Not On Your Telly includes an article about the first ever full-length Doctor Who-related radio show from 1966. Here's an extract from it...
![]( "Not On Your Telly - Daleks: Invasion Radio 1966 A.D.")
With all of the excitement about the recent recovery of long-lost late sixties Doctor Who stories The Enemy Of The World and The Web Of Fear, and the subsequent deserved focusing of attention on those intrepid individuals who actually hunt down long-forgotten film cans (and not just Doctor Who ones either - there are lots of people out there trying to find other equally deserving lost programmes, who never seem to get the credit, publicity or assistance they really should), it’s worth indulging in a spot of cheerleading for the much smaller band of enthusiasts who devote their time to hunting down stray recordings of lost radio shows.
What’s that? You didn’t even know there was any missing radio? Well, that’s understandable. Radio’s been far less prominent than most other media for a long time now, and the relative ease of storing recorded sound would not unreasonably lead you to assume that pretty much everything has been kept since those pioneering days of ‘Uncle Mac’ telling stories about the Yompity Yo or something. Yet it’s that same compactness and reusability that has led to big archival gaps for all kinds of shows - some of which you’d be really surprised by - right up into the early nineties.
You may think that the history of the Film and Videotape archives is complicated, but up until John Birt instigated a consolidation with an eye on an eventual move to digital archive repeat stations in the mid-nineties, the BBC’s audio output was mostly scattered around a dizzying maze of smaller departmental archives - a main Sound Archive did exist but was still very picky about what ‘prestige’ material it opted to retain, even shunning Radio 1’s repeated offers to send over sessions by The Rolling Stones and company for safekeeping - and along the way a lot of material had been lost, recorded over, or just plain not recorded in the first place.
With a bit of luck and persistence, though, it’s possible to eventually find just about anything that went out after home recording became widespread, from Nick Drake’s lone John Peel session to Chris Morris’ Radio 1 debut in 1990 to Radio 3 sitcom (yes, you did read that right) Patterson to even individual news reports and one-off dramas, and I can attest to having my own personal moment of high excitement on discovering a set of C60s containing the missing-since-broadcast first series of early Stephen Fry vehicle Delve Special, which somehow failed to make the lead item on the Nine O’Clock News. Ah well, have a listen next time it’s on Radio 4 Extra. Anyway, the point of this preamble is to get around to the fact that there’s quite a lot of Doctor Who-related radio appearances currently missing but doubtless out there on some unsuspecting fan’s dust-gathering collection of cassettes. No, really. If you thought that long-lost promotional television appearances by, say, Wendy Padbury and Frazer Hines on Crackerjack, The Daleks on The Sky At Night and Celation from The Daleks’ Master Plan on Points Of View were exciting, just you wait until you start delving into the long history of Doctor Who-related radio plugs.
And on an unrelated note, if anyone out there has Marvin The Paranoid Android from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy appearing on Radio 1’s magazine show Studio B15 in 1982, please could you let me know? Thanks.
![]( "Daleks: Invasion Radio 1966 A.D.")
You can find the full version of this article, and lots more about Doctor Who besides, in Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, which is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.
With all of the excitement about the recent recovery of long-lost late sixties Doctor Who stories The Enemy Of The World and The Web Of Fear, and the subsequent deserved focusing of attention on those intrepid individuals who actually hunt down long-forgotten film cans (and not just Doctor Who ones either - there are lots of people out there trying to find other equally deserving lost programmes, who never seem to get the credit, publicity or assistance they really should), it’s worth indulging in a spot of cheerleading for the much smaller band of enthusiasts who devote their time to hunting down stray recordings of lost radio shows.
What’s that? You didn’t even know there was any missing radio? Well, that’s understandable. Radio’s been far less prominent than most other media for a long time now, and the relative ease of storing recorded sound would not unreasonably lead you to assume that pretty much everything has been kept since those pioneering days of ‘Uncle Mac’ telling stories about the Yompity Yo or something. Yet it’s that same compactness and reusability that has led to big archival gaps for all kinds of shows - some of which you’d be really surprised by - right up into the early nineties.
You may think that the history of the Film and Videotape archives is complicated, but up until John Birt instigated a consolidation with an eye on an eventual move to digital archive repeat stations in the mid-nineties, the BBC’s audio output was mostly scattered around a dizzying maze of smaller departmental archives - a main Sound Archive did exist but was still very picky about what ‘prestige’ material it opted to retain, even shunning Radio 1’s repeated offers to send over sessions by The Rolling Stones and company for safekeeping - and along the way a lot of material had been lost, recorded over, or just plain not recorded in the first place.
With a bit of luck and persistence, though, it’s possible to eventually find just about anything that went out after home recording became widespread, from Nick Drake’s lone John Peel session to Chris Morris’ Radio 1 debut in 1990 to Radio 3 sitcom (yes, you did read that right) Patterson to even individual news reports and one-off dramas, and I can attest to having my own personal moment of high excitement on discovering a set of C60s containing the missing-since-broadcast first series of early Stephen Fry vehicle Delve Special, which somehow failed to make the lead item on the Nine O’Clock News. Ah well, have a listen next time it’s on Radio 4 Extra. Anyway, the point of this preamble is to get around to the fact that there’s quite a lot of Doctor Who-related radio appearances currently missing but doubtless out there on some unsuspecting fan’s dust-gathering collection of cassettes. No, really. If you thought that long-lost promotional television appearances by, say, Wendy Padbury and Frazer Hines on Crackerjack, The Daleks on The Sky At Night and Celation from The Daleks’ Master Plan on Points Of View were exciting, just you wait until you start delving into the long history of Doctor Who-related radio plugs.
And on an unrelated note, if anyone out there has Marvin The Paranoid Android from The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy appearing on Radio 1’s magazine show Studio B15 in 1982, please could you let me know? Thanks.
You can find the full version of this article, and lots more about Doctor Who besides, in Not On Your Telly, a book collecting some of my articles on the archive TV we never get to see, which is available in paperback here or as an eBook here.