'The Keys of Marinus' is Doctor Who's first 'quest' adventure, in which the TARDIS crew split up and travel to various zones of the planet Marinus to locate the four missing keys which control the Conscience of Marinus, a machine which prevents crime across an entire planet. Originally thought to be intact in the BBC archives, research for this DVD release brought some surprising news...
All six episodes of this serial from Doctor Who's first season have always been retained as 16mm film recording negatives and there was no reason to believe that they differed in any way from the version broadcast by the BBC in 1964. However, during his research for the production information subtitles feature, Richard Molesworth noted a point in episode two which differed from the script and was accompanied by uncomfortable on-screen cut. He raised this with Peter Crocker, who discovered a difference of a few seconds between the running time of the negative and the duration logged on the BBC's PasC transmission forms from 1964. Looking through the episodes in detail, he discovered signs of four physical splices in episode two and a further three in episode four. He compared these against a recording made from an ABC transmission in Australia and found splices at the same point... which might be expected if the ABC print had been made from the BBC negative, but it was immediately apparent that this was not the case. The ABC print was from a suppressed-field film recording (generally we find these were made close to the original transmissions), whilst the BBC negative was from a quick-pulldown recorder and was probably made when BBC Enterprises did a second film recording run to improve their product quality around 1967. However, the cuts were identical - to the frame - on both versions, suggesting that a list had been made during the first editing session and the same list had been applied to the second film recording run years later.
Mark Ayres pulled out copies of David Holman's off-air audio recordings and found missing material at all the points that Peter Crocker had noted, plus one other located in a fade to black in episode two, which Peter wouldn't have been able to see as it would have been crushed down to true black in the grade. The cuts in episode two were 70, 55, 24, 35 and 20 frames respectively and in episode four were 37, 79 and 133 frames respectively. This translates to seven seconds of cuts to episode two and ten seconds of cuts to episode four. The most likely reason for these cuts is either physical damage to the transmission videotape or physical splice edits in the tapes, both of which might be expected to produce disturbing picture off-locks in the film recording.
