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Post by Jon Preddle on Jun 27, 2018 5:55:07 GMT
So why did the negatives exist for both The Seeds of Death and The War Games but not The Space Pirates in 1976? I can understand that they didn't anticipate or were not contractually obliged to make any further sales beyond Zambia, and considering that Zambia was pushing the two-year screening rights limitation to the max, the negatives for The Space Pirates would have been destroyed circa 1974. Why was the same not true for the other two serials, especially when nothing older than seven years could be sold or broadcast? One possibility is that films were offered to the BFI quite early on. The BFI selected what they wanted - Dominators, Krotons, War Games - but didn't take possession of them straight away. The BBC held onto the films for a few years, and in the meanwhile junked the ones that weren't going to the institute.
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Post by Sue Butcher on Jun 27, 2018 9:29:42 GMT
I've read that the BFI were oddly selective. They wanted examples of first class television programmes, but also examples of typical but not necessarily great shows. So I understand them wanting dodgy monster stories like The Dominators and The Krotons. Perhaps Space Pirates was too atypical for them?
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Post by George D on Jun 27, 2018 12:21:13 GMT
Space Pirates was not my favorite story so I get that. But why not evil of the daleks?
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Post by Sue Butcher on Jun 27, 2018 12:39:30 GMT
I suppose the negatives had gone by then. Back when Evil Of The Daleks was first broadcast, it was very difficult to get the BBC to provide copies of programmes, and the BFI therefore had a very short wants list. So they'd ask for a handful of a year's outstanding programmes, stuff like Cathy Come Home, and even then the time and paperwork required might mean a show they wanted had been wiped while they were waiting. Doctor Who was an ongoing series, perhaps it wasn't even considered for archiving by the BFI until the BBC actually offered to donate material.
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Post by Richard Bignell on Jun 27, 2018 12:58:27 GMT
Well, it was only "donating" the material in the sense that one person took it upon themselves to give the unwanted negatives to them, thinking that it was an acceptable thing to do. In the BBC's eyes, it wasn't though, and she was soon told onto do it again. The BFI could have any programming it wanted - but it had to pay for it (as it also had to do with ITV) and the selection panel's funds were not unlimited. They had to make careful use of their annual budget and regular programmes like Doctor Who just weren't that important to them.
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Post by Chris Wilkinson on Jun 27, 2018 13:42:14 GMT
Of the two sets known to be made, the only film prints of The Evil of the Daleks at the time would have been the set returned from Australia in 1975, and we know that no complete serials were salvaged from that cache - only orphan episodes, and in this case, Evil #2. The other set was junked by the NZBC in 1974.
Did the BFI only accept prints and negatives bundled together? From the information on BroaDWcast, this seems to be the case. If so, maybe they took what they could from what was by 1976/77 a very limited number of existing negative-and-print combinations.
I do agree that the BFI should have been more thoughtful about what would constitute top quality programming, and act in a more timely manner; the fact that The Evil of the Daleks was the only serial from the 1960s deemed worthy of a repeat broadcast in the UK surely indicated its exceptional status. They had four further years to acquire a set of prints and the negatives before the latter was destroyed.
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Post by John Wall on Jun 27, 2018 17:46:35 GMT
Of the two sets known to be made, the only film prints of The Evil of the Daleks at the time would have been the set returned from Australia in 1975, and we know that no complete serials were salvaged from that cache - only orphan episodes, and in this case, Evil #2. The other set was junked by the NZBC in 1974.
Did the BFI only accept prints and negatives bundled together? From the information on BroaDWcast, this seems to be the case. If so, maybe they took what they could from what was by 1976/77 a very limited number of existing negative-and-print combinations.
I do agree that the BFI should have been more thoughtful about what would constitute top quality programming, and act in a more timely manner; the fact that The Evil of the Daleks was the only serial from the 1960s deemed worthy of a repeat broadcast in the UK surely indicated its exceptional status. They had four further years to acquire a set of prints and the negatives before the latter was destroyed. It’s possible that other episodes were recovered from that batch and it’s possible that another episode of Evil was recovered. However, my view is to hope that the animated Power was a success and that encourages Auntie to commission the missing episodes of Evil.
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Post by Jon Preddle on Jun 27, 2018 18:25:49 GMT
...the fact that The Evil of the Daleks was the only serial from the 1960s deemed worthy of a repeat broadcast in the UK surely indicated its exceptional status. They had four further years to acquire a set of prints and the negatives before the latter was destroyed. I thought it was repeated because it was "the last Dalek story", in terms of they couldn't make any more due to their arrangement with Terry Nation, and they wanted to have at least one Dalek story per year, this repeat was the best and only available option.
