Post by Brian Wilson on Dec 11, 2008 16:39:31 GMT
Francis Watson - former BBC Engineer and former Head of Engineering at Yorkshire Television has most kindly written an essay, exclusively for Lost Dr Who, about the history and recovery of Day of Armageddon.
Many thanks to Francis for this superb piece of engaging, informative and witty writing.
Saving Dr Who (Unintentionally!)
In the summer of 1972 I, with a shiny new degree in electrical & electronic engineering from University College London, started work at the BBC. After training (people were trained in those days) my first posting was to the Television Film Studios (TFS) in Ealing, West London. This was a sensible choice on someone’s part: at college I had been active in the Students’ Union Film Society (Filmsoc).
The Ealing Film Studios, just off the Green, were best known as the place where many great British films were made in the 40s & 50s – The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, etc., etc. On my first day I was shown the tank in which Noel Coward bobbed around for In Which We Serve. I was in Electronic Film Services, whose function was to look after the increasing amount of electronic equipment used in film production.
The workshop was on the upper floor of a building next to the sound stages. (I believe it has now been demolished but I have not been back to TFS since 1976 so I am not sure.) The building was not of a high construction standard; we froze in the winter and baked in the summer. Across the corridor from the workshops was a series of rooms that were little used. They were in the centre of the building and had neither windows nor heating, only a skylight. Hence they tended to become filled with junk – stuff that was of no immediate use but (in the eyes of the engineers, who always believe this) “might come in handy one day”. (It never does and one of the recurring struggles I had much later as a manager was to get rid of this kind of stuff.) There were, among the debris, many cans and rolls of film of all sorts: exposed (but unprocessed) negative, gash prints, sepmag, commag, rushes, and the odd complete programme. They were here for the testing of such bits of kit as film editors, pic syncs and sepmag bays.
One day I was rootling in one of the rooms – I can’t remember why – and came across two cans containing episodes of Dr. Who, film recordings of the original transmissions. To put it bluntly, I stole them. I was still living in Kentish Town, close to UCL, and I still visited Filmsoc regularly. As they had 16mm projectors I thought I could run the programmes through one evening. To the best of my recollection we only ever watched the earlier of the two episodes.
How did they come to be in a junk room in TFS? At that time the BBC had outposts all over that part of London (Shepherd’s Bush, Acton, Chiswick and Ealing) as a consequence of rapid expansion in the 60s. One of these was the section who sold BBC programmes to other broadcasters overseas (there was no such thing as home video in those days – the technology had not yet been developed) – BBC Enterprises. They were based in Villiers House, literally on top of Ealing Broadway station. (I think this too may have been redeveloped.) There they had small viewing theatres for foreign buyers who had been intrepid enough to find their way to Ealing in search of BBC programmes. These were maintained from TFS (an unpopular job, I recall), and doubtless someone had removed the two Dr. Whos to TFS, possibly for a quiet viewing one evening. Few people can have had access to 16mm projectors outside work as I did.
I have to say that these were the only two Dr. Whos there. There were not, as some people on the forums seemed to think, a neat rack of the 10 episodes of Dalek Master Plan from which I casually removed ep.2. They were 2 scrap reels of film to be used to try faulty projectors, editors, etc.
I think I should say something about this seemingly cavalier attitude of the BBC to their programmes. It has to be remembered that in the 1960s & 70s (and indeed until the 90s) there was no secondary market for TV programmes. They were shown on the channel for which they were made, possibly with a repeat; then they were offered to the overseas markets. When this process had been exhausted, that was it. The agreements then in force with the actors’ union, Equity, made future showings in the UK prohibitively expensive – it was often cheaper to make a new programme than pay the repeat fees. So a programme like these Dr. Whos had no value; in fact it was worse than no value, as to store it was expensive. (I was told in 1975 that the BBC had used 25 million feet of film the previous year – imagine even a tenth of that as a pile of film cans and you can see the problem.)
