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Post by Sue Butcher on Jul 27, 2019 2:30:08 GMT
It could have been an ABC label. Anyway, it's the only evidence I ever saw for an automatic return or destroy policy on a BBC item, and it was probably being ignored in this case.
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Post by John Wall on Jul 28, 2019 20:50:47 GMT
45 years ago very few knew what was “key” or even what was missing. Afaik the first published list of stories was in the RT 10th anniversary special in 1973 and it was a few years after that that Sue Malden and Ian Levine got involved. True - no one knew what would be missing. What is key was always key: An Unearthly Child 1, TP4, Power 1, Dalek Invasion Of Earth 6, War Games 10 whether they later turned out missing or not. Episodes where someone joined or left the Tardis or just very good stories like EOTD 7 with the Emperor Dalek might be considered better than average or more important. But how does anybody picking up a can of film know? You pick up a can labelled “Power of the Daleks 1” - in the pre fandom/pre internet era, unless you’re some sort of die hard fan who’s kept a personal record since 1963 it’s just the first part of a Dalek story. Go back a little earlier when every episode was individually titled and how do you, for example, know you’ve picked up the first part of Masterplan?
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Post by John Wall on Jul 28, 2019 20:54:13 GMT
Do we know if the BBC atually asked ABC to send back that crate of prints in 1975??? Or did ABC just ship them back to get shot of them??? I have 2 problems with the BBC asking ABC to return them - 1- ABC had been hanging onto these stories for years since their last official broadcast in Australia, so why didn't the BBC ask for their return years earlier which would have later saved them from making more prints to sell to other countries when sales of 60's stories were still high. By summer 1975 the sales of 60's stories was almost non existent, the 4 season five stories sold to Nigeria had already been screened by this point and I think only a few season 6 stories were sold to Zambia in 1976 were I think the last Hartnell/Troughton sales of the 70's. 2- The BBC had already started junking 60's prints by 1975 and most of the ABC returns suffered the same fate, so why not just tell ABC to destroy them instead of asking them to return the prints for the BBC to junk. You won't find a paper-trail to follow, since the basic policy was not to request the return of items. A request could be telexed to station A in country A to cycle a set of prints to station B in country B, but Australia was the end of the line. So no telex was likely to be sent to ABC from London. Any telex that was actually sent would at most request the prints be forwarded to NZ. Or just possibly to Hong Kong or Singapore. Cycling was a dispatch-room policy. They just didn't ask for items to be returned. I privately believe they looked on the ABC as a convenient storehouse, an operation that was big enough to hold a large quantity of items until some other broadcaster in the region ordered them. It saved on the cost of shipping a new print from London, and perhaps of striking that new print, if the item was already held in Oz. So the last thing they wanted was to have all this material shipped back to London, where they'd have to store it themselves. The introduction of colour in Australia, in '75, probably disrupted a system that had worked fairly well up until then. The odd thing is that anything ever got back to London at all, since Enterprises didn't chase ABC for returns, and the contract didn't even require it. ABC could simply telex London to renew the contract if it wanted to keep airing a programme after the contracted end-date, or could silently dispose of the prints however it saw fit if it didn't want to renew. There was some unwritten agreement about cycling, that all the parties involved understood but we don't! Short of talking to some former ABC staff, we probably won't ever get to the bottom of it. I’d suggest you read what’s actually been established about what happened in Australia gallifreybase.com/w/index.php/Australia instead of filling posts with speculation.
