Taiwan Prints

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The Mystery of the "Taiwan Prints"

On 19 December 2013 it was announced that five black and white episodes had been found in Taiwan:

• The Dominators episodes 2 and 3
• The Seeds of Death episode 2
• The War Games episodes 1 and 2

A month later, on 16 January 2014, another five were announced:

• The Keys of Marinus episode 6
• The Enemy of the World episode 6
• The Krotons episode 3
• The Ambassadors of Death episodes 1 and 2

The films had been acquired circa 2008 by Keith Perron, a Taipei-based collector who bought several boxes of material that had been cleared out of one of the old Armed Forces Network Radio Taiwan stations (Far East Network (FEN / AFNRT)): either the Taipei Air Station at Shu Lin Kou, the Tainan base or the Ching Chuan Kang AFB which had been decommissioned in 1979.

According to Keith, all ten films (several of which had bad splices) bore markings on the leaders that indicated they were from the American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS) network. (At times Keith seemed unsure precisely what was on the leaders: he has said "AFRTV" and "AFNTV" at different times, but oddly did not say it was "AFRTS" as it should be. Since it would have been AFRTS we can assume he was misremembering the precise detail of what was on the leaders.)

Shu Lin Kou base mobile TV van; Stars & Stripes Pacific edition, 23 September 1976

It was therefore assumed that the films had done the rounds of and been screened at the various US military bases in South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan.

However, none of the American bases in Taiwan had a networked television service. Although two of the bases -- the ones at Ching Chuan Kang and Shu Lin Kou -- did operate their own short-range television systems, the former (the former -- which was established after 1971 and broadcast on channel 74) had a very weak signal to ensure that transmissions did not extend beyond the base itself and thus interfere with the local Taiwan / Chinese stations, while the latter, which commenced after 1976, operated on a closed-circuit cable from a mobile van (see newspaper report at right).

And although both Taiwanese "stations" would have received their television prints via the usual AFRTS circuits, it's not clear how these ten Doctor Who films would have later ended up at a radio station potentially hundreds of kilometres away from both bases!

BBC Sales Paperwork

Of major importance is the fact that the BBC's Clearances paperwork that exists for those seven stories -- specifically actors' residuals and music royalties -- does not record a sale to the American Armed Forces. Even though the AFRTS did acquire material sometimes "free of charge", that provision was specifically applicable to American-produced material only such as news and sports supplied by local distributors, as opposed to any bought–in foreign drama. (There was absolutely no benefit to the BBC in providing programmes free of charge to American stations.)

Newspapers

When the films were revealed, the questions on everyone's lips were: where did the films come from, when did they screen, how did they get to the radio station, and could there be more?

Pacific Stars & Stripes; full page AFRTS Vietnam TV schedule; November 1970

The answer to the second question was likely to provide clues to answer the other questions. So that was our starting point.

We accessed the online archive of Pacific Stars and Stripes (at Stars and Stripes Archive), the US military newspaper, which had print editions that were distributed and circulated to US troops serving at the US Army, Navy and Air Force bases located in Thailand, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Guam, Taiwan, and various smaller islands in the South Pacific.

We also examined the online archive Berlin Observer which provided listings for AFN-TV in Germany, and the online archive for Morgunblað, the Iceland newspaper that listed TV for the US base there.

And we found -------- NOTHING.

That's right. Nothing. Zilch. Zip. Zero. Nada. Nil. Not a sausage.

The OCR searches did return listings for the two Peter Cushing Dalek movies (in 1966, 1967, 1975, 1981 and 1983), as well as the short run of Tom Baker stories in 1986 (as covered on the main Armed Forces Network profile), but there were NO OTHER LISTINGS AT ALL for Doctor Who.

The Stars and Stripes did publish very comprehensive TV schedules for AFKN (Korea), AFVN (Vietnam), and the FEN stations (Japan), during the 1960s and 1970s (the weekly schedule for AFVN alone took up an entire page in 1970! (see example at right)), whereas the Philippines network AFPN had only a few listings published. The Iceland and Germany listings were also very comprehensive.

Even a random spot check without using OCR of every second month between 1969 and 1985 failed to return any listings.

If black and white episodes of Doctor Who had been distributed from the AFRTS home base in Los Angeles and bicycled through the various AFN networks around the world (which would have been the case; they wouldn't have aired in just the Asia / Pacific regions), the law of probability dictates that at least one out of all the episodes (not just these ten) should have left a "footprint" in one of the US military TV listing publications…

But since there was no sign of pre-1986 listings for Doctor Who in any of them, the only conclusion that we could draw was that THESE EPISODES OF DOCTOR WHO DID NOT SCREEN ON THE AMERICAN ARMED FORCES NETWORKS.

So where on earth did those films found in Taiwan come from? Are those ten "Taiwan" films actually the remnants of something else? Although the films were found with material that did originate from an AFRTS radio station (such as numerous transcription disks), the total lack of unambiguous evidence that the films were ever screened on any Armed Forces station does support that they came to Taiwan from outside the AFRTS system.

We are still exploring several possibilities... And hopefully can provide some answers in due course...

Links

• Armed Forces Network
• Main Page
• Broadcasts around the World
• BBC Records