The basic premise here is that people with these lost episodes ‘stole’ them from bins after they were thrown out by the BBC, so don’t want to admit this to the BBC, as they are worried that the rather large corporation that the BBC is, will take them to court and win.
Ex-BBC archives staff. They have had an amnesty in place for decades. They will let you keep the recording if you wish, they just want to make a copy. Any serious collector would know this. The article is quite dreadful, Franklin the main interviewee has criticized it apparently.
Amnesty? You’d think they’d be rewarding people who came forward with lost materials.
Couldn’t find a list of the “recovered” Dr. Who episodes anywhere. Anyone have the titles?
Curious if I have them in my archives.
It’s insane that BBC just threw out material. Talk about some short-sighted bullshit.
But of course there are immense amounts of material just rotting away out there, I’m sure.
Agree, applying the standards and beliefs of today to 60-70 years ago is quite tricky though. They needed the space, media was expensive and so reused. They just did not foresee repeated content as being valuable… today… we like repeats!
This was common with most major national broadcasters: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_television_broadcast
Not just thrown out, I think some old Dr. Who episodes are missing because they literally taped over them to user for other shows.