FYI I just noticed that the mass pie fight from the 1975 Les Dawson tv special that was recently discussed features a pie in the face for a former Dr Who companion.

Classic Dr Who experts will recognized the first girl being pied is Deborah Watling, who played Victoria during the Patrick Troughton era. This is the only time Debbie took a pie in the face, because in her Dr Who episodes she only did some messy foam scenes during the long "lost" Fury from the Deep" serial where the BBC wiped the tapes and today only telesnap pictures exist of that entire serial.

MK

Why did BBC wipe the tapes? It just seems like a really stupid thing to do consciously. Especially with a show like Doctor Who.

The Sylvester Mccoy episode The Curse of Fenric has several great wetlook scenes in it.

To be fair to the BBC they were not the only ones who had no foresight, because ITV and their sub companies London Weekend Television, Southern and Central Television also did the same clueless practice of wiping their tapes as well.

Numerous British TV shows on the BBC and ITV channels made in the 1960's were wiped and remain missing to this day. The thinking (or non-thinking) in those days were that tv shows were only made to broadcast one time, with one possible repeat only, and after
one repeat showing they had no useful future purpose. In those days they were not destroying tapes and just throwing them in a skip (as they did in the 1980's when Birmingham's Pebble Mill Studios were being demolished and thousands of old tapes were tossed in dumpsters). In the 1960's there were recycling tapes and re recording over them, because the 2 inch format tapes were so expensive they thought they would save money on buying new tapes so they began recording over old tapes that they considered to be worthless.

This was a bone-headed strategy because nobody had the foresight to realize that decades later people would still want to see old shows again.

Here is a site that list all the old UK shows that are lost and no tapes exist today ...

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_lost_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_Kingdom#Doctor_Who

The irony is that the most valuable piece of footage the BBC once had, but erased was The Beatles performing "Ticket to Ride" on "Top of the Pops" in 1965. The BBC wiped that show but another BBC show, Doctor Who, used an extract from that show on the Dr Who serial "The Chase" and today the only footage of that Top of the Pops show that exists today is the 20 second extract that can be seen in "The Chase".

Another clueless act that the BBC did was to wipe the episode showing the 1st regeneration of Doctor Who from William Hartnell to Patrick Troughton, that episode is lost, but a few seconds of that footage was saved by the editors of another BBC show "Blue Peter" who used the clip on their show, so the only footage you can see today of the first regeneration comes from a reconstruction made from the Blue Peter show footage.

FYI I have a list of several "lost UK wetlook" tv scenes on my Most Wanted list e.g.

- a 1960's Ken Dodd show where they lampooned "Come Dancing" and had dancers dancing in a swimming pool.
- a 1975 Michael Bentine tv special where they had an comedy skit of Hamlet in a swimming pool.
- a 1986 Pebble Mill at One show where Bo Derek and a female host are clothed in the pool at her ranch
- a 1968 episode of "Do Not Adjust Your Set" (the prequel to Monty Python) where the cast play Handel's Water Music in showers and bath tubs
- a 1970 episode of "Sexton Blake" where there is a fancy dress pool party with many clothed girls in the pool
- a 1966 episode of "Quick Before They Catch Us" where Pamela Franklin hides underwater in the bath in her miniskirt, boots and tights
- a 1971 episode of "The Marty Feldman Comedy Machine" where a flamenco dancer is soaked in the pouring rain
- a 1970 episode of the BBC show "Omnibus" about the David Hare play "Shag" which has a girl in a black dress and pantyhose dunked in a bath tub

I doubt we will every recover these items, because they are known to be "lost believed wiped", with the exception of the Bo Derek Pebble Mill at One show....which I know exists because it is listed in the library archives at the British Film Institute...but so far the BFI have not posted it on their Youtube channel.

MK

To be fair to the people of the 1960s, at that point no-one could really forsee how things would change in the future, and those 2" video tapes were the price of a house each, so you can understand why broadcasters, regardless of whether state-funded like the BBC or privately run like ITV, sought to reduce costs by re-using their tapes. Many bad decisions were made in the 60s and 70s, from the insanity of the Beeching railway cuts to the hideous concrete architectural carbuncles that were thrown up, often on the sites of much-loved older buildings, all across the country.

Preserving old material also had costs as those old tapes had to be stored in custom-built temperature-controlled storage vaults to prevent deterioration, they weren't something you could just stick in a big warehouse and forget about. I remember a segment of a programme in the early 80s where they actually showed the committee who decided what to preserve and what not to, at work, deliberating over a specific episode of Top Of The Pops, which I think they decided to flag to be kept because it had the first showing of Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" video with him dancing on a light-up pavement, plus other tracks regarded as likely to be worth keeping. The cost of the storage system the items they marked for keeping were sent to was measured in millions per year.

