The OmniRumor, 10 years on

It’s been ten years since the Doctor Who Missing Episode “Omnirumor” broke containment and made it out into the mainstream. I haven’t seen this commemorated anywhere, and as we’re currently barreling towards another anniversary year celebration in November and another set of Missing Episode Recovery rumors has flared up in the UK press, I found myself reminiscing about the last time this happened.

Let’s recap:

Huge swathes of 50s and 60s BBC television no longer exist, due to the recordings being either lost, or thrown out, or having their master video tapes recorded over. This happened for a bunch of complex interlocking reasons, but which mostly boil down to “it wasn’t anyone’s job to make sure they didn’t lose them.”

Currently, 97 of of the 253 Doctor Who episodes broadcast between 1963 and 1969 are missing; that’s actually quite a bit better than many of its contemporaries. Doctor Who is also in a unique position in that all of the missing episodes exist as audio-only recordings, many of them have surviving still images, and all of them were published as novels.

Classic Doctor Who has a strange structure by today’s standards; half-hour episodes making up usually 4 or 6-part stories. A strange aspect of having 100-or-so missing episodes is that some stories are only partly missing. Some stories are just missing a bit in the middle, some only have one part surviving.

This has always been a unique aspect of being a fan of the show; there’s this chunk of the early show that’s just out of reach, stories where everyone knows what happened, but no one has actually seen in fifty years.

And since the BBC got serious about preserving it’s own archive in the late 70s, and a rash of rediscoveries in the early 80s, lost shows have slowly trickled in. One of the bedrocks of being a Doctor Who fan is that there is always a rumor circulating about a recovered episode.

Whether true or not, it’s a widely held belief that there are still “lost” episodes in the hands of private collectors, and for a long time it was also widely believed that their “had to” be more film cans out there, lost, misplaced, sitting in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory. So a lot of people have been poking around in basements over the last 40 years, and doing the hard work to see if they can dig up some more lost TV.

So missing episode rumors have a strange energy around them. First, what more is there to say? Beyond “which do you hope it is?” there isn’t a lot to talk about from the perspective of a fan out of the loop of any real recovery efforts. But the other thing is that it’s a widely held belief that any chatter out on the internet or in fan circles could “spook” any private collector negotiating to return what amounts to highly valuable stolen property. So, there’s always been pressure to not actually talk about the rumors; not an Omerta, but it’s considered in poor taste to risk a potential recovery because you couldn’t stay off twitter. It’s unclear if a recovery of Who or any other BBC show has actually been scuttled due to excited fans being loose-lipped on the internet, but the fan social contract remains: just keep it at a low volume.

In early 2013, there started to be whispers out on the internet that maybe someone had found something. Now, I’m not particularly tapped in to the underground or anything, so for something it make it up to my level it has to have been churning for a while. Lots of “I can’t say anything more, but there should be some good news later this year!” trying to keep just inside the threshold of talking about it too loud.

To add some color of the time, this was also very close to when the rumors started that David Lynch might actually be doing more Twin Peaks. I have weirdly clear memories of this, since I had just changed jobs and had not yet cultivated a group of nerds to talk about these kinds of things with, so I found myself sitting on the two most interesting genre rumors in recent memory with no one to talk to, instead just poking around the deep fora on the web over lunches by myself.

But, again, there’s always a rumor circulating, and this was the start of the big 50th anniversary year, and it seemed too perfect that someone had managed to time a one-in-a-decade happenstance for when it would have the most commercial impact.

But, unlike a lot of missing episode rumors, this one kept emitting smoke, splitting into two distinct branches. The first was that someone had found a huge cache of film, encompassing nearly every missing Doctor Who episode along with a host of other 60s-era BBC shows. The second was more restrained, claiming that three stories had been recovered: The Web of Fear, The Enemy of the World, and Marco Polo). There were, of course, any number of sub-variants and weird contradictory details. The whole situation soon became nicknamed “The Omnirumor.”

Every version of this seemed too good to be true; fan fantasizing for the 50th anniversary. Especially the Web of Fear, which was always on the top of everyone’s wishlist (your’s truly included) for what would you hope is found. For various reasons, Marco Polo had the most copies made, so it always ends up in any rumor mill as it’s the one most likely to be found, despite stubbornly refusing to exist for five decades and counting. Enemy of the World was a little more idiosyncratic, but still part of the terribly under-surviving season 5.

