic oversaturated filter" effect that plagues media productions for 10 years if not longer.
- FridayoLeary 1y ago
  The old episodes are very quaint. They are quite clearly produced on shoestring budgets, some of the plots are quite weak and i found it hilarious how bad the actors were at faking violence. But none of that mattered, because the team were clearly passionate and enjoyed what they were doing and did a good job so the end product is charming. Production standards have obviously moved on massively since the 1980's and we are better off. The modern episodes are much more highly polished and coherent but not necessarily more popular. Like someone else pointed out the massive influx of disney money did nothing and only exacerbated the train wreck which was the recent doctor who seasons. Another film that had a huge impact was monty python and the holy grail which was produced with a budget of 75p and ends abruptly because the money ran out. But they just turned that into a running joke throughout the whole movie.
  - scubbo 1y ago
    > ends abruptly because the money ran out It is a literal cop-out.
    - wcarss 1y ago
      That cop was later my landlord -- he was also the art director of the film, and a wonderful storyteller.
- pndy 1y ago
  The 2005 return/reboot had a small budget and that could be seen in the props which mostly were ordinary items repurposed as out of this world technology. But that worked on the overall charm of this period - I dare to say that show felt realistic in that cheapness. The regained interest surely allowed to assign more money to the series. DW was at the peak during 11th and 12th Doctors tenure with BBC America involvement in production - the low-quality is mostly gone and more CGI was utilized, and so the stories were good. Not mention the good chemistry between all main actors.
  - ocdtrekkie 1y ago
    This is a pretty common scifi thing. The Borg antennas being built on the Enterprise's deflector in First Contact were bird feeders. Odo was once contained on DS9 in a bread maker.
    - pndy 1y ago
      A bread maker? My eyes always focused on these plastic pallets used as wall, ceiling panels in DS9...
      - AmbroseBierce 1y ago
        Cypher -from the Matrix franchise- said it best, "Ignorance is bliss". Fun fact about that scene: Studio executives wanted it cut but Keanu Reeves insisted on using it.
    - wlesieutre 1y ago
      Luke’s lightsaber was famously a Graflex camera flash
    - dcminter 1y ago
      Inevitably there's a reddit sub for it (I adore the name of it): https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
MathMonkeyMan 1y ago
I remember seeing Doctor Who for the first time circa 2011 when it was on Amazon Prime. First few seasons were very much early 2000s TV, and then suddenly it got all big budget Netflix style in season five. The older look doesn't bother me, though. The same thing happened with The Expanse.
- hinkley 1y ago
  The Eccleston episodes are a bit on the rough side.
  - cm2012 1y ago
    But, some of the better storytelling.
    - astrange 1y ago
      I watched some of it at the time and thought it was cool, but never paid much attention. When I checked in again around the Matt Smith era it seemed to have become, um, unwatchably twee[0]. Was that on purpose or are the people who work on it just permanently like that? [0] if you need an American English translation, maybe "theater kid energy".
      - cm2012 1y ago
        Theater kid energy is a great description of the Matt Smith era onward.
      - saghm 1y ago
        IIRC the show runner changed at the same time that Matt Smith became the new doctor. The tone change is pretty noticeable pretty much right at the start of Season 5 in my opinion, even as someone who enjoyed pretty much all of it before and after (although I haven't kept up with it the past few years mostly due to my TV watching habits having changed due to different life circumstances).
      - pndy 1y ago
alternatetwo 1y ago
That’s not true. With Planet of the Dead it was filmed in HD. And no NuWho was ever shot on film.

