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.
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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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.
Any source to this? Sounds reasonable but then one reads only about BBC being evil...
After all, for a "Broadcasting Corporation" it should be easy to leave some pointers somewhere...
Amnesty? You'd think they'd be rewarding people who came forward with lost materials.
Pretty sure The Guardian does not have any sort of paywall.
Couldn't find a list of the "recovered" Dr. Who episodes anywhere. Anyone have the titles?
Curious if I have them in my archives.
chances are if you have them on DVD or VHS they are already found, most of the missing episodes only aired once and all of them aired before home recording.
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.
Storage takes space and costs money!
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.
I think a fire claimed SOME of them (not nearly all though)