Yes indeed! That's something to hope for.Sam wrote:You never know... Other Hendry episodes could turn up one day. "Girl" was once upon a time thought to be lost forever!
And it led me to find an interesting page from someone who traced the episode:
http://archive.whoniversity.co.uk/gatew ... unter.html
The Internet has given us a fantastic tool. We can now make immediate and cheap contact with other collectors and TV stations all over the world. Lots of TV archives are starting to list their contents online and there is a far greater knowledge amongst fans of what is missing and what avenues have already been explored.
Perhaps once there was a feeling that "It's okay, the BBC are on the case," but now it's very obvious how little has been searched and how sketchy the foreign sales records of these shows are. It's only fans like Ian Levine, Steve Roberts and Damian Shanahan, etc., who have the dedication, knowledge and passion to (want to) make a difference. There are plenty of other fans out there who would love to help in the search but wouldn't know where to search, or fear that they would just be treading over old ground. You can't help but feel that the BBC don't really want the help of outsiders, just in case things turn up and fall into the hands of greedy collectors.
Out of curiosity I called up a list of "16mm" film collectors on my online search engine. World-wide, it came up with something like 17,000 matches. Rather more than the small Restoration Team could ever get a chance to search. I started making contact with a few collectors and within just a few weeks I had unearthed a collector in Britain selling 16mm copies of The Web of Fear 1 and The Evil of the Daleks 2 for 150 pounds each. I asked Steve Roberts for advice and he was already aware that the BBC episodes had been copied at some stage. The same collector was also holding a "lost" episode from another TV drama serial, though asking around it seemed that no one was particularly bothered. Another film collector offered me a lost BBC show from the 1960's with Tony Hart exploring the possibilities of space travel. Whilst elsewhere on the Internet I found some Australian fans complaining about a greedy collector who was trying to sell 16mm prints of The Dalek Invasion of Earth for $150 each. Elsewhere I saw a report of someone buying an 8mm print of The Wheel in Space 6 for 250 pounds.
Then one day, quite by accident, I stumbled across the homepage of the UCLA Film and TV archive. This was a university in Los Angeles and I didn't expect to find anything more than a few old Shakespeare plays. I checked to see if they had any Doctor Who and their site came back with one match, an incomplete print of the first Peter Cushing film, Doctor Who and the Daleks. I tried another search using the name "BBC" and it threw back a couple of hundred matches. I looked at the dates and was amazed to see that much of the stuff dated from the 50's, 60's and 70's. I tried another search using the words "British TV" and it threw back a catalogue of several thousand items.
I knew precious little about other "lost" shows, except Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son and Hancock's Half Hour, so I turned to my online pal Mike Long for advice. Within minutes he wrote back and proclaimed that we'd found a lost Avengers episode, Girl on a Trapeze. I had seen The Avengers episodes listed there. There were a couple of others, including one that I had watched called The Frighteners and I just didn't imagine that there were any missing Avengers episodes. I made contact with the archive coordinator at UCLA, and the BBC to advise them that there was a wealth of material that they might like to check. Unfortunately I didn't know the copyright owner of The Avengers and rather stupidly I emailed a posting on the Missing Episodes Online Forum site to try and get some advice. All Hell suddenly seemed to break loose with interested parties contacting UCLA, the BBC, etc., and I think there was a real worry at the time that the Avengers print might vanish into the wrong hands before the rightful owners even knew that it had been found. I also made contact with the British Film Institute and the National Film Theatre to try and get recovery proceedings underway. It took quite an effort to find someone who was interested and knowledgeable enough to want to get it back. Fortunately, things have settled down a bit now and the National Film Theatre is on the case, negotiating with UCLA and the copyright holders in order to obtain a copy of the film print.
This taught me several things. Firstly that I wasn't entirely wasting my time. In the space of just three weeks and a few hundred online sites I had found several lost shows. I may have even been looking at others and not even realised it. Secondly, it also proves how parochial we all are. We fans know and love Doctor Who and could name each and every one of the 109 missing Doctor Who episodes, and we automatically assume that everyone else in the film and TV industry does too, which is obviously not the case. If a Doctor Who fan can stumble upon a lost Avengers print and not realise it, then it is quite likely that an Avengers, Hancock or Steptoe fan could probably see a missing Doctor Who print and not know its significance either. I also feel that what with the initial disinterest that I experienced from large organisations like the BFI and the NFT, any collector who wanted to donate their own film collections might be put off from doing so.
