Story: Marco Polo
Written By: John Lucarotti
Length: 7 Episodes
Year: 1964
Now is the time to talk about the lost stories. In the late 60s up to the mid 70s, the BBC made a big long mistake. They had a policy in which television episodes that were considered old and unusable were to be either erased or junked, in order to make room for newer television series.
There were a few reasons for this:
1 - As stated above, they wanted the room for newer programs.
2 - At the time, they were limited to how many times a program could be rerun, so keeping older tapes and film prints seemed unnecessary.
3 - Episodes were no longer viable for sales overseas.
4 - The BBC had no inkling of the future in video sales, which is a HUGE point, because had they any idea that someday geeks like me would shell out some dough to watch these stories again and again, they would have bought a new storage facility.
This problem affected many shows, Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son, Quatermass, and of course Doctor Who. Steptoe and Son has the best survival rate, because low grade copies were made of every episode for writers and the production staff. Doctor Who has the second best survival rate - as while 106 odd episodes are gone for what seems to be forever, every single episode has surviving audio. Apparently, devoted Doctor Who fans recorded the audio of these episodes off of the TVs with tape recorders, before the VCR was ever invented.
"Marco Polo" is the oldest Doctor Who story to be affected by this policy. Unlike a lot of serials in which 1 or some of the episodes are missing...this story is missing all seven. I have seen a Fan Made Reconstruction, using the original audio and pictures to tell the story. While this is, for the time being, the closest one can get to seeing the story, it doesn't really do it justice. The pictures are great, and its clear the sets were pretty detailed but when you only have photographs and audio of a moving visual tale...it loses something. Therefore it is a hard story to review.
I will say that it seemed decent, if not a little long. I find that anything longer than a 6 parter is usually overly long, and I believe "Marco Polo" is no different. The Doctor and Co. meet Marco Polo in the first purely historical story, which feature no sci-fi beyond the TARDIS landing. The good is that Hartnell is from her on out a much warmer Doctor, and his gruffness and stubborness only appears when it needs to.
NEXT TIME: An Epic Quest
Written By: John Lucarotti
Length: 7 Episodes
Year: 1964
Now is the time to talk about the lost stories. In the late 60s up to the mid 70s, the BBC made a big long mistake. They had a policy in which television episodes that were considered old and unusable were to be either erased or junked, in order to make room for newer television series.
There were a few reasons for this:
1 - As stated above, they wanted the room for newer programs.
2 - At the time, they were limited to how many times a program could be rerun, so keeping older tapes and film prints seemed unnecessary.
3 - Episodes were no longer viable for sales overseas.
4 - The BBC had no inkling of the future in video sales, which is a HUGE point, because had they any idea that someday geeks like me would shell out some dough to watch these stories again and again, they would have bought a new storage facility.
This problem affected many shows, Dad's Army, Steptoe and Son, Quatermass, and of course Doctor Who. Steptoe and Son has the best survival rate, because low grade copies were made of every episode for writers and the production staff. Doctor Who has the second best survival rate - as while 106 odd episodes are gone for what seems to be forever, every single episode has surviving audio. Apparently, devoted Doctor Who fans recorded the audio of these episodes off of the TVs with tape recorders, before the VCR was ever invented.
I will say that it seemed decent, if not a little long. I find that anything longer than a 6 parter is usually overly long, and I believe "Marco Polo" is no different. The Doctor and Co. meet Marco Polo in the first purely historical story, which feature no sci-fi beyond the TARDIS landing. The good is that Hartnell is from her on out a much warmer Doctor, and his gruffness and stubborness only appears when it needs to.
NEXT TIME: An Epic Quest
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