When Sue Malden started working as an assistant researcher for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in the early 1970s, she imagined the broadcaster’s 20-plus year history of television was tucked away somewhere on shelves—a towering video library of cultural history from the Queen’s 1953 coronation to hundreds of episodes of Doctor Who.
But as Malden began to familiarize herself with the spare inventory of past programming, the reality was much different. “What I found was that there were many gaps,” Malden tells Mental Floss. “A lot of things just weren’t there.”
It would take years, but when Malden eventually assumed the post of Television Archive Selector in 1979, she had educated herself on the BBC’s stern and unsentimental methods for dealing with the bulk of their content. Because shows weren’t often repeated, there was no long-term need to retain them. And because videotape was an expensive storage medium at the time, it was far more sensible to reuse cassettes rather than buy new ones.
The company kept a bulk-erasure machine on hand to systematically wipe out shows that were believed to have exhausted their usefulness. Reams of paperwork indicated a large chunk of their content was rubber-stamped into destruction using just three words: “no further interest.”
As Malden tried to corral the wastefulness, she decided to use Doctor Who as a research guide to track the steps of how the BBC went from filming a series to ordering its demise.
Out of 253 produced episodes of Doctor Who, the BBC had not a single original copy left.
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For much of the 1950s, television in the UK was viewed in much the same way as the radio programming it was beginning to replace: Live newscasts, teleplays, and other series were intended to be consumed in the moment. If viewers really liked something, then it would be “repeated” by reassembling the actors and performing it for a second time.
“Television meant being live, over, and done with,” says Richard Molesworth, a BBC historian and author of Wiped!, a detailed chronicle of how the channel discarded a large chunk of Doctor Who history. “When videotape came about in the late 1950s, it wasn’t seen as a means of preservation or as an archival format,” he tells Mental Floss. “It was in case a program was to be repeated in a short period of time—days or weeks.”
The two-inch tape adopted by the broadcaster beginning in 1958 was perceived as a way of getting a program on the air by having completed and edited footage ready for transmission. Across departments, there was virtually no incentive to treat those tapes as part of a long-term storage approach. In fact, it was the opposite: Because tapes often came out of a show’s budget, wiping old episodes and reusing them saved money. Barely any episodes from the entire first season of The Avengers, for example, are believed to have survived; Z Cars, a popular cop drama, was also snuffed out.