The Celestial Toymaker

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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.
  • The prints held by Sierra Leone were reportedly destroyed when the TV station was bombed during the 1991-2001 civil war.
  • A print of episode four was found in the ABC's film store in 1984. The print was missing the "NEXT EPISODE: A HOLIDAY FOR THE DOCTOR" caption.
  • A simple explanation for this was that the ABC chopped the "NEXT EPISODE" captions from the final episode of this (and other serials?) which would enable them to screen the serial on its own or out of sequence during subsequent repeat runs, especially those in smaller regional areas.


  • CONSPIRACY THEORY:
    • 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 could have been done in New Zealand. The NZ prints of the serial 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 offices of BBC Sydney...? But probably not - see Australia for more about the origin of that print...
    • 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...


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