Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
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Post by Richard Develyn on Aug 3, 2023 14:52:59 GMT
I don't think Elon Musk would care very much :-)
And, actually, the thousands of people who will care are not particularly rich, and aren't involved in some sort of "mine is better than yours" race. Every time "you" watch Power of the Daleks part 1 the smug satisfaction you will be getting will be in denying perfectly ordinary nice men, women and children the pleasure of doing the same.
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Aug 3, 2023 9:56:46 GMT
Nazi gold, and all that. And people do terrible things well beyond hoarding missing episodes. The question in my mind is do you want to stand shoulder-to-shoulder (even in a small way) with those sorts of people, or with the people who try to make the world a better place.
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
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Post by Richard Develyn on Aug 3, 2023 8:45:54 GMT
That's all fine and I agree entirely as long as you're not causing any unhappiness.
When that happens, you have a counterpoint to consider - the pleasure that you are denying others. With these missing Doctor Who episodes, it is considerable pleasure to a considerable number of others.
How you strike that balance is up to you, of course, but, broadly speaking, if you are well disposed to people, I think you will choose to let the BBC borrow the episode(s) so that it can be made available to the rest of us. After all, you still own the episode, it's just that it's now also available to others to watch. And, you have the kudos, and gratitude and admiration of a load of Doctor Who fans whose lives you have brightened.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Aug 2, 2023 12:25:41 GMT
Well, this is going to set a rabbit off :-)
Assuming this isn't some piece of mis-reporting I do wonder, as well as the "dozens" line, why Chris Perry might have chosen this particular moment to make a statement like this to the press.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 31, 2023 9:25:32 GMT
My view of an AI win would be to re-create a missing episode using different actors then use AI to substitute in the original actors for the new ones.
You could also substitute the old sets for the new ones.
So, try to get as close as possible to the original using whatever sort of information we have about how the actors would have moved around and so on. Create *reasonable* sets. Try to recreate facial expressions as best you can on the close ups. Then bring the AI in.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 5, 2023 13:33:37 GMT
Some of you might be interested to see the discussions we were having 25 years ago about this. groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.drwho/c/ZVVXoPVkDak/m/z0OeSsgXQugJI see now that my statement about "little pieces of paper" was debunked by Richard Molesworth at the time. Sorry to repeat that now - I'd forgotten. And I do now have the boxed set of Thriller :-) though I'm too frightened to watch most of it! Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 5, 2023 10:39:06 GMT
Well, we know what happened in one instance :-)
I always think it's better to concentrate on reasons why things might still exist, rather than otherwise, regardless of the relative probabilities, because the former encourages people to check things out just in case, whereas the latter makes us all give up.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 5, 2023 10:08:57 GMT
While we're on this subject, I'd like to advance another theory to see what people think.
It came out of a discussion I had quite a while ago when I was talking to some guys, who used to work for Pakistani TV (PTV), about missing episodes.
Basically, they said, the chances of anyone in any of these foreign TV stations doing a thorough search for missing episodes in response to some request from the BBC or, indeed, anybody that they didn't personally know, and owed a few favours to, was zilch.
No one would have spent more than 5 minutes glancing at a shelf before saying - "sorry, no, nothing here".
The only way a foreign TV station could be classified as being thoroughly searched is if someone from here went there and thoroughly searched it.
Equally, you shouldn't put too much credence on little bits of paper signed and returned to the BBC saying "Yes, we've destroyed this now". All that proves is that someone signed a bit of paper and put it in the post. Maybe that person thought to themselves that they would get around to destroying whatever it was that was supposed to be destroyed in due time, however, people who live in countries which are basically on the make (which is probably most countries, actually) are loathe to destroy things in case they become valuable in the future (case in point: Web of Fear part 3).
This problem, of course, exists to this day, so it may be less a case of missing episodes no longer existing, but rather of trying to figure out how to persuade some foreign TV station to allow you to look in their basements and then take any stuff that you find away. This is presumably what TIEA is doing, and it may be that they still have lots of places which they haven't been able to get into yet, however, when they do, there is a reasonable chance that they'll find something.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 4, 2023 22:51:43 GMT
Nobody started looking until Ian Levine and Sue Malden. iirc Ian got in there in 1978 after the damage had been done. Five years earlier….. So the BBC did it. Without announcing it. And literally nobody working within the BBC involved knew anybody who was vaguely interested in any of the shows to say anything to? It really was a different world back then. I remember talking to an old friend of mine called Terry Reason (who, as you may know, actually took a few photos from the TV of Evil of the Daleks which eventually appeared in DWM, pre-telesnap-days) and he told me how TV in the 60s was almost viewed as theatre. No one expected to see the stuff again. And then, of course, we have the unions to think about and how they reacted to the concept of repeats when they first started happening. I think they sort of panicked, a little bit like how we're getting worried now about AI-reconstructed actors such as Peter Cushing in Rogue One. They thought actors would lose their livelyhoods, so they fought against them. Additionally, culturally speaking, I think TV was considered low-brow and not worth keeping on that score either. That suggests to me that the prevailing attitude at the time would have been one of - they're not that important, no one is expecting them to be shown again, and we probably couldn't even if we wanted to. So all in all, the odds were stacked against their survival. Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 4, 2023 16:25:48 GMT
Well, indeed, I concur with all of that. I suppose it's more likely to happen in the public sector where people tend not to do anything without a proper paper-trail, which tends to stop pretty much anything happening.
