Was Macra shown in New Zealand (revisited)?

[shellyharman67]

May 14, 2014 17:30:53 GMT Greg H said:

May 14, 2014 13:44:06 GMT Neil Lambess said:

....I did ! why does nobody believe me....

I believe you Neil. It would be an awfully weird thing to make up after finding an actual missing episode of Who Happy hunting dude!

I believe you 100% mate ! Tho in life there will always be doubters !

[johnbarbour]

Neil, your excellent memory has generated plenty of interest (and renewed searching) and I hope that one of these days it leads to the Macra! What a reward that would be for your efforts - and a welcome addition to my DVD collection!

[cjones]

Bump...

[shellyharman67]

Jul 27, 2014 12:48:19 GMT cjones said:

Bump...

Watch where your going then

[Neil Lambess]

Jul 29, 2014 4:25:09 GMT Angus H said:

A question for you Neil. I don't know anything regarding the 'Macra' screening in the NZ school. I'm curious to know what information we do know and where any leads have taken you. Do we know where the films came from? From the people you have spoken to, what are their recollections of events? Do they clash? How much DO we know..?

In 1974 i was 11 , and recollection was that My school (which was out in the country ) attended a sports day at a larger school in central Masterton , and due to a change in the weather , we were ushered into the school hall and shown movies on 16mm ...the first was a "tommorrow world " type short (in black and white ) that featured speedboat racing , and ice sculptures in Japan (including an ice carved Thunderbird 2 ) , then that short ended and went straight into an episode of Doctor who ! (it was definatly Macra ) then the reel ended and another episode was put on for us..... our bus arrived and we had to leave (i think just before the end of the second episode) . i clearly recall I had already seen the episodes and i didnt think much about it untill the late 80s when i discovered DW fandom in NZ and discovered that episodes were missing ! (thanks Jon )
the important thing to note is that Masterton is just over an hours drive from Wellington (which was the original Home of the NZBC ) and that there were and still are regular commuter trains between the two......some people i grew up with had friend swho commuted to work at the NZBC from Masterton as well ! (one of whom told me that there were still DW film prints at the now TVNZ studios at Avalon in the late 1970s which ive written about in another thread...(i also visited the school in the late 80s early 90s to no avail but was told about a teacher who collected film who had moved to Wanganui in the intervening years . It should also be noted that the film Print of the Lion was ironiclly located a few miles south of Masterton in a shed on Holdsworth rd (wher emy sister lived ) as part of a film collection that was stored on a farm shed , for a still unlocated Masterton film collector who moved overseas in the 70s and never returned to reclaim them ....... I eventually would catch up with the Lion, in 1999 along with Paul Scoones (and Corn Stone whos role is often overlooked) But its scary to think how many times i drove past the shed , the Lion was kept in the family car while i lived there !
a couple of years back David Creighton (hi David ! ) did some brilliant research , used the Mind Probe on me via email ..... and directly interviewed some of my fellow students at the time, and discovered several who clearly remembered the screening , as well , David showed pictures of various Who monsters , as a blind test , and asked them to identify what was in the school screening , and they picked the Macra straight away , whats important about this is I left Masterton in 1977 and hadnt spoken to any of them since then . so Davids research did track down independant witnesses , and raised the possibility that it may have screened on more than one occassion.
David also tracked down some film collectors i had spoken to previously in my hunt over the years (and sadly Time had claimed a lot of them , not to mention some of my old school friends , which was a sad personal side effect for me of Davids research ) and several of them remembered the mysterious film collector who left his stuff in Holdsworth rd, but nobody can remember his name ! , its believed he had a lot of stuff stored and various locations tho ....so for now its a bit of a dead end untill further info comes to light
Jon Preddle recently discovered that an episode of Macra screened from WNTV1 Wellington with a 5 minute short before it (which would explain the short I saw at the school been on ths same reel ) and Jon also has a theory that the school prints could have been screened at the school and then returned to Wellington for Destruction (and he could be correct ) but to me , i dont think so , as stuff did go "walkies" on a fairly regular basis from the NZBC , and i have met people over the year who,ve told me how that happened........so fingers crossed !
its also both scary and pertinant to note that this year is the 40th anniversary of the school screening ! , at any stage in those 40 years the prints may have got trashed or destroyed , a lot of people have died who had knowledge of the collector who had prints in storage , including the Lion ! its very much like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle , but one where you have to hunt for the pieces first !
heres hoping some more pieces show up !