So the cans left with me one evening and travelled on the tube to the Filmsoc studio in Gordon St. There they stayed for a while. Someone – I’ve no idea who or why – took the two spools out of the two cans and put them in one double-thickness one. He (or she) used the BBC cans for some of Filmsoc’s own productions. I know this, because on one of the forums at the time of me owning up a later member of Filmsoc who was a Dr. Who fan said he had found them. How his heart must have leaped, and how disappointed he must have been when he found they contained only Newsreel 73 (or whatever)!
When did all this happen? I worked in TFS from September 72 to May 74. I moved from Kentish Town in February 74 and visited Filmsoc rarely after that. So I suspect I lifted the films in summer 73 (when I had been there long enough to know how the system worked).
I left London – and the BBC – in 1977 to move to Leeds and Yorkshire Television. What happened to the Dr. Whos? Precisely nothing. They moved north with me, went through some house moves, and were from time-to-time were spotted in one cupboard or another. In the early 90s my partner – wanting the space for junk of her own – suggested I took them to work. So I did and for nearly another 10 years they hung in a carrier bag on a coat hook in my office.
In 2003 YTV – by now part of the Granada Group - purchased a small independent facilities company in Leeds, The Finishing School (also TFS). I supervised the move of the equipment to a new location nearer YTV and, in passing mentioned to the manager of TFS that I had the Dr. Whos. He offered to transfer them to Digital Betacam for me, together with viewing copies on DVD-R. This he did. YTV had also another area that serviced Granada’s programme sales. We had invested in a hugely impressive (and hugely expensive) device called Archangel that provided various functions to help restore archive programmes, such as dirt concealment, noise reduction, removing printer hop and weave, etc. The Dr Whos were run through this as well, on a fairly conservative setting.
So the tapes, with some DVD-R copies and the original films were delivered to my office in January 2004. By this time my job had disappeared (as part of the rationalisation of ITV in England & Wales in to one company) and I was redundant. I remember I watched the 2 DVDs then wondered idly if they were of interest to anyone. So one lunchtime I googled for Dr Who sites and found one that seemed suitably technical - the Restoration Team. I checked the list of missing programmes and discovered that DMP2 (as it was called) was one of the lost ones.
This made my position far more interesting: something I had stolen 30 years previously had turned out to be valuable. I sent a careful email to the website, asking if there was a “real person” at the end of it and saying I might have something of interest. (It went from my work address and they later said they’d checked me out before replying.)
So the next day I composed a careful email – a summary of the events above – and sent it. The result was impressive: a few seconds after I’d pressed “send” my phone rang. It was a very excited man from the BBC (he ran the website as a hobby with their blessing) wanting the tapes asap and saying they were very pleased to have them back, and that no action would be taken regarding the original theft. In fact, their archivist had expressed the view that it was a shame I hadn’t stolen more! So I sent the tapes & films (in separate boxes, in case one went astray).
A couple of days passed, then (15th January 2004) I got an email saying the tapes had arrived (I imagined him tearing open the jiffy bag and sprinting to the nearest available Digibeta). He attached a draft press release which I approved with a minor change and then asked casually “do you think anyone will be interested?” “Last time the papers picked it up” he said. Oh dear.
The rest of the day went uneventfully. Just as I was leaving I was given a message to ring someone at the BBC. She turned out to be a journalist from the BBC London local news programme asking if I’d like to do a down-the-line interview for them. I declined, pointing out I about to look for consultancy work in the industry and didn’t particularly want to be recognised as the man who nicks your programmes. I remember her asking if I was interested in Dr Who. I said, not particularly, but I did remember vividly watching the first series on their original transmission (in the case of the Dalek ones largely with my hands in front of my eyes – we were a lot less sophisticated in those days). She sounded startled, as if she hadn’t realised anyone could be that old and not lost to senile dementia.
I then peeked at the internet. The BBC had put a headline on their main news page, so there was little chance this was going to creep past unnoticed outside the Dr Who community. (My staff at work delighted in printing off the story and distributing it widely). There was also a version on BBC Teletext. The forum was going berserk, in a way I found frightening. “I’m so happy I’m having a brain haemorrhage” was one memorable post.
