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Post by Richard Bignell on Jul 15, 2013 20:56:31 GMT
Not at all!
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Post by Brad Phipps on Jul 15, 2013 21:35:41 GMT
I heard Richard Bignell was going to be the 6th Doctor at some point. Is that true?
*runs away*
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Post by Dave Wood on Jul 15, 2013 22:22:10 GMT
It was a very different time back then, when almost anything seemed possible, as recoveries of actual and genuinely lost material seemed to be being made on an almost monthly basis (certainly mid-1980s, although they had dried up by the 1990s). It didn't help that Doctor Who monthly was often inaccurate, the original archive holdings listed in the Winter special included some errors to existing episode numbers and later reports in the regular magazine included a recovery of colour master tapes of Terror of the Autons, which was simply wrong.
Looking back, much of information that was flying around fandom at the time was either wishful thinking, rumours, lies or misunderstandings. Not that it mattered much, as pre-VHS fans had little hope of seeing any of the material that existed in the archive, so it made little difference whether a show was listed as missing or not. Modern fans can't imagine how exciting it was to see a brief and scratchy clip from The Daleks' Masterplan on Noel Edmonds' Tele Addicts quiz show back then, and seemingly relatively soon after the episode recovery. It was equally exciting to see brief clips from The Seeds of Death and The Daleks, even though the soundtrack of modern and sophisticated audiences laughing at the archive material was included in the shows. The only other archive clips that I can recall seeing during the 1980s were on Blue Peter for the Davison handover and Windmill (The War Games/Talons of Weng-Chiang), Did You See (The Web Planet and others), a brief clip from The Daleks on Open Air and a clip from The Web Planet used in the trailer for 25th anniversary special Silver Nemesis. I had seen clips from Robot, Terror of the Zygons and The Deadly Assassin in various school's programmes and even those clips seemed impossibly old and exotic at the time.
I recall a friend paying £200 for a VHS recording of what he thought was going to be part 2 of Power of the Daleks - it was infact the very first reconstruction. He received a rather ropey audio recording of the lost episode paired with fuzzy telesnaps and wasn't very happy!
The Tenth Planet 4 played out as a hoax and Invasion 1 seems to be the result of a misunderstanding in the pages of Doctor Who Monthly, where Ian Marter mentioned in an interview that he had turned to Nicholas Courtney for research when writing the Target version of the Invasion, only to find that the recording of the first episode on Nick's tape (provided by a fan) had no sound. The 1st episode on the tape (i.e. part 2) being mistaken for missing episode 1.
I can also recall receiving an excited telephone call from a DWAS group leader to say that The Highlanders had been recovered (it hadn't). Other persistent rumours at the time included an episode of The Abominable Snowmen supposedly being screened at a London gay bar (never proved, although Cellar Bar in Soho did have a sci-fi thematic and was projecting scenes from Barbarella when I was there in the late 1990s - may not even be the same place). Other rumours included a damaged copy of an episode of The Macra Terror supposedly seen by fans in the Brighton area - all hearsay and I've never met anyone from the Brighton area who can substantiate that, although there does appear to have been a lot of activity on the south coast with regards to actual recoveries (Wheel 3, Galaxy 4 3, Underwater Menace 2 and a guy selling 5 x non- Dr Who BBC film prints in the same area who claimed to have worked for a skip firm who helped clear out Villier's House in the mid-1970s). Coincidence, nonsense or maybe an avenue for exploration and vague hopes and possibilities for future finds, perhaps?
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Post by John F Brayshaw on Jul 15, 2013 22:41:46 GMT
Stuff is out there - it's just harder and harder to find and time is not helping....
