A WORDPRESS neighbour of wipednews.com has helped restore the correct audio to a brief clip from one of the missing episodes of Doctor Who.
Blogger Rumpio came to realize the fragment of grainy b&w footage – part of a 15-minute silent 8mm film reel of off-screen footage shot by a Who fan in Australia in the 1960s – was incorrectly synced with an off-air audio recording while working on a reconstruction of the two missing episodes (four and five, of six) of Season One’s The Reign of Terror.
It was assumed that in the brief clip – from “The Tyrant of France” (tx 29/8/64) – companion Ian Chesterton mentions a character called Jules Renan. That is the way it appears on 2|entertain DVD Lost in Time, which also includes the rest of the 8mm clips capturing precious seconds from missing William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episodes, coupled to their respective soundtracks.
Unfortunately, it’s not an exact science. The problem with the 8mm clips is summed up well by Steve Phillips over at The Docto Who Clips List website:
“Most of the clips on this reel are in the form of very short “reaction” shots and are thus difficult to tie down to exact places in their source episodes. Hence, descriptions for these clips are presented on an “educated guess” basis (arrived at by studying research materials such as scripts, audios and telesnaps) and should not be taken as gospel!”
Rumpio, however, has managed to pinpoint the exact placing of the clip using “limited lipreading skills” to work out Ian was, in fact, saying something that sounded like “cheese”.
I’ll leave the rest of the explaining up to Rumpio himself over at Rumpio’s Blog, but he’s shared his resynced version on YouTube, which you can enjoy below.
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