The following introduction was first published in the
Doctor Who Magazine special,
The Missing Episodes: The First Doctor, for which I also wrote introductions to the various stories for which 'telesnaps' do exist. I previously blogged about researching the magazine
here.
Introduction
It is the singular greatest frustration of being a Doctor Who fan that so many of its early
episodes are missing. While fans of Star
Trek or The Twilight Zone can
watch a complete run of episodes, from beginning to end, in
digitally-remastered quality, Doctor Who fans
have gaps; glaring, soul-crushing
lacunae in the continuously developing narrative that mean it will never be
possible for modern fans to watch all of Doctor
Who from the start, in order, as viewers did in the 60s. Because of the
missing episodes, being a fan of Doctor
Who will always be a tantalisingly incomplete, unresolved experience,
because there will always be episodes which have yet to be seen, episodes that
may yet be recovered but which almost certainly won’t. To paraphrase the
playwright Michael Frayn; it’s not the despair we can’t stand, it’s the hope.
It’s a formative moment in the experience of any Doctor Who fan. If you didn’t know that
there were missing episodes and have only just learned that fact from reading
this introduction, then I feel your pain; the wound is still raw and forever
will be. When I first became a fan, I only knew about the old stories from the
novelizations published by Target books and my prized Doctor Who Monster Book. The thought of ever actually watching them seemed like an impossible
dream, because old Doctor Whos were
never repeated and to all intents and purposes didn’t exist; they were a part
of distant, black-and-white history and I no more expected to watch a William
Hartnell Doctor Who than I expected
to participate in the Second World War. But then, in 1981, the BBC repeated the
first William Hartnell story and suddenly it seemed plausible that if they could
show that, then surely The Abominable
Snowmen couldn’t be that far away. But instead they showed The Krotons. Because that was the only
complete Patrick Troughton four-part story they still had. A story so
inconsequential, so second-rate, that Target books hadn’t even bothered to
publish a novelization of it.
It was only when my mum brought home the Doctor Who Magazine Winter Special – one
of the very first forerunners of this magazine – that I discovered the truth.
The magazine printed a list of all the Doctor
Who episodes that existed in the BBC archive, a list that consisted largely
of the word ‘none’. All those stories I’d read and loved as novelizations, like
The Tomb Of The Cybermen and The Ice Warriors, plus amazing-sounding
stories I’d never heard of like The Evil
Of The Daleks and Fury From The Deep.
None, none, none, none. The Web Of Fear.
One. The Invasion. All of it apart
from part one (a typo, as part four didn’t exist either).
How could they do this to me? Why had such a terrible, heart-breaking situation ever been allowed
to happen? It didn’t make sense. How could the BBC - the people who made Doctor Who – not have bothered to keep
it?
There are, sadly, two main reasons. The first is that in the
60s television was still a young medium, where programmes were considered to be
as ephemeral as theatrical productions. In its very early days when everything
was live, shows weren’t even repeated at all; instead, the actors would simply
reconvene for a second performance. By the 60s the technology existed to repeat
shows, but the BBC’s obligation to both its Royal Charter and the license fee
payers was to originate new material and keep repeats to a minimum; if shows
were repeated, it would be as a sort of ‘catch-up’ service within two years of
the initial broadcast. Moving into the 70s, the introduction of colour
television (and twice as expensive colour television license fees) meant that
black-and-white programming was considered old-fashioned and second-rate and
repeats were few and far between (in much the same way that repeats of
standard-definition, 4:3 programmes are now rare on BBC One.)
So there wasn’t much reason to keep the programmes for a UK
broadcast. In addition, the BBC’s agreement with the actors’ unity Equity meant
that repeating old programmes was almost as expensive as making new ones (the
union being understandably keen to ensure that the BBC generated new work for
its members). However, it is important to note that Equity did not want old
programmes to be destroyed; quite the opposite, in fact, as they provided
royalties for its members through overseas sales.