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Richard Develyn
Member
Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 15, 2013 23:01:46 GMT
It was me that was spreading them (I was younger and more naive then). Did you believe these rumours at the time? Did you make some of them up? LOL, Dave Yadallee (The Doctor) is still at rec.arts.drwho dominating what little discussion is still there. Odd that he's never appeared elsewhere that I know, in all these years. They must have an exclusive contract on him. Even back then, like I said in my post, I knew you had to take things with a pinch of salt, however I believed that there might be something in these rumours and that they were worth circulating and pursuing. I never made anything up. I was genuine in my desire to find stuff and false-rumours would have been counter-productive as well as immoral. It seems to me the whole rumour-mill thing goes nowhere. Lucky finds are exactly that. If there had been some missing episode out there, like the infamous TP4 or Power 2, merely requiring work to wheedle out of somebody's hands, it would have happened by now. Conversely, and happily, like I mentioned in the other thread, the reverse view of this that no more episodes will ever be found is equally proved to be untrue. This ground has also been trodden and re-trodden many times in the past. Richard
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Post by Jim Taylor on Jul 16, 2013 6:29:00 GMT
I remember going on rec.arts.drwho from 97-00?? roughly. The sound of the AOL dial up modem is not missed
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Post by Nicholas Fitzpatrick on Jul 16, 2013 7:41:40 GMT
I remember going on rec.arts.drwho from 97-00?? roughly. The sound of the AOL dial up modem is not missed rec.arts.drwho wasn't the same after they let AOL onto the Internet in the mid-1990s.
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Post by Andrew Parker on Jul 16, 2013 8:34:40 GMT
Not sure where I heard/read about it but there was a rumour a private collector had all of the Macra Terror but wasn't sharing it, (and this was long before the RC twerp last year). I think that's generally believed to have originated with the 8mm off-screen film, which includes part of the opening titles from an episode of 'Macra'. The existence of this led first to the rumour that a complete copy of that episode existed as an off-screen recording, and this then became 'there's a complete copy of the story out there!'. Thanks Alex
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Post by Charles Daniels on Jul 16, 2013 9:13:41 GMT
I remember going on rec.arts.drwho from 97-00?? roughly. The sound of the AOL dial up modem is not missed rec.arts.drwho wasn't the same after they let AOL onto the Internet in the mid-1990s. Back when you had to sell your soul to someone with a university account so you could be listed as a node? I mean, it had a certain elite charm to it I guess. I miss the excitement of running Frontdoor and seeing messages roll in.
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Post by Ronnie McDevitt on Jul 16, 2013 10:45:03 GMT
Ron Merritt asked `Have there been any rumors that have actually turned out to be true?' That's a good point. With no internet then rumours were spread by word of mouth or in fanzines - sometimes given greater authenticity if it made the pages of the Monthly. One of the strongest and oldest was for `The Singing Sands' which has of course now been exposed. It was believed that a print of this episode was being hoarded by a fan. Other strong rumours were `The Tenth Planet' 4 (`the most likely missing episode to exist' according to Doctor Who Bulletin) and `Power of the Daleks' part 2 (minus opening credits). And don't get me started on Simon Lydiards' Skaro article! An anonymous corespondent to DWB claimed to have two episodes of `The Highlanders' in the wake of `Tomb of the Cybermens' recovery but no evidence was forthcoming. So in fact very few rumours yielded returns and I for one tended to dismiss them after a while. Although the 1980s were a golden age for recoveries the fact is that most of the returns came out of the blue. I was aware that there were `Dr Who' prints on their way from Hong Kong in 1992 but there was no indication as to their content of even if they were missing. So even the recovery of `Tomb' was not pre-empted by anything linking the story to Hong Kong. Yet it was still a time of hope with fans eagerly awaiting the next recovery until the well pretty much ran dry. I shook my head in disbelief when I heard that all six parts of `The Web of Fear' had been found and can't believe people were taken in by it - and some are still going on about it. The prospect of one episode coming back is miniscule let alone the entire story. Sceptically, I immediately logged onto the Reatoration Teams website where there was no mention of the report and soon forgot about it. But that is part of the problem with Dr Who fans, some of whom are gullible enough to believe anything which merely feeds the rumours - as Adam Lee once said, commenting that fans refused to believe episodes were gone forever - "it's as if they think they can will them into existence."