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Post by John Wall on Jul 28, 2019 20:58:47 GMT
Oz was the most important customer in the region, because it was the wealthiest. Along with CBC Canada, ABC was one of BBC's biggest overseas customers in terms of sales. Yes, ABC took more programs than anyone save perhaps CBC, but in purely geographical terms it - unlike CBC - was at the far end of the line (you just can't get any further from London!), so that tapes could be shipped to ABC via other customers. If ABC was the first port of call, for a print, nothing would get saved at ABC, they'd just pass it all on to other broadcasters. But some evidence indicates that items ended up at ABC/NZBC. We surely need to agree on one vital point: where was the end of the line (for 'Who')? No point looking for missing film prints in a country which is in the middle of the shipping chain that began in London, or, worse, Is at the beginning of the chain. Why did so many prints get shipped back from ABC in 1975, and why did (say) 'The Lion' end up in NZ, if Oz/NZ were not the end of the line for the Pacific region? In my opinion, that doesn't matter though. If my basic assumption is correct, that ABC were servicing such a big geographical area that they were striking duplicate prints, those dups would remain behind in Oz when the master print - the original - was shipped out to NZ or Hong Kong. We would expect to find the dup prints that got left behind, because Hong Kong is geographically tiny, so only needed one print. We would only expect to find dup prints at ABC or CBC, because no other broadcaster covered such a vast area that it needed them: Star TV in Hong Kong didn't cover a big area, Singapore is similarly not in need of multiple prints, NZ is the same size as the UK so didn't need multiple prints either. But ABC is a special case. It's reasonable to work out where the cycled prints would finish up, but if that wasn't Australia it's still reasonable to expect (dup) prints to exist in Australia. Try reading what’s been established gallifreybase.com/w/index.php/Australia
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Post by Jon Preddle on Jul 28, 2019 22:32:29 GMT
The ABC held onto the film prints until 1975 for three reasons:
Firstly, regional broadcasts; with each region screening different things at different times and in a different order, a large storage facility was needed to hold the prints between each region. This was in Sydney.
As an extension of that, secondly, there was Northern Territory which didn't commence a TV service until 1971. The ABC held onto a lot of material that was still within their rights to screen "in all territories". The DW that did screened in Darwin was many years after the rest of the country. If there were any plans to repeat DW in Darwin afterwards is unknown, but in any case repeats didn't happen, because in December 1974, mid-way through the Pertwees, Cyclone Tracy hit the region shutting down TV transmissions. By the time things had "normalised", the rights to repeat Troughtons had expired.
Thirdly, the ABC had an option for additional repeats, so it held onto material long after the rights had expired in case they wanted to buy additional repeat rights. Although for DW, this ultimately didn't happen.
The ABC wasn't going to be sending prints anywhere else in case they needed them. But once colour came along, there was no longer any need to hold onto the film prints, and along with a lot of non-DW material, they shipped it all back to the UK because they didn't have the resources (time and manpower) to dispose of it locally.
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Post by Natalie Sinead on Jul 30, 2019 1:25:38 GMT
What really pisses me off is the way some fans don't understand that most of the Australian censor cuts DID NOT SURVIVE to be able to be found by Damien and Ellen in 1996 and that should any Australian sent episodes turn up, most of the episodes will be incomplete and stay incomplete forever. For example the end of Galaxy 4 and "I must kill".
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Post by Dan Kolb on Jul 30, 2019 3:47:13 GMT
True - no one knew what would be missing. What is key was always key: An Unearthly Child 1, TP4, Power 1, Dalek Invasion Of Earth 6, War Games 10 whether they later turned out missing or not. Episodes where someone joined or left the Tardis or just very good stories like EOTD 7 with the Emperor Dalek might be considered better than average or more important. But how does anybody picking up a can of film know? You pick up a can labelled “Power of the Daleks 1” - in the pre fandom/pre internet era, unless you’re some sort of die hard fan who’s kept a personal record since 1963 it’s just the first part of a Dalek story. Go back a little earlier when every episode was individually titled and how do you, for example, know you’ve picked up the first part of Masterplan? You may well be right, but, I just reasoned that anyone nicking film that they shouldn't and risk getting sacked if caught, is going to have some idea what they are getting; otherwise why bother with the risk? If we are talking 1975, I imagined that people would have a basic memory of such highlights like An Unearthly Child 1 and Power 1. Even AUC1 was just 11 and one half years old then. Yes, the individually titled ones could be tougher. "Air Lock" is tough but "Mighty Kublai Khan" is much more obvious. Just a thought...
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Post by John Wall on Jul 30, 2019 16:57:48 GMT
But how does anybody picking up a can of film know? You pick up a can labelled “Power of the Daleks 1” - in the pre fandom/pre internet era, unless you’re some sort of die hard fan who’s kept a personal record since 1963 it’s just the first part of a Dalek story. Go back a little earlier when every episode was individually titled and how do you, for example, know you’ve picked up the first part of Masterplan? You may well be right, but, I just reasoned that anyone nicking film that they shouldn't and risk getting sacked if caught, is going to have some idea what they are getting; otherwise why bother with the risk? If we are talking 1975, I imagined that people would have a basic memory of such highlights like An Unearthly Child 1 and Power 1. Even AUC1 was just 11 and one half years old then. Yes, the individually titled ones could be tougher. "Air Lock" is tough but "Mighty Kublai Khan" is much more obvious. Just a thought... There are a few prints - not just Dr Who - known to have “escaped”. The simplest explanation for the oddballs we have is that they were “lifted” from the top(s) of the pile(s) as someone went past - and probably in twos. There’s nothing to suggest that the acquirer was, in anyway, a Dr Who fan. Imho they had a relative or friend who collected 16mm films.
