Tele-snaps
Telesnaps are a series of photographs taken from a television screen. In many cases, they provided the only surviving visual record of monochromatic episodes that have since gone missing from the British Broadcasting Corporation's archives.
History
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 80 such images during the broadcasting of the programme.[1] Normally, Cura would take around 60 photographs for a half-hour episode and provide these on a contact sheet to the BBC.[2] 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. With the exception of episode 7 of The Daleks' Masterplan, no telesnaps exist from John Wiles' producership of Doctor Who (effectively from Galaxy 4 to The Ark), since Wiles was not enlisting Cura's services at the time.
Availability
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 - all episodes
- Mission to the Unknown
- The Myth Makers - all episodes
- The Daleks' Master Plan - episodes 1, 3-4, 6, 8-9 and 11-12. The recording of "The Feast of Steven" was still photographed by Robert Jewell — a Dalek operator who worked on The Daleks' Master Plan — but this is the same as a telesnap.
- The Massacre - all episodes
- The Celestial Toymaker episodes 1-3
- The Enemy of the World episode 4
- The Invasion episodes 1 & 4
- The Space Pirates episodes 1, 3-6
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
- ↑ Telesnap Discoveries (includes lists of who discovered missing telesnaps)
- ↑ Howe, David J., Stammers, Mark, Walker, Stephen James, 1992, Doctor Who: The Sixties, Doctor Who Books, an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd, London, p.32
