cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/617880
Veteran film collector John Franklin believes the answer is for the BBC to announce an immediate general amnesty on missing film footage.
This would reassure British amateur collectors that their private archives will not be confiscated if they come forward and that they will be safe from prosecution for having stored stolen BBC property, something several fear.
“Some of these collectors are terrified,” said Franklin, who knows the location of the two missing Doctor Who episodes, along with several other newly discovered TV treasures, including an episode of the The Basil Brush Show, the second to be unearthed this autumn. “We now need to catalogue and save the significant television shows that are out there. If we are not careful they will eventually be dumped again in house clearances, because a lot of the owners of these important collections are now in their 80s and are very wary,” he added.
Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels. And Hartnell’s Doctor Who episodes were far from the only ones to go. Many popular shows were lost and other Doctor Who adventures starring Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee were either jettisoned or erased. A missing early episode of the long-running sitcom Sykes, starring Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, has also been rediscovered in private hands in the last few weeks.
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The BBC said it was ready to talk to anyone with lost episodes. “We welcome members of the public contacting us regarding programmes they believe are lost archive recordings, and are happy to work with them to restore lost or missing programmes to the BBC archives,” it said.
Whether this will be enough to prompt nervous collectors to come forward is doubtful. While collectors are in no real danger, the infamous arrest of comedian Bob Monkhouse in 1978 has not been forgotten, Franklin suspects: “Monkhouse was a private collector and was accused of pirating videos. He even had some of his archive seized. Sadly people still believe they could have their films confiscated.”
Sounds like an issue of paranoid old dudes. The best plan would be to copy and back them up, then give them to the BBC anonymously.
The entire thing of throwing old reels was incredibly stupid in the first place, of course.
I started in Doctor Who fandom with Jon Pertwee and have (at different times) been very heavily involved, including helping with reconstructions and audio play production.
The BBC has historically been very aggressive in going after ‘lost’ episodes. Even in the 2000’s/2010’s, I don’t know of anyone who’s tried to turn in episodes who hasn’t regretted the amount of effort and stress (and often the expense as well) that it’s caused them. Not only do you not get the return of your original film, nor even a DVD copy of the restoration, but they’ve even refused to pay for shipping the tapes back to the BBC.
The BBC has also done “fun” things like seize other parts of your collection, even if the material wasn’t lost. They had Bob Monkhouse arrested and (fun fact) there’s no statute of limitations for this. When it comes to the lost episodes, the BBC acts very much like corporate Disney and not a repository of cultural memory.
I mean, I want to see the episodes as well, but I fully understand not wanting to deal with or trust the BBC.
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Sounds like he should just pay to have his reels telecined himself. It’s a little pricy but maybe less stressful and they’ll return the masters. Think we paid like USD$0.50/Ft last time we digitized some 16mm we shot.
Assuming these were 16mm prints (IIRC old school TV used 16), a 48 minute episode would be 1728 feet, so about $864 USD for a 4K ProRes scan.
I guess these guys want to keep the tape itself, not just the contents. I don’t know of the BBC can claim something back they purposely threw away decades ago, even if they wanted to.
If the BBC would guarantee that the collectors will get the tapes back, undamaged, after digitisation then everyone can be happy.
Not just Doctor Who but a glimpse behind the curtain of British TV collectors.
