Yeah, the GB thread is already wild over it. A heck of a mistake for someone to have made in the circumstances. Mind you, given that half of the posters there are currently convinced based on the results of a few Google searches that they know more about Sierra Leone's film archive than professional episode hunters (don't ask), almost anything can pass as evidence of conspiracy these days.
Oh, you're just a BBC Schill, trying to maintain their lie that they didn't find all these episodes, until they finally decide to own up to having them and start releasing them, WHAT ARE THEY WAITING FOR!!!! LOL, yea, with all the Conspiracy Theories floating around that is a bit of an inconvenient fluster-cuck up
And of course Bleeding Cool runs with it: http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/09/03/have-the-bbc-just-scheduled-a-missing-episode-of-dads-army/.
Did a quick check as I couldn't remember which of the Dad's Army mini-episodes were missing, and it turned up something interesting (take this with a pinch of salt as it comes from wikipedia)... Season two of Dad's Army probably wasn't telerecorded by BBC Enterprises, so (like Dalek Masterplan 7) it was lost when the videotapes were reused. Sergeant Wilson's Little Secret was transmitted from film, so survives as such (like Wheel in Space 6 and various other Who episodes), while the film copies of the two episodes recovered in 2001 were apparently made for viewing by American executives who were considering making a film version (happened in 1971) or an American adaptation (piloted a bit later). So the other three were probably never telerecorded, and any episode recovery rumour that mentions Dad's Army is almost certainly rubbish.
What a fucking moron. Anyone with even a handful of braincells would understand that the screening of a recovered episode of Dad's Army would be publicised well in advance by the BBC.
Half of the GB thread is shouting "But ten days is more than enough time to publicize it!" Which might be true, IF they were only trying to drive up the audience for the one showing. But of course they'd be using it to promote the entire just-launched repeat run, if not other archive TV repeats as well.
The latest hilarity is that just after a private Facebook post by someone who has worked on the DVDs claiming that "Marco Polo" hadn't been returned, the guy at GB with multiple quote-unquote sources received what he called "concerning" and "bizarre" news about the return of that very story, which had previously been one he was 100% sure was back. Then he reported that the "problem" was that they were having to sort through the multiple copies of the story that had been found, which "may take a while." And of course, the immediate response is not "How ridiculous can these claims get?" but "It could be true! Look at all the countries that bought the story!"
Ok... that's ludicrous. The Marco Polo thing is based in a misreporting of a con panel where some of the cast are going to talk through a screening of a telesnap reconstruction (which is presumably the origin of the different versions bit). But this has somehow become 'a dvd commentary' in some garblings.
And the scary thing is that the main driving force behind all this nonsense is this guy... https://twitter.com/WhoHarmonyPodca ...who among weird other things claims to have heard a tape recording made in Hell and to receive prophetic visions. (I can't speak for the first but his track record on the second ain't so hot. Unlike hell.)
The Who Harmony Podcast guy (who seems, according to people who have watched his YouTube videos, to have some mental or developmental issues) and Scot Ferre (who is the big GB rumor spreader and apparently-- I haven't seen links but I wouldn't doubt it-- has the interesting religious views, though on another forum he's denied believing in the hell tape recording) are two different people. Though at this point they seem equally credulous. One of the funniest parts of all this nonsense, in fact, is watching different rumor spreaders dismiss each other as ill-informed or a poor judge of claims, as if they all weren't drinking from the same fountain of unlikely. Apparently Ferre's "sources" tell him there were going to be press conferences in March and July to announce the finds but they were put off for some reason. What that actually means, of course is "Doctor Who Online posted some gubbins about a non-new series announcement, which never materialized, in March" and "Bleeding Cool hinted at an imminent announcement in June."
Well I was first told (in person) a faily detailed version of the story about 15 months ago, to the point that the expectation that that was what DWO were on about wasn't inplausable. The tally did double after that point, but I wouldn't be at all surprised there is something real at the root of it. I'm almost past caring at this point!
The rumors are even older than that. I didn't mean to suggest that that wasn't what DWO were on about; probably it was. I just don't think there was ever any press conference planned, and that Ferre has no more evidence than people imagining an announcement was imminent. There are, unfortunately, a lot of real things that could be at the root of the rumors without any actual return. There's Paul Vanezis' list for BBC Worldwide of 44 episodes that might still exist, which was apparently the same number of episodes found in one version of the rumor; the complete Hartnell interview, which might well be the seed from which grew the mention of "the full Hartnell" in the original Bleeding Cool report; the recreation of classic episodes, some missing, in the Gatiss docudrama; the animation of missing episodes; and various actual investigations that came to nothing, including the ones in which Vanezis was engaged in recent months, which prevented him issuing absolute denials of any activity. Maybe there's something more than that going on, but I'm still not expecting anything, and certainly not 90+ episodes, or even 17.
Today's entertainment: https://twitter.com/PaulVanezis/status/367719881246244864. (The recent conversation, not the original tweet.) Or, if you don't feel like clicking: fans convince themselves via Google searches that Sierra Leone's archive, which once held some missing Hartnell episodes from season three, was not destroyed despite archive researchers reporting it was; archive researcher is snidely dismissive; fans get hurt feelings, look for loopholes. Another day in crazy rumor land...
Well, if it's a known fact that those Sierra Leone Episodes were floating around as burnt cinders, surely that proves they've recovered those cinders and are working on restoring them When will the lies end and they'll finally release the damned epi sodes <Sorry, I tried to keep a straight face through the whole rant>
I pity Paul, I really do. He could get up and say "right, off to brush my teeth", and fans would take it to mean "something has been found".
Yeah. In a perfect world he wouldn't be as snide and grumpy as he is, but my God, the lengths people will go to to convince themselves something is up. And they genuinely have no clue why he's short-tempered when asked to issue a tenth denial to satisfy someone's sense of appropriate wording.
The one thing that puzzles me about Sierra Leone is the absolute certainty by Vanezis about what was held in the television station there as late as 1999. Is the paperwork that incontrovertible? Is there physical evidence that proves beyond a reasonable doubt that there were Hartnells there to be recovered thirty-five years after they aired? Perhaps someday we'll know what happened in Sierra Leone.
I was confused about that too. But looking again at Vanezis' posts on the topic, I don't think he was certain that anything was there in 1999, just that it was there in the 1980s (because it was shown illegally after the network's contract expired) and that it isn't there now. The assumption is that it was still there when the storage facility was destroyed in the civil war, presumably because the network isn't likely to have finally complied with the requirement to return or destroy prints after ignoring it into the 80s. The remaining question is what verifies the out-of-contract broadcast in the 80s, but I'm sure there's reasonably conclusive evidence for it.
Yes... there Sierra Leone thing is just that they may still have had copies in 1990, but definitely didn't in 2000 (approx). It's most likely that they were destroyed during the war, possible that they were already go e, remotely possible that some might have been salvaged... but probably not. And almost certainly not the entire lot (which would only be 22 episodes anyway).