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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.
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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.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
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