Barbados

Bardados is a small island in the Caribbean sea. Part of the West Indies, it was a British colony until it achieved independence in 1966. It became a member of the British Commonwealth in November 1966.

Profile

Country Number (16)	1966	FIRST and THIRD WAVE
Region	Caribbean	Commonwealth (later)
Television commenced	15 December 1964
Colour System	1980	NTSC
Population	1966	250,000
TV Sets	1966	4,500
Population	1984	250,500
TV Sets	1984	52,000
Language/s	English

Television Stations / Channels

Barbados commenced its television service in December 1964. The station was established with the aid of the TIE Ltd Consortium. Colour transmissions began sometime around 1980, using the NTSC colour broadcast system.

There is just one television provider, the government-owned Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC-TV).

DOCTOR WHO IN BARBADOS

Barbados was the 16th country to screen Doctor Who (see Selling Doctor Who). It was the fourth in the Caribbean. It was not a member of the Commonwealth when the series was sold and commenced transmission.

BBC Records

The Stanmark Productions Ltd advertisement from 1966, identifies Barbados as one of the sixteen countries screening Doctor Who by January 1966.

Barbados is named in the list of 27 countries in The Making of Doctor Who (1972 Piccolo edition).

The Seventies and The Handbook identify only two stories being sold to Barbados: Y and AA. However the books also name "Caribbean" as purchasing "(16)" stories: G, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, W. X, Z, BB and CC, all of which are stories that aired in Barbados. (The fact that the Barbados television station was called "Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation" might account for the naming of "Caribbean" rather than "Barbados" in the 1977 memo.)

In DWM, Barbados is identified in 11 story Archives: F, G, H, K, M, N, Q, R, S, U, AA, and Caribbean under ten: L, P, Q, R, T, W, X, Z, BB, CC.

In The Eighties - THE LOST CHAPTERS, a sale of "(12)" stories is recorded for Barbados; this might be an error, as only 11 Tom Baker stories have been identified as screening from 1985-1987, the period covered by the February 1987 memo that is being referred to.

The Tom Baker stories were sold to Barbados (and several other Caribbean countries) "amongst a package of a ¼ million pounds worth of programmes. These sales were a direct result of a three-day screening of the Beeb's top programmes by BBC Enterprises in Nassau during July", as was reported in the DWAS newsletter Celestial Toyroom (September 1985 issue) (See also Trinidad & Tobago and the Bahamas).

Stories bought and broadcast

WILLIAM HARTNELL

Doctor Who – episode one, 25 April 1966

The Crusade – The Warlocks (sic), 1 August 1967

Sale of 36 episodes to Barbados; Jamaican Gleaner, 10 October 1967

The Myth Makers ep 3, Boxing Day 1967

The Massacre – Priest of Day [sic], 23 January 1968

Dr Who – 30 December 1985

Genesis on the Daleks Part 1, 24 February 1986

Planet of the Eagle! – 16 June 1986

26 stories, 117 episodes:

A	An Unearthly Child	4
B	The Daleks	7
C	Inside the Spaceship	2
D	Marco Polo	7
E	The Keys of Marinus	6
F	The Aztecs	4
G	The Sensorites	6
H	The Reign of Terror	6
J	Planet of Giants	3
K	The Dalek Invasion of Earth	6
L	The Rescue	2
M	The Romans	4
N	The Web Planet	6
P	The Crusade	4
Q	The Space Museum	4
R	The Chase	6
S	The Time Meddler	4
T	Galaxy 4	4
U	The Myth Makers	4
W	The Massacre	4
X	The Ark	4
Y	The Celestial Toymaker	4
Z	The Gunfighters	4
AA	The Savages	4
BB	The War Machines	4
CC	The Smugglers	4

Barbados was one of only two countries (the other being Zambia) to purchase the package of available Hartnell stories which ran from An Unearthly Child to The Smugglers), which consisted of the same 26 stories, 117 episodes. (See WILLIAM HARTNELL SALES.)

The programme was supplied as 16mm black and white film prints with English soundtracks.

Mission to the Unknown and The Daleks Master Plan were not available for purchase by Barbados, as both stories had been rejected by the Australian censors, a ruling which also prevented the sale of those stories to all Commonwealth countries. Also, Terry Nation was still refusing to permit the BBC selling certain Dalek stories during 1967 while he attempted to sell a Dalek spin-off series to American networks; this moratorium denied Barbados the opportunity of purchasing both The Tenth Planet and Patrick Troughton's first adventure.

Origin of the Prints?

Jamaica had started screening the series a month earlier, and since both countries were customers of the programme distributor Television International Enterprises Limited / TIE (Programmes) Ltd, it’s more than likely that Barbados was sent the same set of prints for the first twelve serials that were used in Jamaica (and which had previously been screened in Trinidad & Tobago and Bermuda).

Serials M to S may have been bicycled over from Gibraltar.

Or, given the timing of when the episodes aired, Barbados may have taken receipt of a fresh set of the new Stored Field telerecordings from the BBC.

Since Barbados was the first Caribbean country to air them, the other serials were supplied directly by TIE Ltd or the BBC.

As noted below and illustrated in the October 1967 newspaper clipping above right, the sale of the final 36 episodes – which would be Galaxy 4 to The Smugglers -- was made at some point between 26 May and 11 August 1967. Of note, the article does not mention TIE Ltd, so it's possible that the distributor was not involved in the sale of that final package.

