MAN: Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three.
NARRATOR: By 1973, when Planet of the Daleks was recorded, Doctor Who had already been transmitting in colour for three years, although the majority of British households still only had black and white television sets.
The episodes were recorded and edited for transmission on these two-inch quad video tapes.
Once the episodes had been broadcast, the tapes would be retained for a couple of years, in case the BBC decided to repeat the programme.
But in those days, tapes couldn't be kept indefinitely for reasons of expense and space.
To store them in a library you'd have had to have something the size of the Albert Hall, just to store a year's programmes.
It was ludicrous.
NARRATOR: The wiping of these master tapes didn't necessarily mean that the episodes would be lost forever.
Colour copies were made for overseas sales and also for the benefit of the many foreign broadcasters still transmitting only in black and white, film copies, known as telerecordings, were made essentially, by pointing a film camera at a TV monitor.
But even these recordings would often be destroyed by BBC Enterprises once their sales potential was considered to be exhausted.
By the late 1970s, over 150 black and white episodes of Doctor Who were missing altogether from the BBC archives.
And many Jon Pertwee episodes, originally made in colour, only survived in the form of these black-and-white film recordings.
Oh, no! (DOCTOR COUGHING) Video tape was routinely wiped and reused for making new programmes.
And, back then, it wasn't really envisaged that there'd be a home market for video.
As far as the BBC was concerned, it was very nearly live.
It was a day-to-day operation.
We put out the programmes and people said, "Do you remember that programme five years ago, wasn't it lovely?
", never thinking they'd see it again.
The whole phenomenon of Doctor Who showing programmes that were made 40 years ago is quite extraordinary.
NARRATOR: As the BBC began to realise the extent of what it had lost, its archivists made contact with foreign broadcasters.
And during the late '70s and early '80s, a number of coloured Doctor Who tapes were returned from overseas.
But all good things must come to an end.
And by the late 1980s, it seemed that the well had run dry with 29 Jon Pertwee episodes still existing only on black-and-white film.
But Doctor Who fans never lost hope.
And in 1992, a team of BBC enthusiasts, who would become known as the Doctor Who Restoration Team, developed a process by which they were able to restore 16 of these episodes to colour using some off-air domestic recordings made from a 1970s colour transmission run in the USA.
This process involved merging the colour signal from the domestic off-air tapes with a higher quality black-and-white signal from the film recordings.
Oh, this is fantastic.
NARRATOR: The project was a great success.
But this still left 13 black-and-white episodes that had originally been made in colour.
As part of the 1992 restoration project, a US firm had been commissioned to computer colourise a short clip from which no usable off-air material existed.
But colouring an entire episode by this method simply wasn't financially viable.
Is he dead?
Yes.
The first one.
Technology had got to the point where it was affordable to do it now.
If we had been looking at this five years ago, it would have been too expensive.
Now, the money is It's not cheap but it's becoming affordable to do.
And because there was just the one episode that needed work, it made it even more affordable.
I doubt whether we could do it for a whole series.
I doubt whether we could even do it for two episodes.
But this was a good example 'cause that was just the one episode in black and white.
NARRATOR: The American firm, Legend Films, were engaged to produce a computer colourisation of episode three using reference material supplied from the rest of the story.
INSELL: With the colourisation process, obviously, they're working from reference material and painting colour on top of black and white.
So they have to make best guesses for things, and flesh tones can be quite weak because the detail's just not there.
I think my expectations were very, very high.
And, quite rightly, people were saying to me, "No, no, there's only so much you can do recolourising material.
" And so, when we got the final product in, it looked great, it looked absolutely brilliant.
And it was an incredibly important step.
And it was most of the way, but I just felt that we needed something to take us that last 100 yards.
NARRATOR: Coincidently, at the same time, an independent group were perfecting a new process that would bring a separate source of colour to the restoration, a sophisticated technique which makes the 1992 restoration process look like child's play.
I was watching UK G.
O.
L.
D, a repeat of an old Doctor Who episode back in the '90s.
And noticed various, little bits of red breaking through on the picture, just little bits coming through.
And I knew I was watching a black and white film print.
So I thought, "Well, where on earth is this colour coming from?
" "It must be coming from somewhere.
" NARRATOR: This is part three of Planet of the Daleks, and this is a telecine machine which is used to transfer film recordings onto videotape.