But if Doctor Who was
being sold overseas, surely that was a reason to keep it? Well, yes, that was a
good reason and initially that was the case. Although Doctor Who’s videotapes were routinely wiped (because videotapes
were expensive and had to be re-used) almost every single episode had a film
copy made first*, so that duplicates of that copy could be sold to overseas
stations. Initially Doctor Who was a
great success for the BBC’s commercial arm, BBC Enterprises, but by the mid-70s
sales of the old black-and-white stories were beginning to dry up. Foreign TV
stations were also moving to colour and becoming less interested in
black-and-white-material and as the show’s popularity had fallen off during its
third season in the UK, the interest of overseas viewers also seems to have
waned. In addition, for a couple of years in the late 60s BBC Enterprises couldn’t
sell stories featuring the Daleks (due to Terry Nation withdrawing the rights
in the hope of launching his own Dalek series) so the package of stories that
BBC Enterprises could sell to overseas broadcasters omitted Patrick Troughton’s
introductory adventure, The Power of the Daleks, making the second
Doctor a less marketable proposition.
So with foreign sales drying up and little prospect of UK
repeats, there seemed little point for BBC Enterprises in retaining their
archive of Doctor Who film and so, when
their rights to sell the shows expired, their film copies were ‘junked’ (i.e.
thrown in a skip) to make room in the vaults for more recent, much more
commercial material . This was in the days before home video and it took BBC
Enterprises a long time to realise the commercial potential of archive
material. It does seem remarkably short-sighted in retrospect, but that was how
things were back then; in the early 60s the BBC were wiping episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour while BBC Records
were releasing the soundtrack of two episodes of Hancock as an LP. The idea that there might one day be a market for
‘archive’ material simply didn’t occur; not only was Doctor Who not kept, but also Not
Only... But Also, The Likely Lads,
Til Death Us Do Part and hundreds of
episodes of Z-Cars, Top of the Pops and numerous other shows
now forgotten.
Gradually, however, the attitude of the BBC began to change,
as articles appeared in the press highlighting the fact that they were not
retaining copies of their programming (Peter Cook bemoaning the wiping of Beyond the Fringe in an edition of
satirical magazine Private Eye). The
deal with Equity was renegotiated allowing more ‘out of time’ repeats and, as the
cost of videotape came down, there was no longer such a pressing need to wipe
videotapes for re-use. During the mid-70s the BBC’s Film Library extended its
remit from only retaining material originated on film to include videotapes,
becoming the BBC Film and Videotape Library (which is why every Doctor Who story from 1975 onwards
exists on its original tapes).
A few years later, the BBC appointed an Archive Selector to administrate
this archive, Sue Malden. Eager to build a partnership with the British Film
Institute, Malden visited their Television Officer, Paul Madden, so they could
compare records of what BBC material existed in the National Film Archive that
didn’t exist in the BBC’s Film and Videotape Library and vice versa. She
noticed that the BFI had film copies of three complete Doctor Who stories that weren’t in the BBC’s own archive; The Mind Robber, The Dominators and The War Games. Malden asked where the
BFI had got them from and was told they had been donated by BBC Enterprises.
This led Malden to contact BBC Enterprises to find out what archive material
they held, to stop junking it and to have it transferred to the BBC’s Film and
Videotape Library.
Unfortunately, by that point, BBC Enterprises had junked
their copies of most of the episodes from seasons three, four and five. But
luckily for us they hadn’t got around to chucking out the episodes from the
first two seasons, meaning that all those stories – a complete run save for Marco
Polo, The Reign of Terror and The Crusade – could be added to the Doctor Who shelf in the Film and
Videotape Library. Around this time, Sue Malden was also paid a visit by a
record producer called Ian Levine, a
tenacious Doctor Who enthusiast who
had been trying to purchase copies of episodes from the BBC for his own
collection. He alerted Malden to the fact that some of the Doctor Who episodes missing from the BBC’s archive may still exist
in overseas archives, which was indeed the case for a large number of colour
Jon Pertwee episodes (the BBC’s copies only being in black-and-white).
