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Pamela Nash was an employee of BBC Enterprises in at least the early 1970s. She was responsible for maintaining Enterprise's library of 16mm telerecordings of Doctor Who and other programmes. These film prints were sold to overseas broadcasters.
In the initial phase of her employment — at least as it is relevant to the history of Doctor Who — she greatly expanded the number of film positives and negatives of the videotape masters of Doctor Who episodes. For a short time, this action ensured that every episode of Doctor Who existed in BBC Enterprises' vault, even though the separate BBC archives had already wiped all the videotape masters themselves.
However, in 1972 she began a purge of her own. She ordered the indiscriminate destruction of the library she had created. It is from this second purging that Doctor Who failed to recover. The purge was neither systematic nor complete. How her team and she chose which episodes to trash and which to keep remains a mystery to fans, because many of the ones which survived were not of great significance to the history of the programme, while others that were destroyed had obvious historical importance — such as the final episode of The Tenth Planet and the first episode of The Power of the Daleks.
Nevertheless, her team's record keeping was probably of signal importance in tracking down some episodes recovered from overseas broadcasters.
External links
- The Pamela Nash Experience, a website dedicated to her memory, serves as one of the most complete websites on the destruction of monochromatic Doctor Who