The next day I had calls at work from BBC Leeds and BBC Sheffield wanting to do an interview. I had to ring the YTV Press Office to explain what had happened, as I didn’t which to cause any difficulty for my employers. They were sweet enough to say that they thought it I’d done a good thing.
The furore died down. I don’t know if the BBC have ever done anything with DMP2 – shown it at Dr. Who conventions, perhaps. I was asked by a few people “why didn’t you auction it on eBay?” My reply was that it wasn’t my property to auction, it rightly belonged to the BBC and (on a more practical level) I might well have had my collar felt had I tried to profit from it.
Thus ended my involvement with the Dr Who crowd (is there a collective noun, like Trekkers?). It should be remembered that at the point this happened Dr. Who was a long-cancelled and rather sad programme and had not yet burst forth revitalised in spectacular fashion by Russell T Davies.
I watch it now, as I used to as a schoolboy in the 60s. It has far more pace (not a great deal happens in DMP2; in a modern episode the events shown wouldn’t last much over 5 minutes), and the effects that are available fairly cheaply now were not possible then, regardless of cost. But some of the invention seems to have gone: why are there so many episodes with those relics of the 60s, Daleks and Cybermen? Why not new monsters that grab the imagination? (I can remember the whole class being threatened with detention if one more boy said “exterminate” during a lesson.)
In my view, the best story in the new series was one that only employed the Dr. peripherally. In fact I think it one of the best dramas on TV last year: Blink, by Stephen Moffat. I hope he brings this level of creativity to all the episodes once he has taken over from RTD. Apart from being gripping & scary, it used something that has rarely been a feature of Dr. Who stories: the use of time as a factor in the plot. The Dr. travels in time but arrives at a point and the story unravels there. I think there are great possibilities to be had from the time paradox. And no more Daleks, please.
A final heresy: I rather liked Catherine Tate as Donna.
Francis Watson
7th December 2008
(c) Lost Dr Who 2008
Many thanks to Francis for this superb piece of engaging, informative and witty writing.
Saving Dr Who (Unintentionally!)
In the summer of 1972 I, with a shiny new degree in electrical & electronic engineering from University College London, started work at the BBC. After training (people were trained in those days) my first posting was to the Television Film Studios (TFS) in Ealing, West London. This was a sensible choice on someone’s part: at college I had been active in the Students’ Union Film Society (Filmsoc).
The Ealing Film Studios, just off the Green, were best known as the place where many great British films were made in the 40s & 50s – The Ladykillers, The Lavender Hill Mob, etc., etc. On my first day I was shown the tank in which Noel Coward bobbed around for In Which We Serve. I was in Electronic Film Services, whose function was to look after the increasing amount of electronic equipment used in film production.
The workshop was on the upper floor of a building next to the sound stages. (I believe it has now been demolished but I have not been back to TFS since 1976 so I am not sure.) The building was not of a high construction standard; we froze in the winter and baked in the summer. Across the corridor from the workshops was a series of rooms that were little used. They were in the centre of the building and had neither windows nor heating, only a skylight. Hence they tended to become filled with junk – stuff that was of no immediate use but (in the eyes of the engineers, who always believe this) “might come in handy one day”. (It never does and one of the recurring struggles I had much later as a manager was to get rid of this kind of stuff.) There were, among the debris, many cans and rolls of film of all sorts: exposed (but unprocessed) negative, gash prints, sepmag, commag, rushes, and the odd complete programme. They were here for the testing of such bits of kit as film editors, pic syncs and sepmag bays.
One day I was rootling in one of the rooms – I can’t remember why – and came across two cans containing episodes of Dr. Who, film recordings of the original transmissions. To put it bluntly, I stole them. I was still living in Kentish Town, close to UCL, and I still visited Filmsoc regularly. As they had 16mm projectors I thought I could run the programmes through one evening. To the best of my recollection we only ever watched the earlier of the two episodes.