In effect, it does the opposite job of the telerecording machine described earlier.
But it's rather more sophisticated than that.
Well, I've got the 16mm film recording negative on the Spirit machine, here.
If you look at the monitor on the right, that is set to PAL at the moment, which is basically doing the same job as an analogue TV tuner.
This is during the opening titles, of course, which is highly coloured on the original.
It's looking at the signal coming in and it's trying to decode the chroma information that it sees in that signal.
You can see that shimmering going on, the information is there but it just can't lock on to it.
NARRATOR: As Jonathan zooms into the image, we can see a distinct pattern of dots embedded within the picture.
These film recordings were made from a black and white monitor.
But the colour signal, the colour part of the video signal, wasn't filtered out when they were being made.
So the colour signal manifested itself as a pattern of tiny dots on the film.
And it's this that we use to decode and construct the original colours again.
That someone come along and say, "Here's a black and white picture.
"I'm going to squeeze out of it colour information", it'sit's insanity, it's black magic.
NARRATOR: But as so often in the wonderful world of Doctor Who, what appears to be magic is, in fact, the application of science.
-MS HAWTHORNE: Magic! -Science! -Magic! -Science, Miss Hawthorne.
I don't know how they do it and I don't know how it works, but it does.
The pattern of dots on the film that's scanned relate to the original colours that were there before the black and white print was made.
And the pattern of dots, the sort of weave pattern in the dots, give you the hue, and the intensity of the dots gives you the saturation.
So, this independent group, the colour recovery working group, experimented with various techniques to try and decode this pattern of dots on the film.
And eventually Richard Russell came up with this idea for decoding the dots and getting the full spectrum of colours back.
And then implemented this in software, which is actually written in BBC BASIC.
James showed me this thing and said, "Would you be interested in putting some money towards it "to help us research and develop it.
" And I thought, "Yeah, absolutely.
" But when I presented the business case in it to 2 Entertain, I always I just said, "This is something we won't see a return on for years.
" So, it was of some surprise when it took them about three months to start to get a workable prototype.
It was amazing.
NARRATOR: When the colour recovery process was applied to Planet of the Daleks, the results were very encouraging.
HALL: What caught my attention were the skin tones had subtleties on it.
NARRATOR: But of course, no technique will ever be 100% perfect.
With Planet of the Daleks, the raw recovered version suffered from problems at the top of the frame.
The technique when applied, it's very much dependent on the quality of the film recording.
These film recordings, they suffer from geometrical distortions.
NARRATOR: The restoration team had experienced a similar problem back in the 1990s, when they found that the telerecording process had left the viewer with a picture that was bent very slightly out of shape.
HOWARD STABLEFORD: It doesn't quite work.
Can you see there that the colours don't quite line up with the black and white film version.
And that's because when that was made, the picture shape was distorted.
But, if you're a fan of Tomorrow's World, you may have noticed that we can deliberately distort a rectangular picture into almost any shape.
Well, the team used the same device to match the two pictures.
Quite a fundamental problem in developing a technique that would allow us to decode the chroma-dots is that you've got to correct for these distortions.
We now had two versions of Planet of the Daleks.
There was the one from Los Angeles that had been colourised, and then there was the colour recovery version from here in London.
TARON: Doctor! Come on, Doctor, come on! It's going up! Come on, Doctor, we're nearly there.
INSELL: The techniques, in some ways, are complementary.
With the colour recovery, the flesh tones were there, some of the detail that was there, that was lacking in the colourised version.
The colourised version had the robustness of the colours there, which were perhaps lacking in the colour recovered version.
What that enabled us to do is to take the best from both of them to form one composite.
TARON: Doctor! Come on, Doctor, come on! It's going up! Come on, Doctor HALL: But it wasn't quite finished.
There was still a little bit of work left to do on it.
First of all, it goes for grading, just to get those colours right.
And then, it's manually tweaked, manually touched up, just to make sure every bit is perfect.
NARRATOR: With the application of the VidFIRE technique to bring back the video-look to the studio sequences, the DVD restoration team has now returned episode three of Planet of the Daleks to its original full colour status.
That little machine of yours has quite an effect.
NARRATOR: And it's a measure of the project's success that the difference in quality, not unlike the inhabitants of the planet Spiridon, is almost completely invisible.