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Post by robertboon on Oct 19, 2018 10:26:52 GMT
Cypriot Cinemas: Memory, Conflict, and Identity in the Margins of Europe (published in 2014) has the following paragraph Similarly. the restriction of official visual archives in Cyprus, considered by some as a form of political censorship, has been a constraint and concern of long-standing for Cypriot journalists, researchers and artists. But, while I have heard such investigators complain of limited access to the film and photographic archives at the CyBC and the PIO in the south, I have heard as many describe their almost complete freedom in these archives - complaining of perhaps too much freedom, given the massive volume of uncataloged materials stored without regard for chronological or topical principles of organization. Although the CyBC's collections are beginning to be digitized, and some photographs, films, and television programs are now available for streaming on the CyBC website, a former archivist told me that most of its materials are simply "unknown". He described dark, dusty rooms full of unlabeled film cans and piles of prints without names or dates. Despite directives from the European Union regarding the preservation of film as cultural heritage, very little in the way of organization and digitization has yet been undertaken in the state media archives. CyBC is the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation and PIO, the Press Information Office, a government run body. So the possibility of further finds on Cyprus can't be ruled out if the archives are in that big a mess in 2014.
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Post by Jaspal Cheema on Oct 19, 2018 15:22:30 GMT
Someone here once said they were friends with someone in the RT (can't remember who), and he said quite clearly that they won't tell ANYBODY ANYTHING, even their friends, for fear of jeopardizing future recoveries. So in that case, I'm not gonna believe anything myself. When I see a trailer for a missing episode uploaded by the Who team on Youtube or something, as was done with Enemy and Web, THEN I'll show interest. Incidentally, the trailer for Enemy of the World was genuinely how I learned it had been found, so that's why I presented it as an example. If it's from an official source, then fine. But I don't see The Mirror as a source to be taken seriously right now. Thr Mirror wasn't the initial source, they just didn't bother crediting the actual source. The story is real, just blown ridiculously out of proportion by the tabloid press. Films exist, but they aren't in BBC hands nor will they be any time soon. What exactly does that mean Scott? All sounds very intriguing. Are you saying that more missing Dr Who episodes have been recovered in Cyprus?
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Post by scotttelfer on Oct 19, 2018 15:32:30 GMT
Thr Mirror wasn't the initial source, they just didn't bother crediting the actual source. The story is real, just blown ridiculously out of proportion by the tabloid press. Films exist, but they aren't in BBC hands nor will they be any time soon. What exactly does that mean Scott? All sounds very intriguing. Are you saying that more missing Dr Who episodes have been recovered in Cyprus? Somebody at the BBC bungled their job and instead of reporting on the missing episodes still being in private collectuons accidently reported on Paul Vanezis finding The Reign of Terror in Cyprus over 30 years ago.
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Post by Jaspal Cheema on Oct 19, 2018 15:35:40 GMT
What exactly does that mean Scott? All sounds very intriguing. Are you saying that more missing Dr Who episodes have been recovered in Cyprus? Somebody at the BBC bungled their job and instead of reporting on the missing episodes still being in private collectuons accidently reported on Paul Vanezis finding The Reign of Terror in Cyprus over 30 years ago. Doh!How depressing.
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Post by richardwoods on Oct 19, 2018 16:38:26 GMT
That's the Late News folks!
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Post by Ronnie McDevitt on Oct 19, 2018 18:39:25 GMT
Late Fake News!
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Post by robertboon on Oct 19, 2018 21:58:46 GMT
I would point that Broadwcast has the following version of previous events in Cyprus:
In October 1984, it was discovered by Paul Vanezis that the Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation still possessed their 16mm prints of The Aztecs (parts one, two and three), The Sensorites (all six episodes) and the unaired The Reign of Terror (parts one, two, three and six).
Paul's discovery was announced, with a copy of the letter from the CBC, several months later, in the June 1985 issue of Celestial Toyroom, the news-zine of DWAS.
In late 1984, a very short time after Vanezis had contacted the CBC, the BBC sent telexes to foreign TV stations asking for the return of old episodes. Cyprus was apparently the first to respond...
All 13 episodes were duly returned to the BBC in early 1985.
A few years later, Vanezis visited the CBC, and examined the original film records. He discovered that the other prints that were held -- The Aztecs part 4 and The Reign of Terror parts 2 and 3 -- had been stored in a different building and were destroyed during the July 1974 revolution.
Now the simple question I ask, is, if in 2014 CBC still has rooms of unlabelled film cans which are basically uncatalogued, how could CBC be so definite on the fate of the Doctor Who episodes it held. Did all the episodes returned have labels? It could be postulated that CBC had the other episodes in labelless cans, couldn't find them as a result, and in order to avoid persistent future enquiries manipulated the records to show they had been destroyed in 1974. It has always struck me as very odd that episodes of The Aztecs and Reign of Terror were split between two storage sites.
