Doctor Who archive expert shares positive update on missing episode | Hacker News Reader

Doctor Who archive expert shares positive update on missing episode

radiotimes.com

123 pointsgnabgib63 comments

"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 [1] https://www.zetaminor.com/roobarb/forum.php

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.

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.

Fair in one respect. Yet 'presumably' is just that, and it could have been lost forever.

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.

>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.

It's not just the BBC - there's lots of less popular broadcasts that will be lost to time.

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.

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.

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.

> ends abruptly because the money ran out

It is a literal cop-out.

That cop was later my landlord -- he was also the art director of the film, and a wonderful storyteller.

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.

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.

Luke’s lightsaber was famously a Graflex camera flash

Inevitably there's a reddit sub for it (I adore the name of it):

https://www.reddit.com/r/Thatsabooklight/

A bread maker? My eyes always focused on these plastic pallets used as wall, ceiling panels in DS9...

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.

The reboot show started losing its way toward the end of the 11th Doctor, probably as American money came flooding in.

I suspect there’s a strong negative correlation between audience appreciation and production budget.

There's a lot of people who have remarked on necessity being the mother of invention - I claim that it's possible to maintain that even when you're no longer constrained, but it takes a discipline often lacking in people.

If you know you have 2 weeks and 100k to shoot an episode, and that everyone from the top down knows more money and time isn't coming, then you have no choice but to deliver it, no matter the corners cut. It's very hard to keep that attitude and pressure if people are aware that the budget limits are a polite fiction if you're convincing enough. (One might draw parallels to Steve Jobs' remarks about how the most important thing is not knowing when to say yes, but knowing when to say no.)

One might look at Team Cherry (Hollow Knight, Silksong) for an example of maintaining this - they made an enormous amount of money off Hollow Knight's success, and instead of scaling out the team markedly for Silksong, they mostly used the money as padding against any pressure to deliver it sooner, and worked at their own pace, to their own satisfaction.

Disney blew the budget up and the quality went down.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

The doctor is no longer Gallifreyan/Timelord.

That’s not true. With Planet of the Dead it was filmed in HD. And no NuWho was ever shot on film.

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.

Season 5 makes it sound like it was a this century show the way you've stated it. Dr. Who is older than I am, and we don't need to get into how old that is. "Who" has been restarted so many times that it seems strange to refer to season five without any more info. In fact, not being a Who follower, how do they differentiate just by the actor playing the doctor? Season 5 of actorName?

I also got caught on how GP said Season 5 which would have been from the 60s, not the 2000s. But apparently it is correct (unless you want to be pedantic about the choice of word Series/Season).

The listing of seasons on Wikipedia goes:

Season 1-26 (1963-1989)

Series 1-15 (2005-2025)

And they started renumbering at 1 for 2023-2025 when it went to Disney Plus (to onboard new people and because they don't have rights to older episodes.)

Yes, I meant the 2005 series.

To add to the confusion, the series recently started at S01 again. Not a reboot, same doctor as the previous season.

The Eccleston episodes are a bit on the rough side.

When I saw the first episode of the first season of the reboot, I was hooked. I couldn't believe that there was really a show that went all in with that zany, campy, sci-fi vibe. There's something about the britishness that makes it work.

A time traveling alien with a Northern accent investigates killer mall mannequins, one of which possesses a trash bin that then eats the costar's boyfriend and transforms him into a plastic golem. They get to the heart of the infestation, and the Doctor readies his weapon -- "anti-plastic," of course -- but desires not to use it as he struggles to talk intergalactic law with the malignant plastic blob. Then he runs off with the girl for adventures in future episodes.

Many of the flavor-of-the-week sci-fi concepts were quite good, and some were not. But anthropomorphic cat nuns! A giant head! Evil buckets with eye stalks! Killer statues that can only move when you're not looking!

Maybe it was some inner child aging out of me, but I feel like the show's writing took a nose dive about halfway through Peter Capaldi's Doctor.

gotta check out Lexx

Lexx (790 the robot head) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexx

Starhunter (Caravaggio) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starhunter

Farscape (Claudia Black before her voice was in every computer game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farscape

Eccleston had the best dynamic range of any of the actors that played the Doctor. He could do funny, sad, angry, dorky, brooding, mean, lovable... everything. I wish we could have gotten another season or two out of him.

He’s the creepy husband in The Others which took a second to get over. He’s so happy to be there as the Doctor.

But, some of the better storytelling.

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".

> if you need an American English translation, maybe "theater kid energy".

It wouldn't have occurred to me to call twee a foreign word. However, my feeling of its meaning was... very close to the gloss given on wiktionary (and marked "UK"):

>> Overly quaint, dainty, cute or nice.

The unambiguously American Merriam-Webster agrees:

>> affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint

"Characteristic of theater kids" conveys something different to me. Do you disagree with the dictionary gloss, or do you think it's a good description of how people might describe a performance by theater kids?

I think that definition is missing something, yes. Modern(?) British twee is less "dainty" and more "manic and campy". Which is not to disparage Monty Python, who were good at it, but everyone descended from them can't really pull it off.

https://www.edwest.co.uk/p/the-unstoppable-rise-of-british-t...

(nb I'm not sure about the political analysis here but the citations are good.)

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).

New face, new showrunner and better budged worked pretty well and maybe even better than during Tennant's time. They hit a good spot with 11th and Amy - social media were thriving and I've seen characters all around in fan works, memes and discussions.

Did you entirely miss David Tennant? He was pretty different than the Matt Smith version, and quite good. They had some great storylines too.

He was good. Have you seen him try to do an American accent? Kind of sounds like he's from everywhere except California at the same time.

https://youtu.be/_gp9K-rMdxg

Theater kid energy is a great description of the Matt Smith era onward.

Some of the best story arcs start in those episodes. I warned the family when we sat down to watch it together.

He was my favorite doctor and my first I am a little sad he didnt do more than one season.

It doesnt bother me outside of the fact that theres way older shows and movies that look much higher quality. It would be nice to watch it in a higher quality.

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.

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.

FYI pretty much nobody played live on Top of the Pops

Nobody sang live, but they were on stage while the filming took place

I seem to remember looking into this once. Aren't large swathes of TOTP itself missing? Like, entire early decades?

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).

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.

I upvoted on the title of this post alone.

Always great to see folks trying to save history (of any kind).

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.

That's disgusting.

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.

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