The Celestial Toymaker

Story Code: Y / Season 3	UK Airdate: 2 Apr to 23 Apr 1966	Doctor: William Hartnell
First airings by location	UK Repeats / Foreign Cable and Satellite	Previous Story / Next Story

This story aired in the following countries. They are listed in chronological order according to known airdate. (Refer also to Selling Doctor Who for expanded airdates.)

Australia	Jan 67	b/w
Barbados	Mar 68	b/w
Zambia	Jun 68	b/w
New Zealand	Apr 69	b/w
Sierra Leone	Feb 71	b/w
Singapore	Feb 73	b/w

• New Zealand sent its film prints of this serial to Singapore on 20 September 1972. The sale to Singapore was actually "back-catalogue", as they had already started screening Jon Pertwee stories by this time.

• A print of episode four was found in the ABC's film store in 1984. The print was missing the "NEXT EPISODE HOLIDAY FOR THE DOCTOR" caption.
• A simple explanation for this was that the ABC simply chopped the "NEXT EPISODE" captions from the final episode of all serials, enabling them to screen the serials out of sequence should they so wish. (They often did the same with Lost in Space, which also had "NEXT WEEK" captions at the end of every instalment...)

• • CONSPIRACY THEORY:
  • The recovered episode was a Stored Field telerecording print, a transfer process adopted by the BBC in late 1966.
  • The prints of this serial were examined by the Australia censors in October 1966, so it's entirely possible they were not Stored Field, but the older Suppressed Field format. Therefore, the recovered missing episode may not have actually originated from Australia...
  • Since New Zealand was the only country to screen The Celestial Toymaker and The Savages, but not The Gunfighters, it is logical to think that the excision of the NEXT EPISODE caption was done in New Zealand. The NZ prints of the Toymaker were sent to Singapore in September 1972 - so how then did part four end up in the ABC film store? Did Singapore return the print to the ABC in error? Was it intended for the BBC's Sydney office...?
  • The New Zealand censors requested removal of Cyril's line "-- or you will be killed". The surviving print does not exhibit this censor cut. So, maybe this isn't the New Zealand / Singapore print after all! Or was the censor cut carefully spliced back in? Another censoring method adopted was to mask the relevant parts of the optical soundtrack with black tape, which meant the physical print need not be damaged by cutting and splicing. It's also possible that the offending line was not removed...
  • ABC records indicate that their prints of The Celestial Toymaker parts one to three were destroyed, so logically their prints could not have been sent to another country.
  • So - if New Zealand's copies did not come from BBC Sydney (who only supplied Suppressed Field prints), they were probably sent from one of the two previous broadcasters, who'd have had Stored Field prints. Records held at TVNZ indicate that episodes of Dad's Army were sent from New Zealand to Zambia in 1971, and later to Barbados in 1974, which shows that there was an exchange of BBC programmes between these three countries. Zambia's prints could logically have remained in Africa and been sent to Sierra Leone, which strongly suggests that Barbados was therefore the supplier of the prints of this serial, as well as the others that screened in New Zealand at the time (The Space Museum? to The Smugglers)...
  • Mysteries, mysteries, mysteries...

• • CONSPIRACY THEORY #2:

The late 2011 recovery of the ex-Australia Stored Field print of Galaxy 4 part three does raise some new questions about the origin of The Celestial Toymaker.

• It's possible that Telerecordings of all serials, from Galaxy 4 onwards (including The Celestial Toymaker), were originally made during transmission using the Suppressed Field process. The ABC was offered the new batch of serials, which included Galaxy 4 - in March 1966. However, by the time the ABC finalised the purchase, the BBC had switched over to using the new Stored Field process. The BBC therefore made fresh Stored Field telerecordings of those serials in August, including Galaxy 4 and The Celestial Toymaker, and duly despatched them to BBC Sydney. The Stored Field recordings were subsequently junked.

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