When Sue Malden began working as an assistant researcher for the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) within the early 1970s, she imagined the broadcaster’s 20-plus yr historical past of tv was tucked away someplace on cabinets—a towering video library of cultural historical past from the Queen’s 1953 coronation to tons of of episodes of Doctor Who.
But as Malden started to familiarize herself with the spare stock of previous programming, the truth was a lot completely 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, however when Malden finally assumed the submit of Television Archive Selector in 1979, she had educated herself on the BBC’s stern and unsentimental strategies for coping with the majority of their content material. Because exhibits weren’t typically repeated, there was no long-term must retain them. And as a result of videotape was an costly storage medium on the time, it was much more wise to reuse cassettes relatively than purchase new ones.
The firm saved a bulk-erasure machine readily available to systematically wipe out exhibits that had been believed to have exhausted their usefulness. Reams of paperwork indicated a big chunk of their content material was rubber-stamped into destruction utilizing simply three phrases: “no further interest.”
As Malden tried to corral the wastefulness, she determined to make use of Doctor Who as a analysis information to trace the steps of how the BBC went from filming a sequence 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 a lot of the 1950s, tv within the UK was considered in a lot the identical method because the radio programming it was starting to exchange: Live newscasts, teleplays, and different sequence had been meant to be consumed within the second. If viewers actually appreciated one thing, then it will 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 writer of Wiped!, an in depth chronicle of how the channel discarded a big chunk of Doctor Who historical past. “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 starting in 1958 was perceived as a method of getting a program on the air by having accomplished and edited footage prepared for transmission. Across departments, there was just about no incentive to deal with these tapes as half of a long-term storage strategy. In truth, it was the other: Because tapes typically got here out of a present’s price range, wiping previous episodes and reusing them saved cash. Barely any episodes from the whole first season of The Avengers, for instance, are believed to have survived; Z Cars, a well-liked cop drama, was additionally snuffed out.