10 Doctor Who Real Life Alternate Timelines

9. What If The BBC Had Never Erased Any Of The Episodes?

In the '60s and '70s, the BBC erased videotapes of Doctor Who after they were broadcast, or copied to film for overseas sale and then destroyed. These days, everything can be and is stored for posterity. But what if the BBC had retained all episodes of Doctor Who? Entire sub-branches of Doctor Who fandom would never have existed. Who cares about rare telesnaps by John Cura or off-air recordings by fans such as Graham Strong or David Holman if you can pop in a DVD to see any episode you wanted? The series' success would have continued along the same lines as it has either way, only with a great deal more material for the BBC to release for syndication, then on video, and then to DVD and digital formats. The quality of those earlier episodes wouldn't be nearly as good, though. Those episodes look as good as they do because of the VidFIRE technique developed by Peter Finklestone to address the quality drop caused by telerecording a videotaped programme using a film camera. We'd like to think that Finklestone would have developed the process anyway, and as those of us who still have the un-VidFIREd Tomb of the Cybermen can attest, it's better with VidFIRE than without it. Then there are the reconstruction artists that got their careers started trying to marry telesnaps with existing audio to create watchable (and not so watchable) versions of those lost stories, and the recolourised versions of the Pertwee episodes that were telerecorded in black and white... What would happen to them? Still, we're sure many of us would love to have a grainy copy of the fourth episode of The Tenth Planet, or an even grainier copy of Power of the Daleks, than a reconstruction, or none at all.