WATCH ALONG | CLASSIC DOCTOR WHO | 7x9 | Doctor Who and the Silurians: Episode 5

The slightly blurry picture quality you noticed is unfortunately unavoidable. While it's true that there are no more completely missing episodes, only about one-third of the Pertwee-era episodes still exist on their original transmission videotapes (or in the unique case of "Spearhead from Space", on their original 16mm film prints). In fact, the first episode of the next story ("The Ambassadors of Death") is the sole surviving original videotape from this entire season. Up until the practice was stopped in the late 1970s, the BBC would routinely make copies of the episodes (on either black-and-white film, or colour videotape) for sales to other countries, and then erase the original videotapes in order to reuse them for other productions. For many of the early-1970s episodes, including all of "The Silurians", the only full-resolution version remaining is a black-and-white film copy. Nevertheless, we are still able to see all the Pertwee episodes in colour, thanks to some ingenious and painstaking technical wizardry from the team responsible for preparing the DVD and Blu-ray ranges. In the case of this story, when remastering it for DVD in 2008 they were able to use a domestic videotape recording from the U.S., which had been made by a fan when the story was shown there in the 1970s, as a colour source. The low-resolution colour signal from the domestic tape was carefully overlaid on the high-resolution B&W pictures to produce a full-colour version which, while still not as good as the original would have been, is the best approximation to it we're ever likely to see. UPDATE, next day: It seems my "about one-third" estimate above was too pessimistic. I've just checked my copy of the definitive work on the subject, Richard Molesworth's "Wiped! Doctor Who's Missing Episodes" (yes, of course there's a book about it -- this is Doctor Who, the most researched TV show of all time... :-)) Actually slightly over half of the Jon Pertwee era exists in its original transmission format, so the situation's not as bad as you may have thought based on my original post.

Steven Cooper