[Greg H]

Thanks for that Neil.

I am always fascinated to hear about the behind the scenes searching that goes on. I am sure I speak for the forum when I wish you the best of luck in finding more lost TV material.

It is also worth mentioning old silent and black and white films; as I understand it, Australia and New Zealand was the last known resting place for many a missing silent film. Have you ever come across any collectors who might have 'a friend of a friend' as it were? I always hope that a copy of London after midnight will turn up one day

[Mark Vanderlinde-Abernathy]

Doing a bump of this old lead since it's almost a year.

Yesterday I finally had the chance to watch the recons for Macra Terror. I am absolutely in love with this story. I love Doctor Who, but there are certain stories that grab me more than others. This is certainly one of them! I love the story very much.

I know that this story is unfortunately very rare. Australia and New Zealand have documentation that they destroyed their copies, Zambia has been visited and did not have any Doctor Who (per Brad's site), and no one knows what happened to Hong Kong's prints. I hope a shelf copy can one day be found.

[Will Weller]

Apr 19, 2015 16:32:24 GMT Mark Vanderlinde-Abernathy said:

Doing a bump of this old lead since it's almost a year.

Yesterday I finally had the chance to watch the recons for Macra Terror. I am absolutely in love with this story. I love Doctor Who, but there are certain stories that grab me more than others. This is certainly one of them! I love the story very much.

I know that this story is unfortunately very rare. Australia and New Zealand have documentation that they destroyed their copies, Zambia has been visited and did not have any Doctor Who (per Brad's site), and no one knows what happened to Hong Kong's prints. I hope a shelf copy can one day be found.

I completely agree with what you say about certain stories being more grabbing then others. I do think that "The Macra Terror" is very good, but the stories that really grab me are "Marco Polo", "Galaxy 4", "Mission to the Unknown", "The Daleks' Master Plan", "The Power of the Daleks" and "The Evil of the Daleks". I haven't listened to Macra in a long time though, so I'll be listening to it again sometime soon. 

[Deleted]

Do we have an update to your research?

[Stephen Byers]

"I'm missing one vital clue, there has to be some strange reason the kids were all at that particular school (something that was unusual) on that day – something that hadn't happened previously, nor was repeated in later years. Perhaps it was a special event or celebration that called for a gathering or a weekend club simply using the venue?"

The event might have been mentioned in the local press. Try a search at

paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/cgi-bin/paperspast

[davecrichton]

Hi all, I thought you'd appreciate an update – still nothing terribly interesting to report, but I thought you'd appreciate knowing that I never quite gave up my search – and I still pick it up now and again...

Well, as you'll know from reading the first post in this thread, in 2013 my initial search seemed to be going nowhere. I'd advertised in the local paper, and spoken to every living member of the Harley Street School staff and dozens, if not hundreds of pupils. Worst of all, the log books (school records that were mandatory) never referenced the event – even though they referenced other similar things. Add to that, Harley Street and Fernridge weren’t on the same ‘circuit’ (schools that regularly participated with one another).

It simply wasn't stacking up...and I sadly concluded that Doctor Who almost certainly hadn't played at Harley Street school in Masterton New Zealand.

But there were still some things that did make sense. I now had two people who were adamant they'd seen it. Masterton's only an hour away from where the films were stored at TVNZ in Wellington (big coincidence). And the screening was most likely to have happened around about the exact time TVNZ were emptying the Harriet Street archives! And let's not forget we know at least one 16mm print survived the skips (The Lion). So I persevered and decided to take a look at the problem from another angle...what if the screening hadn’t taken place at Harley Street?

So I looked at other possible contenders, and one particular option seemed to stack up: Cornwall Street in Masterton. Like Fernridge, Cornwall Street was a small ‘country’ school – it regularly participated in inter-school sports events with Fernridge, and it’s mentioned many times in the log books.

I mentioned this to Neil Lambess and...would you believe it, he told me he’d actually been a student at Cornwall Street for a short time. So if we revisit Neil’s memory of being a student at Fernridge, and going for an interschool sports day to another school he attended, it starts to provide an interesting new direction to explore...