Over the years since then, 33 more missing episodes have
been recovered (17 Hartnell, 14 and 2 Pertwee) from overseas broadcasters,
private collections and various BBC storage facilities, thanks to the perseverance
and perspicacity of Ian Levine, Paul Vanezis and several other Doctor Who fans. With the recent
recovery of episode three of Galaxy Four and
episode two of The Underwater Menace, the
total of missing episodes now stands at 106. The fact that so much of Doctor Who exists is a testament not
only to fans’ determination but to the incompetence of the BBC; not only could
they not manage to keep a proper archive, they couldn’t even manage to throw things away. Who knows how many missing
episodes may have found their way into private collections, having been
‘liberated’ from the BBC or elsewhere?
But it’s not only missing episodes that have been recovered.
Back in the 60s a number of forward-thinking Doctor Who fans took the trouble to make audio recordings of the
episodes as they were being broadcast, recordings which have since been
released with narration by BBC Audiobooks and which have provided the soundtracks
of animated recreations of the missing episodes of The Reign of Terror, The
Tenth Planet and The Invasion. Fans
have also tracked down numerous clips from the missing episodes, from film
sequences misfiled in the archive to a trailer accidentally recorded at the end
of another programme, from clips used in editions of Blue Peter and Tomorrow’s
World, to shots cut out of episodes by Australian censors, to a reel of 8mm
film shot by an Australian fan, made by pointing a cine-camera at the TV
screen. As it stands, there are (virtually) complete soundtracks for every
single missing episode and clips from every missing story save for Marco Polo, Mission to the Unknown and The
Massacre Of St Bartholomew’s Eve.
And, of course, there are the telesnaps that form the basis
of this magazine, providing a visual record of the missing episodes of Marco Polo, The Crusade, The Savages, The
Smugglers and The Tenth Planet.
While the clips and the soundtracks can give a flavour of a story, the
telesnaps give a sense of each episode as a whole, as there are so many of them
they form an effective ‘photo-story’. Thanks to the telesnaps we have an idea
of what practically every character from those missing episodes looked like, what
their costumes and their make-up looked like, what every set looked like, how
the scenes were blocked out, how they were shot and how they were lit. Studied
in conjunction with the soundtracks, the clips and the camera scripts, you can
get such a thorough and complete idea of each episode it’s almost as if you
have actually watched them on television. Almost.
Of all the episodes for which no telesnaps exist, those from
The Reign of Terror are the least
mysterious, as they are bookended by four extant episodes from the same serial
which take place in most of the same locations with the same cast. The only
significant character who doesn’t appear in one of the remaining episodes is
the Physician (played by Ronald Pickup in his first television role). We also
don’t know what the room in his house visited by Barbara and Susan looked like,
or what the church crypt where Ian is ambushed looked like. And although
Robespierre appears in episode six, he only does so in a state of dumb panic,
as all his dialogue scenes are in The
Tyrant of France, in which he exchanges harsh words with the Doctor and
admits his regret at the bloodshed he has caused and A Bargain of Necessity, in which he is warned by Lemaitre of his
imminent downfall.
By contrast, until the discovery of its third episode, Airlock, much of Galaxy Four was a mystery. Most significantly, we only had two
rather murky photographs of the stories’ benevolent aliens, the Rills. And
although a short clip from part one featuring the villainous Drahvins did survive, it was frustratingly short
on Chumblie action (the Chumblies being the Rills’ dome-shaped robots). The
discovery of the missing episode demonstrated how little we knew; how rapidly
the Chumblies moved, for instance, or how their claws worked, or quite how shaky
their spaceship was.
There’s also quite a lot we thought we knew that turned out
to be wrong. Fortunately camera scripts exist for all the missing episodes,
detailing not just the dialogue and action but also the camera shots and moves,
but anyone reading these scripts (available on The Lost TV Episodes CD collections) at the same time as listening
to the surviving soundtracks is likely to be struck by how frequently the
dialogue differs from what was scripted (particularly where Hartnell is
concerned). And just as dialogue was modified on the day of recording, other
plans were also changed. And so when fans first saw the recovered episode in
2011 their first shock was how clearly visible the Rill was in the first scene.
