Taiwan Prints
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
All ten films bore markings that they had used by the American Armed Forces Radio and Television Service (AFRTS), and subject to censor edits.
The films had been acquired (circa 2008) by a 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.
Unlike those in Korea, Japan, Philippines and Vietnam, the American bases in Taiwan did not have a television network. However two of the bases, those at Ching Chuan Kang and Shu Lin Kou, did operate their own short-range television systems: 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 operated closed-circuit broadcasts from a mobile van, after 1976.
So although both "stations" would have received their television prints via the usual AFRTS circuits, it's not clear how these ten Doctor Who films would have ended up at a radio station potentially hundreds of kilometres away!
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 were there more?
The answer to the second question was likely to provide clues to answer the other questions. So that was our starting point.
NEWSPAPERS
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, AFVN, and the FEN stations during the 1960s and 1970s (the weekly schedule for AFVN alone took up an entire page in 1970!), 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 these black and white episodes of Doctor Who had been 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 region), they should have left a "footprint" on at least one of the listed TV stations, shouldn't they?
The only conclusion that we could draw based on the available published TV listings was that THESE EPISODES OF DOCTOR WHO DID NOT SCREEN ON THE AMERICAN ARMED FORCES NETWORKS.
The fact that the films had AFRTS markings on them means they did not end up say at Ching Chuan Kang via other delivery channels; they must have gone via the usual routes and aired within all six of the AFRTS circuits.
So where on earth did those films found in Taiwan come from?
Are those ten "Taiwan" films the remnants of something else; something that operated outside of the AFRTS / AFN's standard bicycling / screening system?
We are still exploring several possibilities... And hopefully can provide some answers in due course...
