Happy Easter dear readers! Speaking of which, some egg-cellent news! Okay okay, that was just poor. Won't do it again, promise. But it really is good news - thanks to the generosity of Mike from Huddersfield, we now have a batch of unedited UK Gold recordings of Doctor Who omnibuses dating from 1993-1997! After hours (and hours) of sifting through the tapes, we've collected a large chunk of unique trailers, continuity and stuff which will keep this little blog going for months! So thanks again Mike for his help! And if anyone else has material to share, please get in touch...
Regular readers will recall it wasn't that long ago when we took a look at the continuity for the September 2000 repeat of the classic Jon Pertwee story 'The Ambassadors of Death' - but what about the very first time the channel aired the seven-part epic? That was almost 17 years ago...
The magnificent Jon Pertwee arrived on UK Gold with episode one of 'Spearhead from Space' on Tuesday 16th February 1993. During the channel's early years, Doctor Who stories were primarily screened weeknights in their original, unedited episodic form, followed by an edited 'omnibus' version on Sunday mornings. Now, for some unknown reason, the channel were showing his stories out of sequence, and so 'Ambassadors' appeared six weeks after the preceeding story 'Doctor Who And The Silurians', across seven weeknights from Monday 10th to Tuesday 18th May 1993.
This week's clips come from the omnibus edition of the first four episodes, aired on Sunday 16th May 1993...
- End credits of Rentaghost (featuring the War Chief himself, Edward Brayshaw!)
- Caption - Doctor Who: Next on UK Gold
- Promo for Stalky And Co, the 1982 BBC adaptation of the Rudyard Kipling book (produced by none other than Barry Letts and directed by Rodney Bennett)
- Run down of the evening's programming (see screencap below)
- Promo for Life Without George, a forgotten BBC sitcom from the late 1980s
- Promo for Colin's Sandwich, another late 1980s BBC comedy
- Promo for Signpost To Murder (1964), part of the Weekend Film Festival strand
- Promo for the film Blue Fin (1978), which followed the Who omnibus
- UK Gold ident and opening titles
- All of the bumpers aired either side of the ad-breaks
- Episode 4's closing credits & continuity announcement (anyone know who the lady is?)
But what about the concluding episodes, you say? We'll take a look at those next Monday, 12th May... yes, it's a cliffhanger! Cue titles!
This was the film prints that tipped them off about the chroma dots you know. One of the episodes had the strobing...
ReplyDeleteAll these years later we've got good reason to thank UK Gold.
Now how many beans make five?
I know that a lot of time has passed since you supplied us with information on when Doctor Who stories were re-televised for the first time on UK Gold. I am really hoping that you still look at any new posts that you may receive from fans on this website. @WHOGOLD , would you be happy for me to send you an e-mail so I can talk to you some more about the run that Doctor Who had on UK Gold between 1992 and 2005? Thank you so much!
ReplyDelete