Tele-snaps

Tele-snaps — or telesnaps — were photographs taken by John Cura from the transmission of a televised programme. They were essentially a primitive form of recording transmissions in the days when the price of videotape was still prohibitive. Telesnaps allowed a cheap and portable way for actors, directors and other interested individuals to have a record of a television programme. In many cases, they became the only surviving visual record of monochromatic episodes that went missing from the British Broadcasting Corporation's archives.

Definition

Though John Cura didn't patent the process or trademark the term, the word "tele-snaps" specifically describes the work done by him, largely because his camera was unique and his service of providing contact sheets of entire episodes was also unusual amongst people who offered a similar service at the time. Key to the difference between Cura's work and others was the fact that his camera took images at the speed of 1/25th of a second — the standard PAL framerate. Thus he was able to capture individual frames of programmes with each click, whereas his rivals, at least initially, couldn't. Thus their waste rate was much higher than his, meaning he got a much higher percentage of "good" images of each show.

Clearly, he felt the process unique enough to render the term "Tele-Snaps" on his stationery, as if a trademark. However, he never sought legal protection for his business, so most latter-day television historians have chosen to treat the term as a common, uncapitalised noun.

Beyond that, it is somewhat easier to further define the term in terms of what it is not:

• It is not any off-air recording. Thus, although images of the transmission of "The Feast of Steven" exist, telesnaps do not.
• It is not a publicity still. Though Radio Times were known to have used telesnaps for publicity purposes and this usage arguably turned John Cura into a kind of "accidental still photographer", they aren't what are generally thought of as publicity stills. They were records of transmission, not stills taken during production for the express purpose of publicity.
• It is not the same as a casual photograph taken by cast or crew members. Thus telesnaps are not images derived from, for example, the several 8mm home movies made of location filming. Nor are they on-set images taken from a vantage point other than the one the recording video camera would have had.
• In terms of Doctor Who, a telesnap is never in colour, as Cura died just before the beginning of the show's colour age.

Overview

In 1947 John Cura, a self-taught man with a passion for electronics, sent a letter to the BBC offering his services of tele-snaps, still photographs taken at various intervals during the program's broadcast. His method was simple; a 35mm camera of his own design, pointed at a television screen, could take up to eighty such images during the broadcast of the programme. Normally, Cura would take around sixty photographs for a half-hour episode and provide these on a contact sheet to the BBC. Cura stopped taking telesnaps with the fifth production block (which ended with The Mind Robber), which is why no telesnaps exist of the missing episodes of Season 6. No telesnaps exist from John Wiles's producership of Doctor Who (effectively from Galaxy 4 to The Ark), since Wiles was not using Cura's services at the time. However, since Cura was completely independent of the BBC, and regularly sold his work to multiple interested parties, there's every reason to believe that he actually did take telesnaps of the John Wiles era, but simply never found a buyer for them.

After Cura died in 1969, his widow offered his complete collection of negatives and prints — literally hundreds of thousands of images — to the BBC. When they rudely declined the offer, his widow burned the entire archive. It was because of this act that fans most likely lost the last visual record of some missing episodes.

Legality

The legality of Cura's tele-snaps was never settled by the courts or Parliament in his lifetime, though the BBC were certainly concerned about it. In the 1950s, they tried to get the British Parliament to enact legislation that defined ownership of the image of a transmission, specifically because they wanted to restrict or even eliminate Cura's business. Parliament, however, never obliged. Despite this, they did ask him to limit the people to whom he sold the telesnaps. He mostly ignored this request.

In fact, the BBC were never able to exercise any traditional element of copyright control over tele-snaps. They had no physical access to the negatives, nor did they get a royalty when he sold his images to others. Worse, they actually paid him for images of what was ostensibly their own work. So they were his de facto copyright — even though, technically, the matter was never resolved.

Availability

The hunt for tele-snaps is a bit like the hunt for missing episodes themselves. The BBC largely trashed their collection of tele-snaps, leaving it up to amateur sleuths to find them. After a lot of false trails, a few discoveries have been made in unlikely places.

Unlike the missing episode hunt, however, finding tele-snaps is a much smaller-scale affair that begins with the production notes held by the BBC. These notes, except in the case of The Time Meddler and a few individual episodes, tell whether the producer had actually commissioned the tele-snaps. The basic presumption is that if a producer didn't commission the tele-snaps, they probably don't exist. This presumption may be incorrect, however. Cura could well have tele-snapped a serial for which he wasn't commissioned by the BBC, since he accepted commissions from actors and directors and — by the 1960s — simply anyone who would pay. He was also known to take tele-snaps speculatively in the hopes of selling them on to interested parties.