We live in hope :-)
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 4, 2023 15:45:24 GMT
One of the things that gives me hope about stuff just still sitting around somewhere is that I've seen through my now-finished career the way that people tend to behave when they're presented with problems they don't have an answer for.
Imagine you've been told you can use an office but when you go in there you find a couple of USB sticks sitting on the window ledge.
You don't know what's in them. You don't know who they belong to. You certainly don't want to chuck them away in case they're important, but you really cannot be bothered "taking the initiative" and actually figuring out what they are. You could pass the problem to your boss but then nobody gets brownie points for giving their boss problems, so you stick them in a jiffy bag, label it, and then put it in some cupboard or another where all the other "somebody else's problem" stuff ends up.
Perhaps one day, some executive with nothing better to do, orders that cupboard emptied no matter what is in it, but even then giving that sort of order is risky, and emptying cupboards is rarely on an executive radar.
So the stuff just sits there. Forever, and ever, and ever, until the company either goes bankrupt or the building gets pulled down or world-war-3 is declared.
Imagine two episodes of Doctor Who are sitting on a shelf somewhere. Someone finds them and perhaps remembers that they were supposed to be junked a few years ago. Curious - why weren't these junked? Don't know, can't be bothered to find out, so let's just leave them there (preferable - someone else can think about it), or move them somewhere else if we need the space.
(Or take them home, I suppose - then if someone asks where they are because they were deliberately not junked then they can always mysteriously reappear again).
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 4, 2023 12:50:02 GMT
The fact that the 4 existing Ice Warrior episodes are the Telerecording Editor copies is just a theory, of course (if I've read Paul correctly).
The fact that a Telerecording Editor existed as a gatekeeper in the process of getting the films out abroad is interesting because it leads us to speculate on what the flow of film prints might have been in order to support his job.
I don't know. Perhaps it even opens up the possibility that there's an episode or two kicking around somewhere in the BBC basements after the telerecording editor or perhaps the people in charge of cutting the negatives had their offices cleared out into cardboard boxes and then forgotten about. That sort of thing certainly does happen, and I like to live in hope :-)
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 4, 2023 9:24:35 GMT
We know that all 35mm film recordings were certainly quality inspected a few days after being made and a number of the Film Recording Viewing Reports survive for Doctor Who material around 1966 and 1967 such as the final episode of The Power of the Daleks and several of the cliffhanger recordings, which were routinely made from the episodes each week. Those reports would indicate the quality of each film in terms of sound, picture, faults etc. I don't think it's beyond possibility that the same thing was being done for the 16mm film recordings made for Enterprises and that any significant issues spotted, such as video off-locks would be noted on the report. It may well be that, as a result of a negative report being made on an episode, the recording would then need to be cut to remove the problematic material in order to provide a cleaned-up version for export. Therefore, it would only apply to those episodes that needed amendment, not to every film recording produced. That seems logical, but doesn't it contradict Paul's theory regarding uncut editor copies or have I misunderstood? That's how I understood it - the ones that didn't need cutting survived. So I'll kick off a theory ... an editting print is made of each story. If there's nothing wrong with them all, they just get added to the ones to be sent abroad. If there is a problem, the editor edits the positives on the faulty episodes and sends them off to be mirrored on the negatives. When the positives comes back, they get added to the rest and the whole story now gets sent abroad. In the case of Ice Warriors 2&3 the positives didn't come back for some reason, so the editor was left with 4 orphaned episodes, and these survived. Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 3, 2023 15:12:51 GMT
He says:
"They were for the editor to review and assess, then make cuts to things such as videotape off-locks on the film recordings. And sometimes those changes would be quite minor, just a few frames."
I might be getting confused but that suggests to me that he would need a copy of each episode in order to look for these videotape off-locks (not that I know what that is) and whatever else.
Richard
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Richard Develyn
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Living in hope that more missing episodes will come back to us.
Posts: 574
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Post by Richard Develyn on Jul 3, 2023 9:13:25 GMT
I thought these prints were to check for any glitches or what have you.
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