The Who Prize

After reading the Wired article a few months back regarding lost media gems. Some of those particular gems are the lost Doctor Who episodes.

For those not familiar with Doctor Who, the series has been running in one form or another since the 60s. The main character, the Doctor, has had 11 official incarnations since the show's inceptions, and each doctor is indicated by their ordinal, e.g., the Xth Doctor (albeit, in outside material; within the show, he's just "the Doctor").

The missing episodes are products of the original media being destroyed (intentionally) by BBC to clear room in their storage. Fortunately, for many of the episodes in this case, there existed either home video recordings or foreign distributions that somehow found their way back to BBC, to be digitally remastered and then released to the public. However, there are still many episodes missing, and all of these missing episodes are from the First and Second Doctors' tenure.

When I tried to introduce my wife to Doctor Who, I thought that starting at the beginning would be a good idea. However, this is not necessarily the best way, as there are a lot of gaps. I wanted to show her the missing episodes, but could only find the audio recordings, the novelizations, and some fan recreations of varying quality.

When BBC released "The Invasion," a Second Doctor serial with missing episodes, they used an animation company (who had previously done a web serial called "Scream of the Shalka" with an alternate Tenth Doctor, now known as the Shalka Doctor, played by Robert E. Grant) called Cosgrove Hall. The quality was akin to Flash-animations, but it was an episode nonetheless. To my knowledge they have used Cosgrove for other Who-related things, including a Tenth Doctor animated series, and to recreate parts of "The Reign of Terror", a First Doctor serial about the French Revolution. Likewise, some company (I'm not sure which) is supposedly doing some CG work on a previously untelevised, unfinished Fourth Doctor serial, written by Douglas Adams, called "Shada."

I think, though, that to funnel all the work through one or a few companies is taking too long to get the lesser popular episodes in suitable forms for the public, so I'm proposing BBC do the following:

Set up a website for "The Who Prize," in which investors may pledge money towards lost episodes. These pledges may be a general pledge, or a per-episode pledge, or even some other sort of pledge to suit the situations that may arise with respect to missing and lost episodes (such as a finder's prize if something turns up). It's important that the BBC also grant amnesty towards anybody who has been otherwise afraid of revealing that they have a copy.

The other side of the site would be the creative side. These people would pick an episode, have access to the surviving media, and produce a suitable reconstruction of the episode, be it computer animation, 2D animation, or even reenactment. These videos would be submitted to the site, and viewable by either the general public, the site's members, the judges, or some other set of individuals to which viewing abilities would be of merit. The judges would select the best version of an episode, or, at their discretion, best versions to splice together professionally, and the winner or winners would receive a cut of the prize in exchange for turning the rights of the video over to BBC.

Making the videos available to some subset of the general public, too, would enable users to rank their favorites, which would help filter out videos of lesser quality.

I think, though, that if we took the problem of the missing and lost Doctor Who episodes, and crowdsourced them, we'd not only get it done a whole lot faster, but we'd also get a more diverse mix of talent helping to restore a lost page of a science fiction classic.

Until then, let's hope that Cosgrove and BBC have a wonderful working relationship.