How did they come to be in a junk room in TFS? At that time the BBC had outposts all over that part of London (Shepherd’s Bush, Acton, Chiswick and Ealing) as a consequence of rapid expansion in the 60s. One of these was the section who sold BBC programmes to other broadcasters overseas (there was no such thing as home video in those days – the technology had not yet been developed) – BBC Enterprises. They were based in Villiers House, literally on top of Ealing Broadway station. (I think this too may have been redeveloped.) There they had small viewing theatres for foreign buyers who had been intrepid enough to find their way to Ealing in search of BBC programmes. These were maintained from TFS (an unpopular job, I recall), and doubtless someone had removed the two Dr. Whos to TFS, possibly for a quiet viewing one evening. Few people can have had access to 16mm projectors outside work as I did.
I have to say that these were the only two Dr. Whos there. There were not, as some people on the forums seemed to think, a neat rack of the 10 episodes of Dalek Master Plan from which I casually removed ep.2. They were 2 scrap reels of film to be used to try faulty projectors, editors, etc.
I think I should say something about this seemingly cavalier attitude of the BBC to their programmes. It has to be remembered that in the 1960s & 70s (and indeed until the 90s) there was no secondary market for TV programmes. They were shown on the channel for which they were made, possibly with a repeat; then they were offered to the overseas markets. When this process had been exhausted, that was it. The agreements then in force with the actors’ union, Equity, made future showings in the UK prohibitively expensive – it was often cheaper to make a new programme than pay the repeat fees. So a programme like these Dr. Whos had no value; in fact it was worse than no value, as to store it was expensive. (I was told in 1975 that the BBC had used 25 million feet of film the previous year – imagine even a tenth of that as a pile of film cans and you can see the problem.)
So the cans left with me one evening and travelled on the tube to the Filmsoc studio in Gordon St. There they stayed for a while. Someone – I’ve no idea who or why – took the two spools out of the two cans and put them in one double-thickness one. He (or she) used the BBC cans for some of Filmsoc’s own productions. I know this, because on one of the forums at the time of me owning up a later member of Filmsoc who was a Dr. Who fan said he had found them. How his heart must have leaped, and how disappointed he must have been when he found they contained only Newsreel 73 (or whatever)!
When did all this happen? I worked in TFS from September 72 to May 74. I moved from Kentish Town in February 74 and visited Filmsoc rarely after that. So I suspect I lifted the films in summer 73 (when I had been there long enough to know how the system worked).
I left London – and the BBC – in 1977 to move to Leeds and Yorkshire Television. What happened to the Dr. Whos? Precisely nothing. They moved north with me, went through some house moves, and were from time-to-time were spotted in one cupboard or another. In the early 90s my partner – wanting the space for junk of her own – suggested I took them to work. So I did and for nearly another 10 years they hung in a carrier bag on a coat hook in my office.
In 2003 YTV – by now part of the Granada Group - purchased a small independent facilities company in Leeds, The Finishing School (also TFS). I supervised the move of the equipment to a new location nearer YTV and, in passing mentioned to the manager of TFS that I had the Dr. Whos. He offered to transfer them to Digital Betacam for me, together with viewing copies on DVD-R. This he did. YTV had also another area that serviced Granada’s programme sales. We had invested in a hugely impressive (and hugely expensive) device called Archangel that provided various functions to help restore archive programmes, such as dirt concealment, noise reduction, removing printer hop and weave, etc. The Dr Whos were run through this as well, on a fairly conservative setting.
So the tapes, with some DVD-R copies and the original films were delivered to my office in January 2004. By this time my job had disappeared (as part of the rationalisation of ITV in England & Wales in to one company) and I was redundant. I remember I watched the 2 DVDs then wondered idly if they were of interest to anyone. So one lunchtime I googled for Dr Who sites and found one that seemed suitably technical - the Restoration Team. I checked the list of missing programmes and discovered that DMP2 (as it was called) was one of the lost ones.
