The Restoration Team

Steve Roberts talks about his work for the DVD releases.

In the second part of our look at the Doctor Who Restoration Team, Steve Roberts explains how to clean up old episodes for video and DVD release, discusses current projects and reveals why the black and white Jon Pertwee episodes will not be recoloured any time soon...

Briefly put, what is the Restoration Team? How did you all come together?

The Restoration Team (our own moniker - merely a hook to hang us on!) is a group of individuals from within the television industry who share common interests in Doctor Who, television, film technology, and quality.

Originally formed in 1992 as a result of a test to bring colour back to some Jon Pertwee stories that only existed in black and white, the team has grown somewhat over the years.

What does the Restoration Team do?

In simplest terms, we are responsible for providing the best possible quality video masters to BBC Video for VHS and DVD releases. This is a role we took on in 1996, winning it from the previous supplier on both quality and cost grounds.

We have also provided specialist restoration services for BBC Television transmissions of Doctor Who. Most of the time our skills are less in the direct hands-on restoration work and more as planners, co-ordinators and facilitators - bringing the material together and arranging for the job to get done under our watchful eyes.

We still like to get our hands dirty doing the real work when we get the chance, though! It's important to remember that we all have 'real' full-time jobs and the Restoration Team work is done in our own time outside these jobs. A hobby, really!

So, why are old episodes of Doctor Who in such a poor state?

Although the programme has almost exclusively been made on videotape since its beginnings in 1963, many of the original tapes (including all of the sixties monochrome stories) were destroyed many years ago.

The reasons behind this are many and varied - but the main three were that Equity (the actors union) repeat fees and conditions were prohibitively high, making repeat screening economically unviable; storage space was limited and expensive; and nobody could have foreseen the coming of home video over a decade later.

All of the stories had been made available for overseas sales (often in the form of recordings made onto 16mm film), so once the mistake was realised in the late seventies, much of the previously missing history was recovered from the vaults of BBC Enterprises and their overseas customers. Much of this material had been passed on from broadcaster to broadcaster around the world and much of it is in fairly poor condition.

Sadly, 109 episodes, all from the William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton eras are still missing from the archives. Many more episodes exist only in monochrome, although they were made in colour, and a fair few only exist in the US TV format after being recovered from American and Canadian stations.

Put in simple terms, how do you restore an old Black and White episode of Doctor Who? Typically, what work needs to be done?

Our practice has varied somewhat over the years as technology has changed. Basically, the films are transferred on the best possible telecine machines, including wet-gate processing if required to help repair scratched films. We have a great working relationship with the archivist at the Windmill Road archive and are allowed access to the best quality films, which are often priceless original film recording negatives.

Real-time digital image processing is then applied to automatically remove minor dirt, sparkle and grain from the picture, followed by a manual 'de-blobbing' process to correct larger problems such as flashes and film damage. Optical film soundtracks are often lifted off onto DAT cassettes, sent away to our team audio specialist, Mark Ayres, for clean-up and equalisation, then relaid onto the new tape masters.

How long does it take to repair an episode of Doctor Who?

A modern episode which still exists on its original BBC transmission tape usually needs a straight real-time run through digital noise reduction, then a couple of hours or so spotting and correcting defects such as videotape dropouts.

Older, film-originated episodes can take considerably longer than this - we find ourselves dealing not only with film faults, but also faults on the original video recordings that were used to make the films back in the sixties!

We are just commencing work on the Patrick Troughton story The Tomb of the Cybermen for a DVD release next year, the only existing copies of which were recovered in 1992 as 16mm film recordings from a TV station in Hong Kong. This is going to take an enormous amount of time and effort to bring up to acceptable standards...

Why are there bits missing from episodes, and what have you had to do to get around it?

Bits are missing from a lot of the sixties episodes because the recovered prints had been censored by overseas broadcasters. Australian censors in particular were rather zealous, but luckily research by Australian fan Damian Shanahan a few years ago uncovered the original pieces of cut film, still surviving in a government archive.

As well as helping to piece together otherwise incomplete episodes, the censored clips from some of the 109 still-missing episodes exist to give us some sort of feel for these stories. In other instances, we have been fortunate to have been loaned missing material by private collectors who have come across it over the years.

How do you go about re-colourising Dr Who episodes where the colour version isn't in existence?

If there is absolutely no colour copy in existence, or if the existing colour copy is too poor to be of any use, then the only option is computer colourisation. This is extremely expensive (around £25,000 per episode) and we have been unable to secure that sort of budget - maybe prices will drop in the future.

In other cases, we have married broadcast quality monochrome film recordings with the colour from off-air American Betamax recordings to give us a broadcastable colour copy of a story.

What was the problem with doing this to the story Ambassadors of Death?

