The Celestial Toymaker
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| Story Code: X / 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.
- 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, which was introduced afterwards. 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 was most likely made 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 was to cover the affected optical soundtrack with tape, which meant the physical print need not be damaged by cutting and splicing. It's also possible that the offending line was never removed... Mysteries, mysteries, mysteries...
- ABC records indicate that their prints of The Celestial Toymaker parts one to three were destroyed, so in all likelihood, their prints were never sent to another country.
- So - if New Zealand's copies did not come from BBC Sydney, they were probably sent from one of the two previous broadcasters: Barbados or Zambia. 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 suggests Barbados was the supplier of the prints of this serial (as well as the others screened at the time) to New Zealand...