This made my position far more interesting: something I had stolen 30 years previously had turned out to be valuable. I sent a careful email to the website, asking if there was a “real person” at the end of it and saying I might have something of interest. (It went from my work address and they later said they’d checked me out before replying.)
So the next day I composed a careful email – a summary of the events above – and sent it. The result was impressive: a few seconds after I’d pressed “send” my phone rang. It was a very excited man from the BBC (he ran the website as a hobby with their blessing) wanting the tapes asap and saying they were very pleased to have them back, and that no action would be taken regarding the original theft. In fact, their archivist had expressed the view that it was a shame I hadn’t stolen more! So I sent the tapes & films (in separate boxes, in case one went astray).
A couple of days passed, then (15th January 2004) I got an email saying the tapes had arrived (I imagined him tearing open the jiffy bag and sprinting to the nearest available Digibeta). He attached a draft press release which I approved with a minor change and then asked casually “do you think anyone will be interested?” “Last time the papers picked it up” he said. Oh dear.
The rest of the day went uneventfully. Just as I was leaving I was given a message to ring someone at the BBC. She turned out to be a journalist from the BBC London local news programme asking if I’d like to do a down-the-line interview for them. I declined, pointing out I about to look for consultancy work in the industry and didn’t particularly want to be recognised as the man who nicks your programmes. I remember her asking if I was interested in Dr Who. I said, not particularly, but I did remember vividly watching the first series on their original transmission (in the case of the Dalek ones largely with my hands in front of my eyes – we were a lot less sophisticated in those days). She sounded startled, as if she hadn’t realised anyone could be that old and not lost to senile dementia.
I then peeked at the internet. The BBC had put a headline on their main news page, so there was little chance this was going to creep past unnoticed outside the Dr Who community. (My staff at work delighted in printing off the story and distributing it widely). There was also a version on BBC Teletext. The forum was going berserk, in a way I found frightening. “I’m so happy I’m having a brain haemorrhage” was one memorable post.
The next day I had calls at work from BBC Leeds and BBC Sheffield wanting to do an interview. I had to ring the YTV Press Office to explain what had happened, as I didn’t which to cause any difficulty for my employers. They were sweet enough to say that they thought it I’d done a good thing.
The furore died down. I don’t know if the BBC have ever done anything with DMP2 – shown it at Dr. Who conventions, perhaps. I was asked by a few people “why didn’t you auction it on eBay?” My reply was that it wasn’t my property to auction, it rightly belonged to the BBC and (on a more practical level) I might well have had my collar felt had I tried to profit from it.
Thus ended my involvement with the Dr Who crowd (is there a collective noun, like Trekkers?). It should be remembered that at the point this happened Dr. Who was a long-cancelled and rather sad programme and had not yet burst forth revitalised in spectacular fashion by Russell T Davies.
I watch it now, as I used to as a schoolboy in the 60s. It has far more pace (not a great deal happens in DMP2; in a modern episode the events shown wouldn’t last much over 5 minutes), and the effects that are available fairly cheaply now were not possible then, regardless of cost. But some of the invention seems to have gone: why are there so many episodes with those relics of the 60s, Daleks and Cybermen? Why not new monsters that grab the imagination? (I can remember the whole class being threatened with detention if one more boy said “exterminate” during a lesson.)
In my view, the best story in the new series was one that only employed the Dr. peripherally. In fact I think it one of the best dramas on TV last year: Blink, by Stephen Moffat. I hope he brings this level of creativity to all the episodes once he has taken over from RTD. Apart from being gripping & scary, it used something that has rarely been a feature of Dr. Who stories: the use of time as a factor in the plot. The Dr. travels in time but arrives at a point and the story unravels there. I think there are great possibilities to be had from the time paradox. And no more Daleks, please.
A final heresy: I rather liked Catherine Tate as Donna.
Francis Watson
7th December 2008
(c) Lost Dr Who 2008
I hope Francis doesn't mind me quoting bits of our correspondence verbatim, it sort of feels like it's forming a historical document and there's nothing in there that he hasn't basically said in his own words!