Pertwee in Black and White

If you’re a classic Doctor Who fan, you probably know that a lot of episodes from the 1960s don’t exist in the archives any more, and like me you’re probably quite cross about that. However, in many ways we should consider ourselves lucky, as very few programmes of that time have as much surviving material as Doctor Who, and that we have all of Jon Pertwee’s episodes shows this.

Many of Jon Pertwee’s episodes do not exist in their original formats. Some do, like Carnival of Monsters. Some, like Inferno, are kind of first-generation copies from the American NTSC conversions, which have to be converted back using Reverse Standards Conversion. Worse still are the nineties recolourisations of Doctor Who and the Silurians, Terror of the Autons and The Daemons, along with parts of The Ambassadors of Death, which only have colour thanks to off-air video recordings. And the worst are the episodes that exist today solely in B&W, and The Mind of Evil is the only story to have none of its episodes in colour.

The reasons for this are the same as the missing episodes of the sixties. The BBC wiped the original videotapes, but recorded the programme onto other formats (NTSC, B&W) for sale to countries which didn’t broadcast colour VT. When archiving became more of a priority, it recalled what it could, but had to settle for inferior standards.

RSC has helped improve the picture quality of the NTSC tapes, but restoring colour is a different challenge. Until recently, you could pay to have each frame coloured manually (very expensive) or release the B&W footage.

Thankfully, a process has been discovered to restore the original colour to a B&W image. When they were converted (usually by pointing a camera at a screen), the B&W film picked up chromadots, tiny little specks on the image containing the colour information. These were supposed to have been deleted after converting, but most people didn’t since it was an unnecessary hassle. People who are good at science have somehow been able to take these and return the colour to the image.

According to the current DVD schedule, we probably won’t see any of these until 2013 (bar the already released Planet of the Daleks episode 3). It has been reported that The Mind of Evil  has been restored to full colour, though it is still unscheduled, and the delay on The Ambassadors of Death (which was to have been released later this year but has been delayed pending further restoration) suggests that these may take a while.

1 year ago  /  5 notes