For Doctor Who-lovers they are the missing crown jewels: lost episodes of the first series of the TV sci-fi drama, shown in the 1960s. But now film recordings of not just one, but two of the early BBC adventures, both featuring the first doctor, William Hartnell, has been found in Britain by amateur sleuths.
The episodes, one featuring the Daleks, would offer viewers a chance to travel back in time without the use of a Tardis. But the Observer has learned that the owners of the rare, rediscovered footage are not prepared to hand it over to the BBC, even as the clock ticks down to the 60th anniversary of the show’s launch this month.
Veteran film collector John Franklin believes the answer is for the BBC to announce an immediate general amnesty on missing film footage.
This would reassure British amateur collectors that their private archives will not be confiscated if they come forward and that they will be safe from prosecution for having stored stolen BBC property, something several fear.
“Some of these collectors are terrified,” said Franklin, who knows the location of the two missing Doctor Who episodes, along with several other newly discovered TV treasures, including an episode of the The Basil Brush Show, the second to be unearthed this autumn. “We now need to catalogue and save the significant television shows that are out there. If we are not careful they will eventually be dumped again in house clearances, because a lot of the owners of these important collections are now in their 80s and are very wary,” he added.
Discarded TV film was secretly salvaged from bins and skips by staff and contractors who worked at the BBC between 1967 and 1978, when the corporation had a policy of throwing out old reels. And Hartnell’s Doctor Who episodes were far from the only ones to go. Many popular shows were lost and other Doctor Who adventures starring Patrick Troughton and Jon Pertwee were either jettisoned or erased. A missing early episode of the long-running sitcom Sykes, starring Eric Sykes and Hattie Jacques, has also been rediscovered in private hands in the last few weeks.
Franklin, who staged an event entitled Film is Fabulous! for collectors in Leicester last month with the Cinema and Television History Research Institute at De Montfort University, argues that the BBC is best placed to help. “The collectors involved are ex-employees and so are terrified. The rule was that you didn’t take anything, even if it had been thrown out. But if you loved film and knew it would be important one day, what did you do? So what we need now is an amnesty,” he said.
Franklin’s plea was supported by Mark Stuckey, a film and projector restorer who appears as an electronics expert on the BBC’s The Repair Shop. “These collectors were seen as criminals, but now we can see they are really saviours. An amnesty would stop them being frightened of prosecution,” he said.
Last month the BBC admitted its 800-episode back catalogue of Doctor Who shows, now available on its iPlayer streaming service, would be incomplete. Seven episodes from 1963 have been colourised and woven together into a 75-minute long monster show, The Daleks in Colour, which will be shown on BBC Four on 23 November. These will also be made available on the iPlayer.
The BBC said it was ready to talk to anyone with lost episodes. “We welcome members of the public contacting us regarding programmes they believe are lost archive recordings, and are happy to work with them to restore lost or missing programmes to the BBC archives,” it said.
Whether this will be enough to prompt nervous collectors to come forward is doubtful. While collectors are in no real danger, the infamous arrest of comedian Bob Monkhouse in 1978 has not been forgotten, Franklin suspects: “Monkhouse was a private collector and was accused of pirating videos. He even had some of his archive seized. Sadly people still believe they could have their films confiscated.”
Most of the collectors are not interested in selling, but feel they should not be penalised for storing film for 50 years. “If we list all the found footage we could simply go to an auction house and sell it, which would save some of it, but then it could go anywhere. That seems sad, when there is such a growing interest in celluloid among younger people again. It has become quite fashionable,” said Franklin.
“BBC Studios, the corporation’s separate, commercial arm, have already spent money animating some lost Hartnell episodes, so surely they could spend a little more on restoring the originals and perhaps pay something to these elderly collectors, a few of whom are now unwell, or caring for others.”
Until the recent discoveries, it was believed that a total of 97 Doctor Who episodes were missing from the show’s first six years. Chris Perry, head of the TV archive Kaleidoscope, has recently claimed that he knows of many in private archives that could be returned, with the right assurances.
After all, as Phil Collinson, executive producer of the new colourised episode has attested, the Hartnell adventures are “a masterpiece of 1960s drama” and “literally the foundation stone of all that Doctor Who has become.”
The modern reboot of the show is to return to television screens on 25 November with the first of three special episodes. They feature David Tennant in a return to the role of the Doctor, before his regeneration into Ncuti Gatwa, the character’s 15th incarnation.
