The Web Planet

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Story Code: N / Season 2 UK Airdate: 13 Feb to 20 Mar 1965 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. If no month is noted, the actual airdate is not confirmed, and is a close approximate. (Refer also to Selling Doctor Who for expanded airdates.)

Australia Feb 66 b/w
Gibraltar May 66 b/w
Singapore Jul 66 b/w
Nigeria Sep 66 b/w
Zambia Nov 66 b/w
Barbados May 67 b/w
Mauritius Nov 67 b/w
Mexico Apr 68? b/w
New Zealand did not air b/w
Sierra Leone Jun 68 b/w
Venezuela Nov 68 b/w
Jamaica Feb 69 b/w
Chile Nov 69 b/w
Iran May 70 b/w
Ethiopia Nov 71 b/w
Costa Rica Mar 72 b/w
Nigeria (again) Apr 73? b/w
  • New Zealand received prints in mid-1967, but the serial was not screened due to censorship issues.



Dr Misterio

  • In the Spanish dub, the Animus speaks with a male voice, whereas in the original English, it was female.
  • In the Spanish edition of part six, the "Next Episode" is given by voice-over as "EL LION" to match the caption - and yet The Crusade did not screen in any Spanish-language countries.
  • The BBC held two 'odd' prints from this serial: a copy of part 1 from which the cliffhanger reprise from The Romans part 4 had been removed, and a print of part 6 that had a different "Next Episode" caption that read "The Space Museum" rather than "The Lion". It was thought that this latter change was done because The Crusade was deliberately withheld from sale to Muslim countries, due to the story's content and subject matter. But since only nine serials from A to L were dubbed into Arabic, and The Crusade was not sold outside the Commonwealth; plus the fact that the edited prints are in English not Arabic; that there is no corresponding negative with the other caption -- as there would be in order for a print with the other caption to exist; that the Next Episode captions weren't actually translated or even acknowledged in the Arabic narrations that played over the closing credits anyway (therefore it wouldn't have mattered to Arabic viewers that the episode had the "wrong" caption), the caption must have been changed for other reasons... These are some of the points to note:
    • The BBC was still offering Inside the Spaceship, The Web Planet, The Space Museum, The Time Meddler and Galaxy 4 for sale as late as 1974. Therefore, the BBC may have amended the "reprise" and the caption at that point, to reflect that The Romans was no longer available and that The Space Museum was now the next serial after The Web Planet in terms of the package that was available. (On that basis, the "Next Episode" captions for the last installments of the other serials would also have been amended accordingly.)
    • The BBC's existing master negative of Inside the Spaceship part two has a splice five minutes before the cliffhanger ending. The negative is a Stored Field telerecording, but the last five minutes is from an earlier Suppressed Field recording. This might indicate that the ending was re-edited as part of this 1974 package, and that the full ending was later replaced by splicing from the earlier inferior copy. (The BBC also holds a version of Inside the Spaceship without the final cliffhanger link to Marco Polo, but this edit appears to have been made in the mid-1980s, along with similar edits to other stories, when the reissued package of 17 William Hartnell stories was released for syndication to the United States.)
    • These two odd prints may have come from Australia; the first repeat screening of The Web Planet was in Adelaide, which was the first of two states where the preceding story wasn't The Romans, so the reprise may have been edited out at that early stage (and thus the 'edited' print was bicycled to the other states even though they aired the serials in the correct order!); whereas the last repeat screening of The Web Planet occurred in Queensland (Brisbane), which was also the only state in which The Crusade aired before rather than after The Web Planet, and so the Next caption was changed (by splicing out and swapping it with the one from part four of The Crusade?) to reflect that the next scheduled repeat (albeit one that would be dropped and held over for nearly two years!) was of The Space Museum. (The prints sent to the ABC would have been Suppressed Field -- it's not clear whether these two 'odd' prints are Suppressed Field or Stored Field. If the latter, they won't have come from Australia...)
  • A print of part five was apparently returned from the "Far East" in 1978, but no countries in that region would have still held a broadcast print as late as that. Was it perhaps an Audition print, or a duplicate from Australia?
  • A complete print of part six with the correct caption was recovered from Nigeria in the mid-1980s; a TV station in Nigeria had bought the serial in 1966, but it was a different broadcaster in the same country that had aired the serial in 1973.
  • See Hartnell Junkings


Reissue

  • The serial was reissued by the BBC in late 1985, and sold to:
United States from Sep 85 b/w
Canada 1990s b/w
New Zealand Jul 00 b/w

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