And a cache? Seemed absurd. The last time more than one half-hour episode was found a time was Tomb of the Cybermen in 1992. Since then there had been three standalone episodes found? The idea that there were still piles of film can somewhere in the 2010s seemed like the hight of wishful thinking,

But the rumor mill kept churning, eventually breaking out of the deep nerd corners of the web. I missed the exact anniversary day due to being distracted by cyber goggles, but for my money the moment it broke out into the mainstream, or at least the mainstream of the nerd web, was when it hit the front page of Bleeding Cool. From there, it was a short jump to, if you will, “real” news.

This pretty badly violated the “don’t talk about missing episodes too loudly” rule. This made a bunch of people upset, which made a bunch of other people more upset, and proceeded to be a Internet Fan kerfuffle. But the whole thing seemed absurd, because the core claim was preposterous. There was no way there was still an undiscovered cache of multiple film cans sitting around. Fan wishful thinking gone nuclear.

Anyway, imagine our collective surprise when the BBC announced they had recovered The Enemy of the World and (most of) The Web of Fear.

(I can’t find it now, but I remember somewhere on the web someone’s initial shocked response to the news was to blurt “what happened to Marco Polo?” Which then someone else immediately responded to by posting a youtube link to Meat Loaf singing “two out of three ain’t bad.”)

The details of the find, and who and how they found it—and why it was only most of the Web of Fear are well documented elsewhere, but the upshot was someone really did find a cache of missing tv, sitting abandoned in the back of a local TV station in Nigeria. Knowing what really happened, you can look back and if you squint you can sort of see what information must have leaked out when to cause the various flavors of the Omnirumor took shape.

And what an absolute treat. I’d read the novel of Web of Fear probably a dozen times a kid, watched the reconstruction, watched the one surviving episode and tried to imagine what the rest might have looked like. Never, did I ever think I would actually get to see it.. And there it was, come October, sitting in iTunes.

Web of Fear was one of those stories that had a single part of of 6 surviving: the first. I’d seen that first episode more than once, and it was the strangest feeling to sit down to watch and have “Episode 2” appear on the screen.

There’s always a hint of hesitation when one of these stories is actually recovered. I mean, we are talking about a low budget (mostly) kids show from the mid 60s, here. Decades of imagining the best possible version of something tends to crash rather badly into the reality of what the show really was. The poster child for this is Tomb of the Cybermen, which was always hailed as one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time, and then in 1992 we finally got to see it, and the reality was that it looked cheap even by the standards of the times, the plot made next-to-no sense, and there was way more casual racism than anyone expected. Turns out, the novel had papered over a lot of shortcomings. Overnight, it went from “best of the 60s” to, “it’s fine, I guess, but let me warn you about a couple things…”

That’s not what happened with the Web of Fear, though. The premise is bonkers even by Doctor Who standards—robot Yeti with web guns have taken over London, and the Doctor teams up with an Army team hiding in the London Underground to fight them off. Across the board, it just works. Where the BBC budget struggles with other planets or space ships, it can do a fantastic Underground tunnel. And the camerawork and direction around the Yeti keeps them strange and uncanny where they could easily become silly. Theres a part abou 2/3 of the way through the story where a group of soldiers have to venture up to the Yeti-controlled city to find some parts, and get ambushed by the monsters. And even that works! It manages to find a “kid-friendly Aliens” tone where the soldiers get absolutely wrecked as more and more monsters emerge, and it manages to do this without ever descending into farce. Remarkable.

And then on top of all that, Enemy of the World, which wasn’t at the top of anyone’s wishlist, turned out to be an absolute classic that we basically had never noticed. On paper it seemed very dull and slow moving, but it turns out you really needed to see what the actors were doing to appreciate it.

The whole experience was like being a kid at christmas, being surprised and delighted by a present that you didn’t even know was possible.

But I digress. Ten years ago in August, we didn’t know what was coming. All we knew was that the rumor mill was going into overdrive, we didn’t know what was really going on, and so we all hoped.

And sometimes, crazy rumors and hopes turn out to be true.