Did you ever play the swimming pool game Marco Polo? You know, if you are “it” you call out “Marco” and who you are trying to reach calls out “Polo”. I feel there is a fair amount of similarity that can be taken between this game and what is currently happening with the missing episode rumour saga. It feels like the more we are told something is going to be announced or happen the further away we get from the truth.
Before the announcement of The Enemy of the World or The Web of Fear and even before the public knew that those 9 episodes were discovered, another story was always listed among these two. It was Marco Polo. The rumor had always been called MEW. It stood for Marco Polo, (The) Enemy of the World, and (The) Web of Fear. As long as the rumour existed that The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear had been found, Marco Polo was always right there too. It became a huge surprise as we got closer to the announcement of The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear that Marco Polo suddenly dropped off.
Why would this be? There were a lot of reasons given. Reasons ranged from the films were in poor condition, multiple film prints of the story had been found, to even the restoration had been deleted and needed to be started over again. There are all sorts of reasons why this could have been dropped. For all I know one reason could be it doesn’t exist. The world would be an easier place to live in if I could believe it but I don’t.
There have been a couple of close-calls with this story. The Mirror ran an article that this story was found from an amateur collector who pointed a film camera at the TV at the time of the original transmission. We were told that Marco Polo is up on iTunes ready to go and could have even possibly been released around the time of the 50th anniversary in November. Then there is another angle to the story.
It is said by a few that Philip Morris holds a great deal of material on film and videotape found in his searches of African archives. If the numbers are true, there is more than a good chance that there are missing episodes of many of our favorites series. The last number I heard of what Philip had was around 55,000 film cans and 10,000 videotapes. I am lead to believe that this number is way out of date and there should be more than that. Very exciting but if it is true that there is so much material and so far we have only yielded 9 recovered episodes of Doctor Who, 2 episodes of The Sky at Night and an unplayable Morecombe and Wise, this is going to stir a little debate.
There has been a growing group of people who have been very vocal on Twitter and other Doctor Who forums about Philip Morris “hoarding” of episodes. While it is true that any sort of confirmation or news of any kind is not moving fast enough for me, I don’t believe “hoarding” the correct term. I am part of a podcast called The Others. We do a weekly program where we talk about missing episode rumors but one thing that needs to be applied to any missing episode rumor regarding Philip Morris is logic.
First of all, we (The Others) had worked out that if 55,000 films cans were returned that it would take a lot of logistics in every possible meaning of the word. Say 1 16mm film can weighs approx. 5 lbs. x 55,000 equals 275,000 lbs. We got all excited about news of 3 tons of material returned to the UK. 3 tons is 6,000 lbs. Basically to get the amount of film that was said to be recovered back to the UK would take roughly 46 shipments if shipped the same way as the freight we found out about last year. My math may be a little wrong but it is close. Once this film is in a place to start going though, that is 55,000 film reels that need to be opened up in special environments played back some way. Even if Doctor Who material was separated and kept to the side it still takes a long time to go through, especially if there are multiple prints for some episodes as we are lead to believe. I don’t know how big the staff is that works with Philip but the people handling the film needs to be experts and it will take a long time. Anyone reading this will throw it back at me that Philip had these prints for years. All I can do is repeat: I don’t know how big the staff is that works with Philip but the people handling the films need to be experts. If any of the prints are damaged or take more time to playback, this will take those experts even more time. This doesn’t even take into account just checking that the labels on the film cans are the actual contents. Imagine if the BBC announced they had recovered three prints of Fury from the Deep only to find that all 18 cans contain films of old Spyder’s Web episodes. The bottom line is, this whole process will take a long time. But that doesn’t mean the BBC can’t announce that more is yet to come. I think there is much to be excited about but I do not believe the results will be immediate and I don’t completely buy into the notion of an announcement around Easter. I think there is a lot to look forward to but today I feel we hit a set back of sorts.
On Sunday January 26th, a YouTube video was posted and it was a screen that simply announced:
“The first and last 3 minutes of Marco Polo Ep. 1 will be uploaded to YouTube tomorrow. The Daily Mirror article of November last year was indeed correct. The Doctor Who story Marco Polo has been recovered complete in the hands of a private individual. I have obtained a copy of episode one and will be uploading the first and last 3 minutes of the episode in low definition, to my YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3akiIgHPJgUaQJEcosyVsg)as proof. The full episode will be available to download via Paypal from a secure download site for £4, shortly afterwards. The link to which will be provided after the end credits of the sample video. No bullshit and inertia from the likes of Phil Morris or the BBC, just a straight forward £4 for your copy of this missing Episodes. 100% illegal. You no want - you no have to buy. End of.”