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Post by Matthew Kurth on Jul 31, 2019 2:37:36 GMT
But once colour came along, there was no longer any need to hold onto the film prints, and along with a lot of non-DW material, they shipped it all back to the UK because they didn't have the resources (time and manpower) to dispose of it locally. Jon, thanks for the insights over the last couple of pages. I'm still trying to reconcile the shipping aspect though. I know the station in the midwest USA where I worked is removed in time and place from 1975 Sydney, but in 2002 we had a full syndication run of the sitcom "Full House" on U-Matic and when there were no forthcoming bicycle instructions, over the course of a week or so all 190-odd tapes went into the dumpster. I also know the station was so cheap that we would play back commercial spots on U-Matic until the tape wore out, at which point we would pull the worn tape out of the cassette, cut it off, and Scotch tape the virgin tape to the leader. I spent many a night as an intern "stripping aircarts". This makes me wonder, didn't they have a couple of bored interns that could have been tasked to fill a dumpster or two? Was the effort to crate really that much less than binning them, and was shipping halfway around the world really that inexpensive to make that a less expensive option? Or would the BBC have subsidized the shipping cost?
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Post by Jon Preddle on Jul 31, 2019 4:43:59 GMT
My understanding is that the ABC's film library only had a staff of two or three, and they were busy doing their day-job and had no time to spend time running old prints through a bandsaw and issuing certificates of destruction, so it was at the BBC's request (and likely expense) to send them back to London, so they could be disposed off and "de-certified" there.
A film print was classed as an asset, and the BBC would need to 'write off' films if they had been destroyed to take them off the balance sheet, and the only way to do that legally was to have a certificate issued or 'de-asset' the goods themselves. ABC couldn't do the former, so the BBC had to do the latter.
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Post by Matthew Kurth on Aug 1, 2019 2:30:12 GMT
It was at the BBC's request (and likely expense) to send them back to London, so they could be disposed off and "de-certified" there. A film print was classed as an asset, and the BBC would need to 'write off' films if they had been destroyed to take them off the balance sheet, and the only way to do that legally was to have a certificate issued or 'de-asset' the goods themselves. ABC couldn't do the former, so the BBC had to do the latter. The classification as an asset is a new angle to me and does go a long way toward explaining why Ents would want the stuff back once it was out of contract and might be willing to pay for the shipping. That raises other questions though, particularly about the story of the African station with the full set of Seasons 1 & 2. In your scenario I can see the effort to chase down a couple of prints here and there might not be worth the effort vs. just writing them down/off as lost, but if someone was holding on to 80 prints I would think Ents would have done more to get them back to take off the books properly. Unless of course there were false affidavits sent at the time. Or could those have been a set belonging to TIE with a special arrangement in terms of print ownership?
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Post by Jon Preddle on Aug 1, 2019 5:02:37 GMT
It's impossible to tell because we don't know where those films originally came from.
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Post by Marty Schultz on Aug 5, 2019 1:41:28 GMT
My understanding -as mentioned before -is that both 16mm and quads were used. Further that not all 16mm prints were done in house by the ABC... As mentioned above it was a small team. The ABC also used an external service in the 60s.... Jon is right on the money about the Northern Territory. That's a theory I subscribe to BUT IIRC I've been told there was a reason why by the 70s that it wasn't couriered. I think they may have used microwave or used a ch9 link? to send footage there. Apologies for the vagueness as not at home to read notes.
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Post by Marty Schultz on Aug 5, 2019 1:44:44 GMT
Did the infamous aussie returns have ABC labels?
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Post by Jon Preddle on Aug 5, 2019 20:11:45 GMT
Did the infamous aussie returns have ABC labels? Presumably yes: they'd have been shipped back in the cans they'd been in at the ABC. But when they were disposed off in the UK,they would have been taken out of the cans first so the BBC could reuse them.
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