According to the camera script and according to the memories of fans who saw
the episode on original broadcast, the Rill was hidden behind ‘swirling, smoky
gas’ - leading Vicki to later ask why they won’t let her see them - yet we now
know that wasn’t the case. Similarly, while we did know there was a ‘flashback’ scene shot from a Rill’s point of
view, we didn’t know that it would show the wounded Drahvin to be actually bleeding. The script also specified that
we should catch glimpses of other Rills during this scene; in the actual
episode they are nowhere to be seen. And while we knew Stephanie Bidmead’s
monologue was shot as a close-up, we didn’t know it was delivered straight to
camera as a fourth-wall-breaking aside. In this and in so many other ways what
we thought we knew was only half the story or completely wrong. But most
importantly of all, what the script and the soundtrack didn’t tell us was all
the physical business that William Hartnell would add, directing the Chumblies
with his cane or his mirth at their appearance. It’s these moments, moments
that we couldn’t possibly have known about, that make episode recoveries so
precious.
Mission to the Unknown’s title turns out to be ironically
appropriate. No clips exists from it at all, so the only visual material we
have are the photographs of the alien delegates (some of which include a
mysterious female human delegate, ‘Verity’), a few set photographs and – bizarrely
– a sketch from a Canadian comedy show recorded on the same set. No photographs
exist at all of any of the human characters. There’s one photograph of a
sinister Varga plant in situ in the jungle, but we don’t know how it moved, or
what Jeff Garvey’s transformation into a Varga hybrid looked like. We’re not
even sure which alien delegate is which, as Malpha is the only one to speak,
but if the existing second episode of The
Daleks’ Master Plan is anything to go by, they each had their own distinctive
way of moving and expressing agreement.
We have almost as little to go on with the next story, The Myth Makers. The 8mm clips aren’t
greatly revealing and in terms of photographs, we’re very well-served in terms
of Vicki clinching with Troilus but not very well-served regarding the rest of
the cast; there are no photographs at all of Menelaus or Paris and the only
photographs we have of Achilles and Hector have their faces hidden by their
helmets. But what we do know – from the script and the existing soundtrack – is
that this was an exceptionally fine story, with an extraordinarily witty script
and a cast of experienced comedy players. Unfortunately, that means we’re
missing all the reaction-shots and double-takes that would have accompanied the
comedy. And although the script is very much a theatrical, verbal piece, we’re
also missing some great visuals; although we know what some of the sets looked
like, we have little idea what the scenes set inside the Trojan Horse looked
like, or how the fall of Troy came across on screen. We know they built a model
of Troy to be combined with shots using the Schüfftan process; did it work? In the scene where the Doctor
demonstrates his ‘flying machine’ to Odysseus what sort of paper aeroplane did
William Hartnell build and did it fly? This story was also the first to feature
the TARDIS’ wardrobe room; what did it look like and what did Vicki find there?
The frustration continues with The Daleks’ Master Plan, as so much of it is missing but what does
exist is so well-directed and spectacular. The existing film sequences, in
particular, are some of the most visually arresting moments of the
black-and-white era; Kert Gantry stumbling through the jungle only to come
face-to-face with a Dalek, the Daleks setting light to the jungle and the
teleportation sequence in Counter Plot.
When it comes to the episodes that don’t exist, it’s the absence of the film
sequences which are the most frustrating; frustrating because they were the
‘money shots’, the sequences where the director had the most resources, freedom
and time at his disposal – shooting with a single-camera at the BBC Television
Film Studios at Ealing and editing at leisure rather than shooting multi-camera
– and yet frustrating because at least with the studio recordings we have a
record of what shots and camera moves were planned. With regard to the film
sequences, we have virtually no idea at all. So when it comes to the model
shots, the scene where the Monk’s TARDIS changes its appearance to different
modes of transport and the climactic ‘mutation sequence’ we can only guess at
what they looked like. The final episode certainly sounds incredible, but as it had several days of filming devoted to
it, creating shots of the sun racing across the sky, of Sara and the Doctor
aging and the Daleks regressing, the likelihood is that it looked even better
than it sounded.