Nevertheless, a basic question of tele-snap availability is whether they were commissioned in the first place. And what we can say in general is:

• Verity Lambert often, but not always, commissioned tele-snaps.
• John Wiles never did.
• Innes Lloyd, beginning with The Gunfighters ordered tele-snaps.
• Cura's last work for Doctor Who appears to have been The Mind Robber episode 3, since that is the latest-surviving set of tele-snaps known to exist. He died only months later, taking his tele-snapping secrets with him.

This means there's a significant period of 1965 where there are no known tele-snaps. Again, Cura could have made tele-snaps and sold them to other people, but we don't know. If the episodes themselves also are missing, then there simply is no visual record of those stories. This means that there are only three stories which have absolutely no visual record whatsoever:

• Mission to the Unknown
• The Myth Makers
• The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve

A number of partially-missing stories, however, have no visual records for their missing episodes. In most cases that means that individual characters do have some surviving material. But there are some unlucky actors who appeared in only a single episode who have no visual records at all. In addition to the above whole serials, individual episodes without visual records are:

• "The Tyrant of France" and "A Bargain of Necessity" from The Reign of Terror
• "

Obviously, the above questions are the ones that most interest Doctor Who fans. But if you're a fan of tele-snaps, then you might be interested in some other issues:

• existing episodes for which tele-snaps were known to be made, but which no longer exist
• cases where it's simply not known whether telesnaps were made.

Most fans simply don't care when tele-snaps of existing episodes go missing, but it is certainly known, for instance, that The Chase and The Web Planet — amongst others — were fully tele-snapped, but no one knows where those tele-snaps are.

Of slightly greater interest are those episodes whose tele-snap status isn't clearly known. "The Lion", for instance has an ambiguous status, which used to be a matter of some fan consternation. After the episode was recovered in New Zealand, however, the issue of whether Cura had been commissioned became less pressing. Indeed, The Crusade is a highly interesting case, because there are full tele-snaps for the missing episodes "The Knight of Jaffa" and "The Warlords", but production records don't clearly indicate whether "The Lion" and "The Wheel of Fortune" were tele-snapped — but they are presumed tele-snapped, since it would be odd to telesnap only episodes one and three of a four-part story.

Then there are the

Just like whole episodes, there can be episodes whose tele-snaps are missing.

As they relate to Doctor Who, tele-snaps come in four different categories:

• extant snaps of episodes that exist
• extant snaps of episodes that don't exist
• non-existing snaps of episodes that exist
• non-existing snaps of episodes that don't exist

ntirely missing telesnaps

• There are tele-snaps which exist, but are of episodes which exist, and therefore are of limited interest.

Several of the groups of telesnaps have been published as blocks of episodes in Doctor Who Magazine, or been released in a compilation form with audio soundtrack on video, DVD or CD by the BBC.

Missing episodes with no telesnaps existing

• Marco Polo episode 4
• The Reign of Terror episodes 4 & 5
• Galaxy 4 - episodes 1-2 & 4
• Mission to the Unknown
• The Myth Makers - all episodes
• The Daleks' Master Plan - episodes 1, 3-4, 6, 8-9 and 11-12. Twenty low quality and mostly very blurry images exist of "The Feast of Steven" thanks to the amateur efforts of actor Robert Jewell — a Dalek operator who worked on The Daleks' Master Plan. But these aren't quite the same as telesnaps. Jewell was apparently just pointing his off-the-shelf camera at the television screen and clicking. Consequently, all are blurry to one degree or another, and in no way rival Cura's work.
• The Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Eve - all episodes
• The Celestial Toymaker episodes 1-3
• The Invasion episodes 1 & 4
• The Space Pirates episodes 1, 3-6

Notes

1. Although no telesnaps are known to exist from Marco Polo episode 4, contemporary BBC documentation indicates they were taken.

External links

• Telesnap Discoveries (includes lists of who discovered missing telesnaps)
• BBC website Doctor Who - Photonovels (using telesnaps)
• Doctor Who: The Missing Episodes (PDF), includes list of where telesnaps are published)

Footnotes