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Post by John Wall on Jun 27, 2018 19:17:17 GMT
...the fact that The Evil of the Daleks was the only serial from the 1960s deemed worthy of a repeat broadcast in the UK surely indicated its exceptional status. They had four further years to acquire a set of prints and the negatives before the latter was destroyed. I thought it was repeated because it was "the last Dalek story", in terms of they couldn't make any more due to their arrangement with Terry Nation, and they wanted to have at least one Dalek story per year, this repeat was the best and only available option. Or there was a seven week hole in the schedule....
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Post by Jon Preddle on Jun 27, 2018 19:51:34 GMT
I thought it was repeated because it was "the last Dalek story", in terms of they couldn't make any more due to their arrangement with Terry Nation, and they wanted to have at least one Dalek story per year, this repeat was the best and only available option. Or there was a seven week hole in the schedule.... The 'hole in the schedule' was nine weeks -- don't forget, there was a two week break for Wimbledon during the repeat, between eps 3 and 4. I guess the schedulers factored this in,and there was still seven available slots. It still reads as odd though -- they could have had just a four-parter. I still think it's because they wanted a Dalek story to screen in 1968.
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Post by John Wall on Jun 27, 2018 20:22:17 GMT
Or there was a seven week hole in the schedule.... The 'hole in the schedule' was nine weeks -- don't forget, there was a two week break for Wimbledon during the repeat, between eps 3 and 4. I guess the schedulers factored this in,and there was still seven available slots. It still reads as odd though -- they could have had just a four-parter. I still think it's because they wanted a Dalek story to screen in 1968. Perhaps we could start our own urban myths:-)
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Post by Chris Wilkinson on Jun 28, 2018 0:14:57 GMT
Or there was a seven week hole in the schedule.... The 'hole in the schedule' was nine weeks -- don't forget, there was a two week break for Wimbledon during the repeat, between eps 3 and 4. I guess the schedulers factored this in,and there was still seven available slots. It still reads as odd though -- they could have had just a four-parter. I still think it's because they wanted a Dalek story to screen in 1968. I agree, it is odd. It seems that the production team wanted to write the Daleks out of the series not just for Terry Nation's 'Space Security Service' programme idea but because they wanted a different lead monster - the Cybermen. They could have repeated The Moonbase, which on average had a higher audience appreciation and viewing figures, followed by a fairly typical four or five week holiday.
Evil was a serial that breached its budgetary limit, and as the Black Archive book documenting the serial states, Innes Lloyd wrote to Timothy Combe stating that such an overrun was tolerable because the serial had a 'special' status among the production team. Maybe the special status was enough to convince them to repeat that one instead what may have been considered just another Cyberman serial.
If they intended to bring the Daleks back into the series after writing them out when Nation's idea fell through and the Embargo was lifted, then surely it would have made more sense to create a new serial considering the comparatively extortionate expense of repeat broadcasts at the time?
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Post by Richard Bignell on Jun 28, 2018 7:12:33 GMT
Evil was a serial that breached its budgetary limit, and as the Black Archive book documenting the serial states, Innes Lloyd wrote to Timothy Combe stating that such an overrun was tolerable because the serial had a 'special' status among the production team. It did go over budget, but not hugely. Other stories of the time went over budget far more than Evil did, including The Underwater Menace, The Faceless Ones, The Abominable Snowmen, The Ice Warriors etc. As Jon indicates the "special" status was down to it being (as far as the BBC were concerned at the time) the final Doctor Who/Dalek story, not that it was an elite production. The cost of repeating wasn't that extortionate and nothing like having to create a new production from scratch. Troughton and the rest of the crew were already completely exhausted from the relentless schedule, so adding an extra story into the mix would never have been a possibility.
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Post by richardwoods on Jun 28, 2018 7:16:34 GMT
Is it true that the BFI has thousands of undocumented film cans in its archive, and if that is the case, is it possible that more b/w was donated in one form or another & still lurks there undocumented?
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RWels
Member
Posts: 2,862
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Post by RWels on Jun 28, 2018 10:16:12 GMT
Is it true that the BFI has thousands of undocumented film cans in its archive, and if that is the case, is it possible that more b/w was donated in one form or another & still lurks there undocumented? This is a very generic question. Even if that is true (and no doubt there will be some uncataloged stuff everywhere), there is no reason to assume it's DW, or even TV, or even from anything missing.
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