That’s not all we’re missing. There’s the first death of a
companion, Katarina; a clip survives of the moments just before, but not of the
shot of her body floating weightlessly through space. There’s the peculiar
scene with the Test Match commentators in Volcano,
which appears to have included a shot of the TARDIS on the pitch and some stock
footage of a cricket match. There are the Screamers and the Visians and the
alien delegates that, for reasons known only to themselves, look and sound
different when they turn up in later episodes. There’s the futuristic TV
broadcast from the opening episode. And there’s The Feast of Steven, Doctor
Who’s first Christmas special, which, judging by its virtually
incomprehensible soundtrack, was either a tightly-choreographed fast-paced
laugh-riot, or a lot of people running around shouting. Of course, it’s likely
to be the latter, but if anyone could’ve pulled it off, it would be director
Douglas Camfield.
The Massacre of St
Bartholomew’s Eve is another of Doctor
Who’s great enigmas. Once again, little photographic material exists, with
no images available of many of the characters, most notably the Abbot of
Amboise as portrayed by William Hartnell. Given that the character’s appearance
was intended to come as a surprise and the intention was to keep viewers
guessing as to whether he was the Doctor, it’s understandable, if frustrating,
that he didn’t feature in any of the photo sessions called to publicise the
story. And the Abbot only constitutes a small part of what is an unusually
adult, literate script, light on action and humour, but rich with emotion and a
suitably doom-laden atmosphere. The cast is exceptionally strong – and as the
story’s de facto leading man, Peter
Purves is no weak link, giving a skilful and emotionally-charged performance. The
production values also seem to have been unusually high, with a huge set
constructed at Ealing for the story’s exterior scenes . But the highlight has
to be Hartnell’s performance, not as the Abbot but as the Doctor, seemingly abandoned
by his remaining companion and contemplating a return to his home planet. But
we can only guess at how that scene looked on screen, just as we can only guess
at how powerful the story’s climax, combining film footage of the characters’
deaths with a ‘nightmare-raising portfolio of Massacre woodcuts’ must’ve been.
And finally, there’s The
Celestial Toymaker, a story which might not have been recorded in telesnaps
but which was amply covered by publicity photographs and where the existing
final episode gives us some idea of what the other episodes were like (as, for
instance, the game of TARDIS Hopscotch takes place on the same basic
metallic-walled set that was used for the obstacle course, the Hall of Dolls,
Mrs Wiggs’ kitchen and the Dancing Floor). The final episode gives the
impression that it was an unusually ramshackle production, an opinion shared by
some of its cast, but we shouldn’t be too quick to condemn it. After all, if we
only had the final episode of the first Dalek story to go on, it would appear
equally ropey and despite its low budget this story seems to have been
particularly effective for its younger viewers. Certainly the soundtrack
suggests an atmosphere of unbearable menace and the story’s central conceit, of
real people turned into playthings, is both piteous and extremely disturbing.
Judging by Cyril’s electrocution in the final part, the story didn’t pull its
punches, with characters being violently transformed back into dolls or playing
cards. The whole idea of killer clowns, playing cards, ballerinas, fictional
characters and lethal playground games is the stuff of nightmares, Lewis Carroll
by way of Samuel Beckett. By missing the first three episodes, we are missing
all of this stories biggest scares, as well as a proper look at the Toymaker’s Dolls’
House (only glimpsed in the existing episode). We’re missing astonishing,
surreal images like the conveyor belt of TARDISes and Mrs Wiggs and Sergeant
Rugg dancing off into the void, as well as a flashback to young Dodo in school
uniform and clips from The Daleks’ Master
Plan and The Massacre Of St
Bartholomew’s Eve. But most of all we don’t know how effective the gradual
descent into half-darkness during the obstacle course was; maybe it was barely
noticeable, or maybe it was a masterpiece of surrealism akin to The Twilight Zone’s Five Characters In Search Of An Exit.
In short, there is still so much we don’t know about these
missing episodes, which is why they continue to exert such fascination and why
their absence will always be a source of great frustration. We can only hope
that some more will be found, maybe one day... but it’s the hoping we can’t
stand.
* As far as we know, no film copy was made of the 1965
Christmas Day instalment of The Daleks’
Master Plan, The Feast of Steven,
which was not included as part of the story when it was offered to overseas
broadcasters.