The only known colour recordings are the previously mentioned off-air Betamax copies. Unfortunately, most of the episodes are afflicted with a severe rainbow patterning effect which makes the colour unusable.

Episode one exists on its original transmission tape and the colour for episode five was good enough to use, but the only real option for the remaining five episodes is computer colourisation - at a cost of over £100,000, this is not a realistic option.

Recreating the Tenth Planet episode four - how did that come about, and are you proud of it?

We had previously provided a short linking reconstruction of the missing episodes two and three of The Ice Warriors for the BBC Video release, utilising off-air fan audio recordings and off-screen photographs ('telesnaps') taken during transmission, coupled with narration and graphics.

The original intention for The Tenth Planet was to issue episode four as an audio CD, but with a little encouragement BBC Video agreed to fund a full-length telesnap reconstruction. This was carried out entirely by team member Ralph Montagu and we think he did a great job!

Has the Restoration Team had any luck finding missing Doctor Who material?

Although we seem to have been involved in just about every piece of material returned to the BBC since we formed, it has mostly been as go-betweens for people wanting to return material - although we have done a fair deal of persuasion in a lot of these cases.

Film collectors can sometimes be very wary about returning material to the BBC, fearing (completely unwarranted) that they may be prosecuted for having BBC material. Of course, the BBC is only too happy to just borrow material to make its own copies and return the original to the collector... but I think it's good that we have a reputation for being able to help people out. We were the first port of call for the New Zealand fans who discovered a missing William Hartnell episode a couple of years ago - and hopefully we may someday have that pleasure again!

Between us we have found a few bits and pieces, mostly little extracts from the show that have cropped up in other programmes, or sometimes even material miscataloged in the BBC's own archive.

Is the Restoration Team doing work restoring other programmes?

Again, mostly as go-betweens for film collectors to return material. This has included such wide-ranging shows as Spike Milligan's Q5, Til Death Us Do Part, Lulu, The Frost Report and Benny Hill.

However, a lot of us work inside the BBC and have been instrumental in steering other programmes down the restoration route... I think our enthusiasm for what can be done these days often rubs off on others and results in better quality products at the end of the day.

What's been your biggest triumph? (either a discovery, or a restored scene that's come up a treat).

Even though we could technically do a much better job of it now, I think the original colour restorations we did in 1992 are still some of our most important work. I shall never forget the amazement of seeing The Daemons in colour when we did our first tests and realised that we were going to be able to make a silly idea work!

I'm also very proud of the work we've been doing on the DVD range. The Missing Years was fun too - thanks to the generosity of several people, we managed to get our hands on a lot of previously unseen or very rare material and get it out there for everyone to see.

What's been the biggest disappointment?

Usually things that aren't our fault... Putting an enormous amount of effort into restoring The War Machines or making The Five Doctors - Special Edition, only to find that the duplicators totally messed up the retail copies, for instance.

We did recently make a little faux-pas of our own with the Remembrance of the Daleks DVD, inadvertently losing a couple of video effects during remastering. That's something that we should have been more careful about - it was a genuine mistake, but it shouldn't have happened.

Do you feel you get the recognition you deserve, or are you worried you're all being taken for granted?

We're not in it for the recognition (and certainly not the money!). We do it because we enjoy it and because we believe that we are the best people to do the job. You don't have to look very hard to see the improvement in the quality of the BBC releases since we've been working on them - not just technically, but in all the added-value that we've been able to source.

We're producing the sort of product that we would be happy to spend our own money on... which is probably the best test!

What kind of work are you doing on the series for DVDs. Are there any really interesting highlights we can look forward to?

DVD has brought with it a need to push the quality envelope even further. Quality that may have been acceptable for VHS are not acceptable for DVD. I see this as a good thing - we're having to work harder, but we're putting out a better product for the fans. We effectively act as content producers for the DVDs, suggesting, sourcing and supplying all the video and audio material that will be used on the disc. We then hand this over to our disc producer, Ross McGinley, in BBC Worldwide, whose job it is to take our material and turn it into a finished DVD.

DVD has also brought new kinds of work that we wouldn't have done in the VHS days. We're trying to get as many extras onto the discs as we can... trailers, featurettes, music soundtracks, commentaries etc. We were the first people in Europe to put out a DVD with an onscreen text commentary giving the viewer the opportunity to learn more about the production background as they were viewing the programme.

The latest DVD to be released, The Caves of Androzani, is one I think will be very popular. We all put a lot of hard work into this one and I think it will be the best Doctor Who DVD yet... We've got a lot of ideas for The Tomb of the Cybermen... but we're keeping them under our collective hat for now!

What missing bit of Doctor Who would you most like to see back in the archives?

I would love to see Patrick Troughton's first story, The Power of the Daleks. The production photos for the story look amazing - and I've always been a big fan of those mechanised pepperpots!