So now I just had to find promising references for Fernridge visiting Cornwall Street in the mid 70s. In the Fernbridge log books, it appeared that every year, in February, on the same date, the kids went to Cornwall Street to watch the Burton’s Puppets travelling theatre show. Frustratingly, the log books run out (and stopped being mandatory) at the end of 73. However, I’d always thought ’74 was the most logical year for the event to have happened, so I looked at some other schools in the circuit. One such school, MikiMiki, confirmed that the Burton’s annual event did indeed also occur as usual in 1974 and Fernridge were there too. Here’s the entry from 28th February 1974:

‘Visited Cornwall Street School to see Burton puppets. The children had lunch there and viewed the puppets and had tabloid sports in the afternoon’.

Sound familiar? It sure does. There’s no record of the rain, but that in itself isn’t suspicious. So I registered with the New Zealand Meteorological database, and pulled up weather records for that day. And...on the 28th February 1974 it rained in the afternoon over Masterton...

Other things about this lead soon started to stack up. Neil had always maintained that, in his memory, the event happened a ‘couple of years after a swimming tournament at the War Memorial’ and ‘not long after an Open Day with Opaki’. Both events are listed in the log books as occurring in March 71 and October 73 respectively.

I found out that Cornwall Street, in 1974, had five teachers on roll. 2 of them, including the principal had likely died, and I contacted the others. They told me the school had a projector, and did show 16mm films from the New Zealand National Library (just like Harley Street). They didn’t have a school hall, but instead showed films in a large, wide corridor. None of them remembered the Doctor Whos but they all thought the head teacher was a likely source. They described him as an ‘avid photographer and film buff’.

It’s taken me over two years to find the family of the late head teacher, as he died unmarried with no kids, and all his friends had long since died. I eventually found a nephew who has the last of his belongings. Again, they confirmed his interest in film, but don’t believe there’s any film left in his collection – but they remember selling off some projectors years ago. I’m working with the family to look for clues in his collection.

I was ready to give up until...another student popped up and remembered the Doctor Whos. And thought the films belonged to the headteacher! That’s three independent accounts!

It’s worth mentioning at this point that Jon Preddle has been incredibly helpful, and we’ve been working together to establish what connection, if any, the headteacher could have had to NZBC. And it’s still unclear if he got the films from NZBC directly, or whether they were salvaged from a skip, either directly by him, or indirectly. But I’m certainly following up each and every lead to establish that network.

I even re-contacted the Head of the Harrier Street film archive in 1974 – but he still maintains the films ‘couldn’t possibly have escaped’. Make of that what you will.

So that’s where my search stands at the moment. It’s more than likely that even if I do find absolute proof that the films were once in this man’s collection, it’s likely they could still have been lost to time long ago.

Certainly the Cornwall Street log books are long gone (sadly), as well as lots of other evidence that could have helped. But that’s the joy of researching an event from 40+ years ago.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the update. Please can I ask, as before, that nobody attempts to contact anybody referenced in this update. I’ve spent 4 years looking into this in enormous detail, and many of the relationships I’ve built up are delicate indeed. If anyone does want to help, please feel free to post ideas on here, or PM me and I’ll reply.

Thanks, Dave.

[andrewfrostick]

Wow! What fascinating detective work. Even if this doesn't lead to the films it may finally link the jigsaw pieces of this part of the story. Fantastic searching and best of luck as it progresses.

[Richard Develyn]

Reminds me of a short story by Howard Waldrop called "The Ugly Chickens". If you're motivated then the whole pursuit / investigation thing is interesting in itself even if you don't find anything in the end.

I hope it is interesting. Obviously as someone who can only gain from what you're doing I'm going to want to encourage you as much as possible, but at the end of the day it's you that's doing the leg work so I hope you're enjoying it.

All the best

Richard

[richardwoods]

Great work Dave. It's brilliant that you are so dedicated to the investigation, and great that you are making progress in unraveling what happened over 40 years ago. Even if, as is likely the film prints are long gone, the investigation itself has been worth it, as your hard work makes it look increasingly likely that the sports day Macra screening took place, which opens up all sorts of interesting possibilities. Great work & much appreciated.

[John Wall]

Incredible dedication, massive congratulations:-)