JKCalhoun 1y ago

Related? There are also missing Beatles performances that were also recorded over by the BBC — one of which (do I have this right?) made an appearance in an early Doctor Who episode? I think that Doctor Who episode is still in tact.

mikehall314 1y ago
Correct. The Beatles appearance on Top of the Pops survives only because a clip from that show was used in episode 1 of The Chase. Ironically, The Chase often has rights clearance issues when it comes to home release because of this. Beatles music costs a fortune to clear, making releases untenable. Double ironically. This is because the Beatles chose to mime to their studio record for Top of the Pops. If they had played live, it would have been less of a problem.
- maxfurman 1y ago
  FYI pretty much nobody played live on Top of the Pops
  - hdgvhicv 1y ago
    Nobody sang live, but they were on stage while the filming took place
- qingcharles 1y ago
  I seem to remember looking into this once. Aren't large swathes of TOTP itself missing? Like, entire early decades?
SoftTalker 1y ago
Also NASA's Landsat program was facing a severe data tape shortage in the 1980s and it is likely that Apollo 11 data tapes containing the raw video feeds from the moon were erased and reused at this time. (per Wikipedia, and sometimes claimed as "evidence" that the entire mission was faked).

ant6n 1y ago

The irony is that the animated versions of lost episodes are probably much more watchable for most people today than the actual episodes, should they ever be found.

doctor_radium 1y ago

"Since 2023, I and a couple of other key members of the Film is Fabulous! team have been aware of a large collection of films, thousands of films, that have become vulnerable. That collection contains some very important material including a missing episode of Doctor Who." I assume this refers to Network (now defunct UK home video company) founder Tim Beddows, who passed away unexpectedly in 2023. I remember reading an article about the drama that unfolded thereafter (sorry, no links), which mentioned him having a large, private collection of vintage material, and the first thing I thought is that he probably has a missing episode or two of Who. Obviously the missing episode of The Web of Fear is out there somewhere [0], and I recall speculation, probably from the Roobarbs web board [1] that "a couple lost episodes of The Dalek Masterplan are in private hands". [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Web_of_Fear [1] https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php

b112 1y ago
Not sure it's obvious it's anywhere. Things can be lost. Unless you mean we manage faster than light speed, and we get ahead of it.
- mikkupikku 1y ago
  Apparently it and other missing episodes were found and shipped to the BBC archives in 2013, but that one episode never arrive. It was presumably stolen en route and sold to a private collector.
  - b112 1y ago
    Fair in one respect. Yet 'presumably' is just that, and it could have been lost forever.

Keyframe 1y ago

These type of things is what gets me excited about video genAI. Audio is available, presumably scripts and production notes as well. People have done animated reconstructions as well. AI reconstructions will probably play in rather well into the effort in the future.

7jjjjjjj 1y ago
That's disgusting.
- Keyframe 1y ago
  why would it be? I'm the first one against genai, my nickname tells the story, but this isn't different from restoration or poorly animated reconstructed scenes they've been doing.

alexpotato 1y ago

I upvoted on the title of this post alone. Always great to see folks trying to save history (of any kind).

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago

These kinds of shenanigans (BBC not keeping a copy of their productions) is one of the reasons that I'm a datahoarder and keep a large library of films/tv series that I'm interested in (mainly Scifi and horror). The scary thing with streaming services is that even modern productions can become inaccessible via legal means e.g. the 28 Days Later film wasn't available when the 28 Years Later film was being shot. Personally, I'm not a fan of the BBC as their online iPlayer service is terrible at letting me (a license payer) watch older productions that my money has contributed towards. Even shows from a few months ago become inaccessible as their default lifespan is 30 days on iPlayer. Some real old classics are easier to find on YouTube than BBC's iPlayer service. There's definitely a "dark ages" of TV shows and films from the 70s/80s/90s as digital recording wasn't as common, so unpopular shows will just slip through the cracks as no streamer will be interested and there won't be decent copies available to be pirated.

Ylpertnodi 1y ago
>There's definitely a "dark ages" of TV shows and films from the 70s/80s/90s as digital recording wasn't as common, so unpopular shows will just slip through the cracks [.] Perhaps letting a few 'slip through the cracks' is the Bbc's way of purging the "dark ages...of TV shows". A lot of strange things were happening around TV during those times.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  It's not just the BBC - there's lots of less popular broadcasts that will be lost to time.