Having said that there's no excuse for the Pebble Mill madness, that was out and out stupidity, as by the 80s it was apparent that there was a significant market for older material, plus the option of converting to less fragile media was becoming available.

It wasn't just the BBC and the UK: This happened to many shows in the 1950s and 1960s in the U.S. Sometimes it was videotape reused, sometimes it was the "kinescopes" (film, from a B&W camera aimed at a TV monitor) that were shown three hours later to the West Coast audiences.

That btw was part of why "I Love Lucy" became a classic: Desi had the idea of using three movie cameras to record the shows. They were still "live" performances (no retakes) but the visual quality was so much better than the kinescopes and, of course, they were made and kept by Desilu.

While hundreds of old tapes were simply thrown into skips when they were demolishing the old Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham there were many tv collecting fans who were :dumpster divers who rescued many tapes and sold them at car boot sales around the UK, so many of the old Pebble Mills shows on Youtube today were recovered from car boot sales.

The BBC shot itself in the foot as far as recovering lost Doctor Who tapes, because they had a very bad reputation with private collectors, because in the 1970's they were in cahoots with the UK poilce serious crimes squad and prosecuting people who had tapes or films in their private collections, because to have private tapes of UK tv shows in your possession was considered to be a crime in those days, as per the famous 1975 arrest of Bob Monkhouse for his private collection.

https://www.filmstories.co.uk/features/bob-monkhouse-his-movie-collection-and-the-bizarre-serious-crime-squad-case/

Private collectors and fan clubs did not trust the BBC and feared prosecution, and then 25 years later when the BBC finally relented and asked for private recordings to be submitted, then the BBC did another awful thing. Some people returned private recordings of lost episodes of BBC shows, only to be totally ripped off by the BBC who gave them only 100 pounds for sending in the footage, and then the BBC made new DVD releases and made MILLIONS from that returned footage. So, the BBC were litigious at first, and then later they became greedy and did not fairly compensate fans for returning lost recordings.

Even famous actors were afraid of the UK tv companies prosecuting them for having copies of their OWN SHOWS...e.g. the last Reg Varney sitcom series "Down the Gate" was completely wiped from the archives and no copies of those shows existed....or so they thought. Crafty Reg Varney made private home recordings of his show and kept them as a secret stash in his attic for 40 years, not telling anyone because he saw what they had done to Bob Monkhouse, they arrested him for owning private recordings. Those lost "Down the Gate" private tapes were only discovered after Reg's death, when his heirs were going thru old boxes in his attic. So now you can watch those lost episodes on YT today, because of Reg's private tapes.

MK

Just having come across this thread, there are some nice colour behind-the-scenes photos from this show on Shutterstock. Sadly from a WAM point of view there only seems to be one messy picture, and it's a wide shot where you can't see Debbie's face.

https://www.shutterstock.com/editorial/image-editorial/les-dawson-pastiche-1920s-hollywood-silent-film-9326096w

Still, the clean ones would be a useful reference if anyone ever wanted to try and do a homage, or colourise the sequence.

This thread has the footage on Daily Motion. It's been tagged male for some reason. Should be coed.

https://umd.net/groups/i/les-dawson-pie-fight

I cleaned up the "before" picture of Debbie. Given the pies on the shelf behind her and knowing whats to come it still gives me a tingle.

The video unfortunatly is such bad quality that extracting a still isn't worth it. I don't know if the producers were trying for an old time look or its just a lousy copy.

It's just like her missing messy scenes from Doctor Who (2 messy foam scenes). All 6 episodes from the 1968 serial "Fury from the Deep"are lost. The entire serial was wiped and has never been found, so all we have today are some production stills and some telesnaps that were made in 1968 (telesnaps were pics taken off the tv screen).

This is all we have, but in 2020 the BBC animated the missing story so now can see an animated version of the foam fight scenes and the scene where actress June Murphy turns into a zombie and wades fully clothed into the sea in episode 4.

I remember watching this serial on live tv in 1968 but there was no way to record it in those days because I was not able to buy my first VCR until 1971 when Philips came out with the L1500 1 inch video tape machine. I recorded lots of stuff on the L1500 until 1975 when Betamax and VHS were invented.

This serial was controversial, because it was a very scary story with zombies which had a scream that is like the famous Edward Munch painting "The Scream" and many parents wrote letters to the BBC to complain that this was too scary to be shown in the early evening hours.

This is edging towards the 'AI WAM' group, but I tried feeding a few screen grabs through online AI colourising and upscaling tools. Not brilliant, but I think it's a slight improvement.