Lost Doctor Who episodes found

November 12, 2023 10:55 AM

Lost Doctor Who episodes found – but owner is reluctant to hand them to BBC. As Doctor Who’s 60th anniversary nears, a collector pleads for BBC to offer amnesty to those with recordings discarded by the corporation.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (12 comments total)

Is there a good reason not to offer amnesty here?
posted by Easy problem of consciousness at 11:28 AM on November 12, 2023 [4 favorites]

If you give in to amnesty demands here, Daleks will be demanding amnesty.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 11:31 AM on November 12, 2023 [22 favorites]

There is effectively an amnesty. The BBC don’t really care, and don’t own the rights to the physical film itself. They’d just take a copy and return it. This is what’s happened in the past. This is a click bait junk article. See x.com/drwhopodcasters/status/1723388160866943358 for John Franklin disavowing it.
posted by Hartster at 11:32 AM on November 12, 2023 [12 favorites]

This is an issue that sadly attracts rumor and innuendo, fraud and wishful thinking, on a large scale. People will bend over backwards to interpret statements by Paul Venezis et al as confirming something, anything is out there. Just out of view.

The Web of Fear 3 probably still exists, though given the political turbulence in the locality where The Web of Fear and Enemy of the World were discovered, maybe not.
posted by StarkRoads at 12:09 PM on November 12, 2023

This is great news since the Robert Mugabe treasure trove turned out to be empty rumors.
posted by dr_dank at 1:17 PM on November 12, 2023

Maybe the internet archive would be able to digitize finds like these, and possibly act as a shield to protect the anonymity of the collectors?
posted by signsofrain at 4:35 PM on November 12, 2023 [1 favorite]

If I were a senior citizen in possession of the last known extant copies of some culturally significant audio or audiovisual work long since abandoned by its nominal copyright holder, and I feared some kind of sanction for making it available for "legitimate" archiving, then I would consider it my moral duty to organize the highest quality digital dub within my means, release that via BitTorrent, and make sure both the Internet Archive and The Pirate Bay had copies of its magnet link.
posted by flabdablet at 2:59 AM on November 13, 2023 [5 favorites]

I would consider it my moral duty to organize the highest quality digital dub within my means, release that via BitTorrent, and make sure both the Internet Archive and The Pirate Bay had copies of its magnet link.

Even if these folks had that inclination (big "if"), surmounting the technical barriers to achieve what you suggest is probably not within the capabilities of most people, senior citizen or not.
posted by Optamystic at 3:38 AM on November 13, 2023 [2 favorites]

What's all the fuss about?

I'm sure if you fed all the existing Doctor Who episodes into an generative AI model you could just ask it politely for the missing episodes.

And while we're at it, maybe we could get all those episodes that never existed, like Doctor Who Meets Scratchman, the third Peter Cushing Dalek movie, and maybe even that big budget late-90s Red Dwarf movie that was supposed to feature the Daleks....
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:26 AM on November 13, 2023 [1 favorite]

I worked on the Doctor Who line of novels at Virgin Publishing in the 1990s (freelance copy-editing), with people who knew the twin universes of Doctor Who and its fandom far more intimately than I did, and it was well known back then that copies of these episodes existed in private hands, and whose private hands those were. Even at the time there was no good reason for not returning them to the BBC, and by now I suspect that hanging onto them is the only thing that makes these collectors feel special. Fans are weird, media fans doubly so.
posted by Hogshead at 6:33 AM on November 13, 2023 [14 favorites]

Indeed this feels less like "I'm afraid to give the episodes back" and more like "I want people to know I have episodes that I won't give back. "
posted by Joey Michaels at 9:19 AM on November 13, 2023 [4 favorites]

What episodes exist in what private hands?
posted by StarkRoads at 10:13 AM on November 13, 2023 [2 favorites]