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TOM BAKER

Eleven stories, 48 episodes:

4C	The Ark in Space	4
4D	Revenge of the Cybermen	4
4E	Genesis of the Daleks	6
4F	Terror of the Zygons	4
4G	Pyramids of Mars	4
4H	Planet of Evil	4
4J	The Android Invasion	4
4K	The Brain of Morbius	4
4N	The Hand of Fear	4
4M	The Masque of Mandragora	4
4L	The Seeds of Doom	6

After the mid-1985 Nassau-based sales junket, Barbados screened a package of eleven Tom Baker stories (48 episodes) in 1985 to 1986, with a repeat the following year; the same package of stories was also sold to Trinidad & Tobago and part to the Bahamas.

These programmes were supplied as NTSC colour video tapes.

For reasons not known, neither Baker's debut serial Robot nor The Sontaran Experiment were included in this package; or if they were they did not screen.

Transmission

WILLIAM HARTNELL

Viewers in Barbados enjoyed a non-stop run of the series that lasted for over two years.

The series started on Monday, 25 April 1966, at 6.20pm. The day of the week and timeslot changed to Tuesdays at 6.00pm midway through Marco Polo, where - apart from one timeslot variance during Christmas 1966 period - it remained for the entire 117 week run. The last episode, The Smugglers part 4 aired on 16 July 1968.

The time slot was generally always 25 minutes, which suggests there were no commercial breaks.

Fate of the Prints

Barbados was the last of the four Caribbean nations that was serviced by the programme distributor Television International Enterprises Limited to screen the first eleven William Hartnell stories. These were either sent back to TIE Ltd or the BBC, or destroyed.

It is possible they were sent to Ethiopia.

Barbados would have sent the other 24 episodes from season two to Jamaica, where they screened some two years later.

The season three serials were either sent back to TIE Ltd or the BBC, or destroyed, or possibly to Zambia or Sierra Leone, which was part of the TIE Ltd network.

TOM BAKER

18 years after the William Hartnell run came to an end, CBC-TV (channel 3) screened further adventures of the good Doctor; eleven Tom Baker stories commenced from Monday, 30 December 1985 at 5.25pm, and screened weekly until 8 December 1986. (The World Cup football, Argentina vs Republic of Korea, interrupted the run on 2 June 1986 (screening 4.30pm to 6.15pm), and the programme did not play on 1 December 1986.)

The timeslots changed a couple of times during the 50 week period: most episodes aired at 5.25pm, however the final instalment of Pyramids of Mars aired at 11.25pm, and most of The Seeds of Doom played at 5.40pm.

Interestingly, the stories aired in a somewhat unusual order, with Revenge of the Cybermen, Genesis of the Daleks, Pyramids of Mars and Planet of Evil playing in production code order, and the final three stories aired in the sequence The Hand of Fear, The Masque of Mandragora and The Seeds of Doom for no apparent reason; made all the more odd given that Sarah Jane Smith departs in The Hand of Fear, and appears in the other two!

Trinidad & Tobago was airing the same batch of eleven stories at the very same time. Because Barbados aired the stories way out of order, sometimes they were first to screen a particular serial, and other times Trinidad was the first. The closest they came to airing the same episode was with part four of The Masque of Mandragora, on 24 September and 29 September 1986.

The stories that aired in Barbados first were: 4C, 4D, 4E, 4F.

The same eleven Baker serials were repeated from 1 February 1987, Wednesdays, at variable timeslots, 5.00pm, 4.50 before settling in at 5.25pm. Again, the stories aired in the same out of order sequence. The repeat run ended on 6 January 1988.

The same repeat run of Baker stories had occurred in Trinidad & Tobago only a few weeks earlier, but there it was two episodes back to back. Due to the cross-over of some of the air-dates, it's unlikely they shared or exchanged the same set of video tapes.

• The nearby island of Saint Lucia was linked by cable feed from the CBC in Barbados, and "aired" the same programmes at the same time. This run of the Tom Baker stories was also seen in Saint Lucia.

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PAUL McGANN

The 1996 TV Movie was available via the HBO OLE cable station in February 1999. This was in English with Spanish subtitles.

TV listings

TV listings have been obtained from the newspaper, Barbados Advocate.

For the Hartnell episodes, the majority of listings named the series as "Doctor Who"; from 13 February 1968 (with The Ark part two), it was shortened to "Dr Who". Only one episode was identified by name during the first year – "The Dead Planet", part one of The Daleks.

From 1 August 1967, the newspaper named all but a few episodes by title. Part four of The Crusade was printed as "The Warlocks" (instead of The Warlords); The Chase part three lost its middle "Through", and was "Flight Eternity"; part three of The Massacre was "Priest of Day". In the entries for The Savages and The Smugglers, the paper used the longer format of "DR WHO AND THE ... ".

In the 10 October 1967 edition of the Jamaica newspaper The Gleaner, an article mentioned that "during the period May 26 to August 11, one of the most popular series, the 36 programme "Dr Who" went to Barbados." Given the date of the paper, the 36 episodes in question are the final nine serials, Galaxy 4 to The Smugglers.

All the 1980s Tom Baker listings were named "Dr Who". A couple of errors crept into the listings, with Genesis of the Daleks called "Genesis ON the Daleks" (an error that was also applied for the repeat), and part three of Planet of Evil was named "Planet of the Eagle".

• See also Saint Lucia.

Barbados in Doctor Who

• In The Highlanders, Solicitor Grey was planning to send the captured Highlanders to Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies to be sold as slaves.

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