When "Tomb of the Cybermen" was found, we were told that a missing episodes office would be set up inside the BBC to find all kinds of lost TV around the globe and that a finder's fee would be paid. The BBC would pay whatever the material was worth. Then...it all went quiet. Nothing more was heard, and those who talked in favour of it (including one BBC engineer who pondered what kind of goodies this would prise out of the woodwork when word spread) soon began to dismiss it as a bad idea. One Dr.Who fan even offered to buy a full size Dalek replica to anyone who returned an episode and this was featured reasonably prominently in the news at the time. Again, this was dismissed as a bad idea. Why?

I've seen lost TV shows go for auction on Ebay and consortiums of fans are happy to pay for the film prints, but when it comes to lost Dr.Who, their response is (and they have said this) is to email the seller and ask if they would be prepared to loan it to the BBC for copying. WHAT? And reduce the cost of it? And why not do this with other lost TV shows? Or is Dr. flippin' Who the be-all and end-all of archival chases?

This rumour started off in the summer as "90 missing episodes found" and even some big name fans were taken in by it, but the BBC (and those in a position to know and/or find out) always rubbished it. The story seems to be this: in the summer, someone in Africa (probably an old TV company, but a private collector has also been mentioned) sent a large package of old TV material to a company in the UK. The shows were to be remastered from old, obsolete formats into something that could be played with modern technology, something that the company specialised it. Somehow this news got picked up by the Dr.Who fraternity who made 2+2=106. So, almost certainly its a case of "move along, nothing to see here."
At any rate, if Ethiopia has got anything, they never bought the broadcast rights to the Troughton era, so all we'd have to recover at best would be a handful of Hartnells, but still better than nothing.
BUT just suppose the rumour is true, could the BBC have kept it quote for all these months? Ostensibly yes. The two episodes found in 2011 were "found" in the summer but this was a well kept secret until "Missing Believed Wiped" at the British Film Institute in December. Even the programme said they would be showing "1960s BBC Science Fiction" with no mention as to what it was. No one had a clue until much closer to the event. And when "Tomb of the Cybermen" was found in 1991, the BBC put out a cover story that it was simply four episodes of an already existing story. The secret was apparently kept hidden for at least a few weeks; all other missing episode "finds" have been quite quickly reported.
Lastly, a little plug for my own website about the missing episodes of Dr.Who.

A few companies have pulled out of advertising on Facebook after bad publicity, so it does work apparently.

I use Social Fixer all the time and while I haven't used any of the exotic features like tabbing that people are so enamoured with, I can see how they could be a great boon to some users. But I feel that Kruse is being naive in asking people to respond to his comments about Social Fixer and Facebook's demands. When his Social Fixer page was eradicated, he and his admin staff were suspended by Facebook. By venting their spleen on his current page, users are identifying themselves and do you really think Facebook will think twice about deleting a couple of hundred or thousand of disgruntled people? Of course not. Thats why I don't reply to the Social Fixer forums on Facebook. God knows who is monitoring the conversations!

I think Peter Cook says in his autobiography that when he found out that the series was going to junked, he tried to buy copies but the BBC refused. The singer Sandy (sp?) Shaw also tried to buy copies of her stuff but the BBC spitefully destroyed her stuff anyway. From what I've read, they went out their way to junk her recordings as soon as she made inquiries.

No, there was no burning of a studio warehouse. Sorry. It was deliberate destruction by the BBC.

In terms of UK TV shows, they were recorded onto separate spools of video tape, and location filming done on film. When the finished programme was completed, the individual spools were erased for other TV shows (some have survived though), and the filmed material thrown away (again, some have survived). All that was left was the final completed tape.

Video tape was used a lot in the 1960s and I suspect the 1950s. But it had the advantage that it could be wiped and reused.

Well, yes, but does that count ;-) ? Whatever was completed before the strike dug its talons in has been preserved.

I bet that when it was announced Elvis's songs were coming out of copyright, he was "all shook up."

;-)

:-)

I know technology has improved a huge amount since then, but some of the 1970s/80s PAL to NTSC conversions were awful. Reds looked pink, blues looked turquoise and so on. So my little icon was a subtle "dig" at that ;-)

You'd be surprised.

From 1993 onwards there has been a British Film Institute Initiative to recover lost British TV. Its called "Missing Believed Wiped." I attended the first two of these and we were told that anything - brief clips, audio recordings, cine film taken from a TV set, domestic VCR/VTR material etc. was of interest. But I know of a few cases where audio material was offered up and there was no interest. One BBC Engineer was given a lost Harry Worth TV episode and he kept it in his locker for the better part of a year before giving it to the archives.

And then there is the matter of the wiped children's shows. You might think these don't count; only vid kid after all? But people have fond memories of some of those TV shows and were horrified to discover that the BBC Archivist had decided on his own back in 1993 to wipe many episodes so that the 2 inch tape could be sold to countries that used this obsolete format (Australia, being one I believe). Some of those shows only exist because commercial copies had been made for overseas sales, but the original tapes are now gone. When the BBC wanted to put together a tribute night to one of the people involved in one of those kids shows, they were horrified to find that a lot of stuff had been erased. And the BBC Archivist kept his job. At the same time as he was doing this, he was on the podium at "Missing Believed Wiped" telling the audience that the BBC were interested in lost material. Oh, the irony. Oh, the hypocrisy.

Yes, you're right and this is why the weblink I gave above is a kaleidoscope of colours for all the different formats between 1970 and 1974; fortunately all those episodes are now in colour to varying qualities. The "Chroma Dot/Colour Recovery" process of which you speak has been used on 12 episodes of Dr.Who with varying degrees of success, and two non-Dr.Who episodes. But, in a nutshell, the Jon Pertwee now exists in colour in its entirety.

Yes the US archival situation is a lot better than the UK one. One reason is that multiple copies of TV shows were made so that they could be shown across the states in multiple time zones and with more copies, there's more chance of something having survived.

No, this is not true, sorry. There was no fire at the storage facilities. People use this as an excuse for the BBC's dire archival status, but the only "fire" was in the furnaces that the BBC utilised and into which episodes of many TV shows were thrown.

Also, don't forget that the Actors and Musicians union limited the number of repeats that could be shown in any given year; nowadays it seems to be mostly repeats with a few new programmes thrown in to the schedules occasionally.
The Union members hated repeats as their members didn't get paid as much compared to first-run broadcasts. So effectively, the TV broadcasters were accumulating large amounts of material that they couldn't reshow.