The Daleks' Master Plan
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| Story Code: V / Season 3 | UK Airdate: 13 Nov 1965 to 29 Jan 1966 | Doctor: William Hartnell |
| First airings by location | UK Repeats / Foreign Cable and Satellite | Previous Story / Next Story |
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- The serial was planned as a 12-parter. However, from the stage directions in the rehearsal and camera scripts for parts six and seven, particularly with regards to the "NEXT EPISODE" captions, it would seem that by the time the serial was made, it was being treated as an 11-parter (and would be sold as such to foreign broadcasters), but with an additional episode screened at Christmas, but only for consumption in the UK. In other words, The Daleks' Master Plan should really be regarded as an 11-parter with a special Christmas episode added for UK viewers, rather than as a 12-parter, with an episode removed from foreign sale. Put another way, it's an 11-parter which, after its sixth episode on 18 December 1965, took a fortnight's break before resuming on New Years Day 1966; meanwhile its replacement on 25 December 1965 was a one-off episode of Doctor Who...
- The 11-part serial (minus the Christmas 'special') was offered to Australia in March 1966, along with Galaxy 4, Mission to the Unknown, and The Myth Makers.
- It was viewed by the Australian censors on 13 September 1966 - and rated with a mixture of "G" and "A" classifications, with and without cuts. The ABC ultimately decided against attempting to "reconstruct" the films, since the "A" classifications on some of the episodes that didn't have cuts would prevent them from screening the serial in their preferred early evening timeslot anyway.
- The ABC officially "wrote off" buying the serial in March 1967. And since they did not purchase the rights to screen it, they did not make any clearance payments to the BBC. Accordingly, the other countries that were still buying the series at this time were not able to purchase the serial, as they relied on Australia to cover all the rights clearance costs.
- It is not known what happened to the prints that had been offered to the ABC. The ABC did not 'own' the prints and therefore could not keep hold of them. In all likelihood they'd have been returned to the BBC's Sydney office in March 1967. But what happened to them after that is unknown...
- By the end of 1973, the BBC still retained all 11 master negatives as well as prints of episodes 2,3,4,5 and 10 (at least), although these copies were sited at three different locations around London: episode two had been taken to the BBC's film studios in Ealing (from which it was "stolen" in 1973, and subsequently returned in 2004), whereas three was at BBC Enterprises and four was kept in the film library. Both were borrowed by the Blue Peter producers for use in their tenth anniversary clip montage (broadcast on 5 November 1973), but were never returned to their places of origin. Part five and ten surfaced in 1983 at a disused BBC building. Whether these five prints were all part of the same set of 11 is unknown; nor is it known how they came to be separated in the first place. It is entirely possible that these were all from the set that had been sent to Australia in 1966 (and if so, had been returned to London two years earlier than the 1975 bulk shipment of returns by the ABC), or maybe from an "unused" set from 1967 (see below)...
- See also Hartnell Junkings
POINTS TO CONSIDER:
- At the time the offer was made to Australia, both Singapore and Gibraltar were coming to the end of their transmissions of season two; the BBC may have struck additional prints of this story in anticipation of a sale to those two countries. As it turned out, neither country picked up the option to continue with the series after The Time Meddler. (The two episodes found in 1983 may have been from a set of these unused 'additional' copies.)
- Even if the serial had been accepted and broadcast in Australia in 1966, the two other countries screening season three at the time - Barbados and Zambia - would probably have been denied broadcast rights anyway, because by the end of that year, the BBC had withdrawn the sale of all Dalek serials as part of their agreement with Terry Nation.
- By the time the moratorium had been lifted at the end of 1967, only New Zealand and Sierra Leone, which were still lagging behind with screening the series, would have been in a position to include and schedule the serial with the rest of season three, but since neither country did buy this (and Mission to the Unknown) it must have been the cost that prevented them from doing so...
- Both Barbados and Zambia had screened as far as The Smugglers by the end of 1968, and probably wouldn't have been interested in buying and screening a story out of sequence.
- And because Singapore did not purchase season three until 1972 (as a "back-catalogue" package), it's likely that the sales rights to the 11-parter (usually five years from first UK broadcast) had already lapsed (in 1970) and not been renewed, which would have prevented Singapore from buying the serial with the rest of the season.