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Post by Ash Stewart on Jul 16, 2013 12:17:42 GMT
"Have there been any rumors that have actually turned out to be true?" Well `Faceless Ones' 3 and `Evil of the Daleks' 2 for sure. Did not know there were rumors about those two episodes before they were returned? Curious how accurate those rumors were if they named the episodes or just that a couple of episodes had been found? IIRC, it played out over the course of about a year, year and a half or so, and was mentioned in a number of issues of DWB as the tale unravelled. Makes for very interesting reading. I seem to recall episode titles were mentioned.
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Post by Richard Marple on Jul 16, 2013 12:29:42 GMT
I've heard once or twice that the location sequences for Evil of the Daleks was shot on colour film, but that seems to be just another fan myth.
DWM a couple of times has had a feature on fan rumours over the years.
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Post by steveb on Jul 16, 2013 12:35:14 GMT
It's quite a trip down memory lane, this thread! Wasn't Victor Pemberton somehow associated with the Invasion 1 story btw? The Reign of Fear 4-5 rumour seemed to be well grounded at the time, espiecially because it involved another episode as well which really did turn up a bit later. The "someone in the north" story (actually someone from Scotland) I also know very well and which epis it was, I still think that was probably true, but who knows, over 20 years later and nothing more heard!
You are right we were generally all much more gullible back then I would say, or maybe credulous / youthfully innocent is more accurate than gullible.
I'm still *always* hoping but I learnt to treat it all "not so seriously" in the meantime! :-) As long as every few years something turns up, and I think it will for a while yet, it's a really nice surprise and brightens up my life every time.
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Post by John Brew on Jul 16, 2013 14:05:22 GMT
It's quite a trip down memory lane, this thread! Wasn't Victor Pemberton somehow associated with the Invasion 1 story btw? The Reign of Fear 4-5 rumour seemed to be well grounded at the time, espiecially because it involved another episode as well which really did turn up a bit later. The "someone in the north" story (actually someone from Scotland) I also know very well and which epis it was, I still think that was probably true, but who knows, over 20 years later and nothing more heard! You are right we were generally all much more gullible back then I would say, or maybe credulous / youthfully innocent is more accurate than gullible. I'm still *always* hoping but I learnt to treat it all "not so seriously" in the meantime! :-) As long as every few years something turns up, and I think it will for a while yet, it's a really nice surprise and brightens up my life every time. This thread sure has been a trip down memory lane. I remember anxiously waiting for the next issue of Doctor Who Magazine or DWB to arrive hoping there would be news of a new recovery. And what a thrill when there was one. I agree that we were much more innocent then. Since there had been successes, we kept thinking there would be more. When I read the rumors of the copy of The Singing Sands floating around in Canada, I thought it would be only a matter of time till it was returned. Then maybe someone I knew might eventually get a 27th generation copy of it on VHS and we'd gather around a small television and try to watch it. We'd done this with An Unearthly Child, The Krotons and a very ropey copy of the first 3 episodes of The Tenth Planet back in the mid 80's. Now many years later after so many disappointments, we've all learned to take the rumors with a grain of salt. And yet we still hope. To me that's part of being a fan. Waiting and hoping that more will come back and we'll get to see them.
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Post by Luke Curtis on Jul 16, 2013 18:35:58 GMT
I could be mistaken, but wasn't that one of Darren Gregory's bizarre cries for help/ attention? (Whatever his motivation is.......) He returned a blank uMATIC tape. But as far as I know the oil rig is a whole other yarn DG claimed to me to have some/all (can't remember now) of Fury of the Deep on u-matic tape and would give me a copy if I could get it transferred onto vhs. I naturally contacted IIRC Adam Lee at the BBC archive only to be told this guy was a notorious hoaxer and to have nothing to do with him.
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