"It's like raaaiiiin on your wedding day" etc

Doubtless you will all by now have heard the good news about the recovery of a couple more clips from The Power of the Daleks (and, just to show we're not all blindly Who-centric, some much more substantial clips from a missing Out of the Unknown episode). If not, have a click on this RT forum thread and rejoice in the good news.

It does, however, make you think. No, not about how over-excited we fanboys can get about twenty-odd seconds worth of film - we already knew all about that. More about how bloody ironic it is that some of the most dedicated researchers in the world of archive television have searched high and low for Who episodes and clips down the years. And then, not only have these clips existed in an old edition of Tomorrow's World at the BBC all along, but how do they get found in the end? Not through Andrew Pixley picking up a paper trail at the Written Archives Centre. Not through Ian Levine remembering seeing it broadcast at the time. Not even through Andrew Martin finding the episode in the vaults of Windmill Road.

No, it gets found because the BBC actually broadcast it to the nation as part of clip-based nostalgia show Sunday Past Times on a lazy weekend morning.

Not quite "Oh, we had these episodes of The Ice Warriors in the cupboard the whole time!" but it still makes you think. Think what, exactly, I'm not entirely certain. 

Comments

[Stuart Ian Burns]

Makes you think that actually this stuff may be out there somewhere. I look at the Kenyon and Mitchell story. They're film archive was hidden in an oil drum in the basement of a shop and only turned up when someone was doing some building work.

I'm waiting for the day when we hear about the BBC employee who was squirreling away copies of all kinds of material which s/he knew as being junked and couldn't bare to see it happen. But no one but s/he was aware of it and one day a house will be demolished/moved into and everything will be found hidden in box in the loft. Even 'The Feast of Steven'

[Paul Songer]

i reckon the beeb should try their cupboards again!!!!!!!!!

[Salem]

I honestly think this is all some clever plot, and Roger Delgado is somewhere up at Beeb home office rubbing his hands together and laughing like a maniacal Ricky Gervais every few months, randomly releasing 20 seconds of Doctor Who.

This way, sometime about 30 more years from now, we'll have a complete collection of the series, fragmatically restored to blu-HD-DVD-ray-discs and playable in most major home appliances in full Hologrammatic 4-D. And by that time, Simon Pegg will have finished building his own TARDIS, and will have collected all the old film reels anyway, to start releasing himself. One day ladies and gents, one day we will have all of them back.

[Kevin Jordan]

Whoa! Just had a strange picture pop into my head there of the Master doing the Ricky Gervais "dance" from The Office while menacing the Doc with his Tissue Compression Eliminator. Must drink less coffee...

[Patrick Crozier]

It makes me wonder where Tommorrow's World got the clips from. According to Gallifrey One it was from an edition that was only broadcast in 1996.

[Paul Hayes]

No, that's a typo. It's definitely 1966.