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Post by simonashby on Oct 19, 2018 23:59:07 GMT
Now the simple question I ask, is, if in 2014 CBC still has rooms of unlabelled film cans which are basically uncatalogued, how could CBC be so definite on the fate of the Doctor Who episodes it held. Did all the episodes returned have labels? It could be postulated that CBC had the other episodes in labelless cans, couldn't find them as a result, and in order to avoid persistent future enquiries manipulated the records to show they had been destroyed in 1974. It has always struck me as very odd that episodes of The Aztecs and Reign of Terror were split between two storage sites. Sometimes things happen for very mundane reasons - maybe a bunch of items were scooped up and transferred to a different building. I would suggest that happens a lot. It's safe to say that these places weren't always very well organised. Heck, the my place of work moved a bunch of items from one unit to another to make some space, with a view to sorting it properly later. 12 months later and it still hasn't happened. Then again, you might be closer to the mark - an effort to stop requests. It could be a big task to sort through uncatalogued material and the people/person there simply didn't care enough. Or it could be something entirely different. I guess that this is one of the things Phil Morris has set out to discover.
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Post by Mike Biggs on Oct 20, 2018 3:26:53 GMT
Now the simple question I ask, is, if in 2014 CBC still has rooms of unlabelled film cans which are basically uncatalogued, how could CBC be so definite on the fate of the Doctor Who episodes it held. Did all the episodes returned have labels? It could be postulated that CBC had the other episodes in labelless cans, couldn't find them as a result, and in order to avoid persistent future enquiries manipulated the records to show they had been destroyed in 1974. It has always struck me as very odd that episodes of The Aztecs and Reign of Terror were split between two storage sites. Sometimes things happen for very mundane reasons - maybe a bunch of items were scooped up and transferred to a different building. I would suggest that happens a lot. It's safe to say that these places weren't always very well organised. Heck, the my place of work moved a bunch of items from one unit to another to make some space, with a view to sorting it properly later. 12 months later and it still hasn't happened. Then again, you might be closer to the mark - an effort to stop requests. It could be a big task to sort through uncatalogued material and the people/person there simply didn't care enough. Or it could be something entirely different. I guess that this is one of the things Phil Morris has set out to discover. Something I run into all the time with Local Authority archives is when Council staff (not specialist Archives staff) can't find something, they usually just tell the requestor "it must have been lost in the fire". More than half the time historically the council just didn't bother keeping records properly and there was never any fire (In an even smaller number of cases the records did still exist, they just didn't know how to find or access them). Of course it's not unusual for fires to destroy archives, so it sounds pretty plausible, but I never believe it anymore with Archives I'm working on unless I find a record to confirm a fire happened.
As you say Simon, things happen for very mundane reasons, so odds are the story happened exactly as told. On the small chance they exist in those unlisted/unlabelled ones, it might be more a matter of "what happened to the films we can't find? They must have been in that destroyed building", rather than a deliberate manipulation of the records. I don't see old Doctor Who films being that important to them.
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Post by Paul Vanezis on Oct 24, 2018 20:46:41 GMT
Hi all.
It is now 35 years since I sent my letter to PIK and 29 years since I personally visited the station in Nicosia. The gentleman I was introduced to was Andreas S. Georgiades, a lovely guy who had been there since the early 60's. He first showed me generally around the station and I found some 16mm prints of some BBC film series from the late seventies. Nothing that captured my interest. Then I asked about Doctor Who. He recalled sending the films back just a few years earlier. It was then that I asked about the films that weren't sent back. I wanted to know what had happened to them. He produced his film traffic book which listed everything that arrived at the station in alphabetical order. Importantly, it also listed where the material had been sent from, the flight number of the plane on which it arrived, and VERY importantly, the fate of the films. Serials A, B & C had been sent to Uganda. Serials D & E to "Hong Kong Rediffusion" (his words). Again, the flight numbers associated with these bicycling events were carefully logged. Then I asked the important question, what had happened to the three episodes that should have been there in 1984, but weren't, F #2 & H #4&5? He indicated the episode references in his log book. Unlike the others, they had a big red X next to them. "Destroyed" he said. Then he explained. These episodes had been stored in a particular vault which had been destroyed by shelling in the attempted coup in 1974 (along with the rather more important Cypriot film archive).
I have told this story several times in quite some detail. Now fast forward 30 years to the present and there's a new report of film lying around at PIK uncatalogued. Well, in 1989 I also found around 200 BBC shows, many of which turned out to be missing, in a basement room there. It took a year for the material to be returned. Whilst I was there, the material was threatened with destruction and it was only due to some frantic calls to Adam Lee and the timely intervention of BBC Enterprises (who made me their representative in Cyprus) that prevented this.
