Lost in time boxset

Synopsis

A digitally restored collection of rare 1960s Doctor Who episodes, from stories which no longer exist in their entirety.  They offer a unique glimpse at classic adventures which are now lost in time...

Cover notes

Thousands of television programmes made during the 1960s, including 108 episodes of Doctor Who, no longer exist.  This is the story of how they came to be destroyed, and why this DVD collection's confetti of individual episodes still survive when the remainder of the serials to which they belong have been irrevocably lost in time.  It is a story without villans – just ordinary people doing their jobs in terms of the needs and assumptions of the day.  Nobody was negligent, but if, with hindsight, we may think that nobody was very imaginative either... well, can anybody really foresee the future?

In its earliest days, television was invariably a live event: drama programmes were performed, transmitted, and viewed in the home, all at the same moment of the same evening.  Nothing was pre-recorded, and this meant that, as the broadcaster Joan Bakewell has put it, television "spent its energies on the airwaves and left little recorded trace"; the only programmes made in the early 1950s which survive today were filmed off the screen, by special arrangement, as they went out.  By the end of the decade, videotape technology was now reliable enough to allow television companies to make programmes in advance; this had become standard practice when Doctor Who began in 1963.  Every episode of Doctor Who was pre-recorded, usually on videotape, but not one of those early tapes survives today.

One reason for that is the high cost of new technology, then as now: videotape was an expensive commodity, but at least the television companies could save money by re-using it.  Moreover, no matter how fast technology may develope, people's attitudes and outlook will always lag behind.  For programme makers, executives, and viewers, television in the 1960s was just as ephemeral as it had been in its infancy: it was, in the words of BBC drama director Shaun Sutton, "the largest theatre in the world", but, like theatre performances, it happened once and then disappeared into history.  Programmes were rarely repeated (only eight episodes of Doctor Who during it's first six years, for instance), not least because many viewers felt short-changed when given 'another chance to see them'.  Producers could request that particular episodes be retained for a possible second showing (Doctor Who's first producer, Verity Lambert, ear-marked The Dalek Invasion Of Earth in this way), but the norm was for a programme's tapes to be returned to the BBC Engineering Department after transmission, to await their eventual date with an electromagnetic eraser.

Most of the tapes of 1960s Doctor Who were wiped during the years 1967-9 but by then their contents had been transferred to 16mm film, for sale to television companies around the world.  The BBC had overseas sales rights in each Doctor Who serial for seven years, but needed to make them available in a universal format: electronic video standards and systems differed from contry to contry, but everyone could transmit programmes from film.  Doctor Who travelled the world, to countries as diverse as Nigeria and New Zealand, Cyprus and Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, and Gibraltar.  After they had finished with them, the companies were supposed to do one of three things: 1) send the films on to the next country that had bought them, 2) return them to the BBC, or 3) junk them (and send the BBC a certificate of destruction).  Fortunately, not all of them did...

By the early 1970s, the films were coming back in droves to the BBC's sales division, BBC Entrprises.  Shelving space soon ran out, and film cans began to clutter up the corridors.  It was a television enthusiast's dream, but a fire safety officer's nightmare.  What was worse, it looked as if none of these old programmes could ever be used again: the overseas sales rights were expiring, and an agreement with Equity, the actors' union, prohibited British television from repeating anything that was more than three years old.  Even if that were to change, the BBC had entered the new decade with the triumphant launch of its colour television service; these old black-and-white films seemed part of the dead past, and they were duly spring-cleaned away.

For six years from 1972, innumerable films held by BBC Enterprises were selected for destruction, wound off their spools, and burnt by the skipful.  In 1978, when a policy change brought an end to the practice, Enterprises still had most of the first two series of Doctor Who (1963-5), with only four serials missing, all historical adventures.  From the remaining four years of the 1960s, there were just four serials left.  The decision was taken to consolidate the surviving films at Enterprises with the material in the BBC Film Library, which held a haphazard collection of odd Doctor Who episodes, many of which had been made as viewing copies supplied for internal BBC use.  Eight of these unattached oddments appear in this collection.

The BBC had begun to think seriously about an archival policy in the mid 1960s, but it made slow progress in implementing one.  At that time, it was considered impossible to keep everything: Doctor Who's script editor in the early 1970s, Terrance Dicks, remembers being asked to nominate serials for retention as good examples of the genre.  But by 1978, when the BBC Film and Videotape Library was finally established, popular thinking about television was on the turn.  Domestic video recorders had started to become generally available, and would soon become generally affordable.  This offered a new mode of programme distribution, for which the archives were to be an important source: within five years, the BBC would begin to make selected items from its back catalogue available on home video.

If the 1960s and 70s were decades of destruction, during the following quarter-century the BBC has actively sought to recover its lost programmes.  In that time, 37 episodes of 60s Doctor Who have been found, ten of which appear in this collection.  Some were found in BBC premises, or buildings once owned by the BBC, others lay forgotten in the archives of overseas broadcasters, and some had found their way into the possession of private film collectors.  Wishing won't bring the others back, alas, but if you have genuine, first-hand information about the whereabouts of a missing episode of Doctor Who or any other BBC programme, please contact a grateful BBC: you'll make a lot of television buffs very happy!

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DVD Extras

Special Edition DVD Extras

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