It seems a mystery to me why some are now questioning how I was able to access the station and view the material, when ultimately the films were returned. This included 12 missing episodes of the first series of Z Cars (including the first 7 episodes), the Francis Durbridge serial 'The Desperate People', the 1959 version of 'Bleak House', episodes of 'Katy' with Susan Hampshire etc...
I left the recovery of the 60 episodes of Armchair Theatre I found to Steve Bryant at the BFI...
All the lost BBC material that was in Cyprus came back. Years later when ITV did their 'Raiders of the Lost Archive' shows, I personally spoke to the producer who further chased up the Armchair Theatre lead with PIK. They claimed to no longer have the material.
So, there we have it. Again.
Paul
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Post by Robert Lia on Oct 24, 2018 23:10:49 GMT
Sounds like the BFI or ITV did not make a claim or a stake to the Armchair Theatre film prints?
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Post by Paul Vanezis on Oct 25, 2018 6:49:50 GMT
Sounds like the BFI or ITV did not make a claim or a stake to the Armchair Theatre film prints? You might think that...
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Post by Rob Hutchinson on Oct 25, 2018 15:16:04 GMT
Hi all. It is now 35 years since I sent my letter to PIK and 29 years since I personally visited the station in Nicosia. The gentleman I was introduced to was Andreas S. Georgiades, a lovely guy who had been there since the early 60's. He first showed me generally around the station and I found some 16mm prints of some BBC film series from the late seventies. Nothing that captured my interest. Then I asked about Doctor Who. He recalled sending the films back just a few years earlier. It was then that I asked about the films that weren't sent back. I wanted to know what had happened to them. He produced his film traffic book which listed everything that arrived at the station in alphabetical order. Importantly, it also listed where the material had been sent from, the flight number of the plane on which it arrived, and VERY importantly, the fate of the films. Serials A, B & C had been sent to Uganda. Serials D & E to "Hong Kong Rediffusion" (his words). Again, the flight numbers associated with these bicycling events were carefully logged. Then I asked the important question, what had happened to the three episodes that should have been there in 1984, but weren't, F #2 & H #4&5? He indicated the episode references in his log book. Unlike the others, they had a big red X next to them. "Destroyed" he said. Then he explained. These episodes had been stored in a particular vault which had been destroyed by shelling in the attempted coup in 1974 (along with the rather more important Cypriot film archive). I have told this story several times in quite some detail. Now fast forward 30 years to the present and there's a new report of film lying around at PIK uncatalogued. Well, in 1989 I also found around 200 BBC shows, many of which turned out to be missing, in a basement room there. It took a year for the material to be returned. Whilst I was there, the material was threatened with destruction and it was only due to some frantic calls to Adam Lee and the timely intervention of BBC Enterprises (who made me their representative in Cyprus) that prevented this. It seems a mystery to me why some are now questioning how I was able to access the station and view the material, when ultimately the films were returned. This included 12 missing episodes of the first series of Z Cars (including the first 7 episodes), the Francis Durbridge serial 'The Desperate People', the 1959 version of 'Bleak House', episodes of 'Katy' with Susan Hampshire etc... I left the recovery of the 60 episodes of Armchair Theatre I found to Steve Bryant at the BFI... All the lost BBC material that was in Cyprus came back. Years later when ITV did their 'Raiders of the Lost Archive' shows, I personally spoke to the producer who further chased up the Armchair Theatre lead with PIK. They claimed to no longer have the material. So, there we have it. Again. Paul i know you are probably sick of telling it Paul but if its any consolation i think there are some of us who don't get tired of reading it and appreciate your efforts and successes. while i was reading it something occurred to me. does Cyprus have film collectors? could some of the material have fallen into their hands, especially in the confusion of the conflict? i'm sure collectors in this country, Australia and New Zealand have been trawled to death but is there any chance that there are collectors in non-english speaking countries that have not been reached out to? if anything, a long shot. i know...
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Post by Robert Lia on Oct 25, 2018 20:53:17 GMT
Paul
I got the impression from your post that after all the BBC-TV film cans were shipped back to Windmill Road the ITV stuff was forgotten for one reason or another by the ITV Companies or the BFI and got tossed in the skip before being recovered. Ill be happy to be wrong
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Post by steveb on Oct 25, 2018 21:16:03 GMT
Probably the most important individual find of lost TV ever. And I‘m not sucking up honest. And with Desperate People and Bleak House both released on DVD, it disproves the idea that returning material to the archives doesnt benefit the rest of us. The Z Cars episodes are also great drama and are around if you look.
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