Based on the YouTube video, this person was going to allow us to see the first 3 and last 3 minutes of Episode One of Marco Polo. Of course at the end of the day this was revealed to be a hoax; hardly surprising. Normally, I can see these things play out pretty well but I was left open to the possibility this was real. This person played on the climate of what some of the fans have been complaining about: Philip Morris is hoarding episodes of Doctor Who. Regardless how illegal the offer was, it seemed like a fair deal. Low quality files uploaded and then a way to buy the episode for £4. It seemed reasonable to me. This guy advertised a time for when he would upload this gem and we would all be ready for it. Then cracks started to show up in how this was playing out.
Almost immediately, he started to tweet directly to the likes of Paul Vanezis and Tom Spilsbury. If someone really had the episode and uploaded it, I am pretty sure the last thing they would do is directly message people who work closely to the Doctor Who brand telling them what he was about to do. That said, charade was pretty believable. He needed to keep moving the video around because “the BBC were after him”. The closer we came to 7:30pm when the video was to be posted, the veneer starts to crack further; the tweets become a little bit stranger. After “trying” to upload the video to YouTube and publicly announce that he will upload to DailyMotion, someone asks if he could just put up a screengrab to show authenticity. His response was:
“Yeah, but you’ve no idea what I’m up against. They are on to me. See WHO blocked??? Not me.”
What became telling real fast was that his sights were on Ian Levine. It became obvious to me that he was a fraud once he started to bait Ian to retweet the link to the video even before it was up:
“OK Ian retweet this. I am uploading now. New address:”
Once I saw that I assumed that this guy was fooling us and soon we found out the truth. The video came up, started with the title sequence but soon fell apart there. Eventually we were treated to the musical sensation Tarzan Boy. We soon got another tweet from the King of Comedy:
“HAAA HAA HAAA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!”
As much as I mention that I wasn’t fooled, I sure the hell was refreshing constantly to see what was being uploaded. I have no problem saying that at all. I would love to see this episode and it could have been possible that this was legit (in terms of being real). I certainly wasn’t angry about it. I found it quite amusing. That was, until he tweeted this:
“There was one sole target of this whole thing Ian - You. Ha ha ha!”
Very few people are more passionate about missing episodes than Ian Levine. He tracked down many but has been quite vocal about the situation directly to Philip Morris’ Twitter feed. I am not quite sure what this achieves apart from letting off steam over the missing episode situation. It is pretty pathetic that this hoaxer singled out Ian but unfortunately Ian draws attention to himself. The good news was that Ian was never fooled by this hoax. Sure, he kept an open mind to it but he publicly stated many times his suspicion about this guy.
Perhaps the question raised would be why would I draw more attention to this hoaxer? Why give a joker like this any more attention than he already has? I think it has less to do with him and more to do with Marco Polo.
To me Marco Polo has been a sort of lynchpin to the whole missing episode saga. As I mentioned earlier on, this was always partnered with The Enemy of the World and The Web of Fear. This title keeps popping up every where when the next “announcement” is going to be made. The 50th anniversary of this story is coming up in February. It is linked to being announced when announcement is made about all of the missing episode recoveries at Easter. This story seems to be at the forefront of the whole missing episode movement. Is it little wonder why a hoaxer would pick any other story than this one? Generally speaking, if someone believes if Philip Morris has found any more episodes of Doctor Who, Marco Polo is probably right at the top of the list. This was the perfect choice for this guy to pick to hoax. If it were something like The Power of the Daleks, the story would probably have been rejected out of hand.
Many people had said that if The Web of Fear episode 3 was not on the upcoming DVD, that means the whole Omnirumour is false. It’s not on the DVD. That is a fact. I think more people believe that if Marco Polo doesn’t get announced soon, to them that proves the Omnirumour is a fake.
To go back to my analogy of the swimming pool game Marco Polo, it feels like the more the “sources” or people in the know call out “Marco” the “Polo” aspect feels like it is slipping further away. There are a lot of people who seem to know what is going on. They can give information at a moments notice on any film print that there is a question about. I am not saying that these people do not know what they are talking about nor are they trying to deceive us. These people want to give us the information we so badly want to hear. Trust me, I check the forums daily to see what they have to say. I get really excited hoping what they are saying is true. The problem is much of this seems very contradictory to what is staring us in the face.
One more piece of logic to consider. Taking into consideration what I mentioned earlier about all the film prints and how long it would take to go through them, how do our “sources” know the quality of each film print. They are getting their information from sources like Worldwide. The problem is that multiple people have said that nothing has been handed over to the BBC apart from the 9 episodes from October. I too have a few sources and they all say work has not started on any other episodes beyond the 9 returned in October. It doesn’t mean my sources are right but it is an angle to consider.
Finally, I believe one way to have a better and more realistic understanding of what is going on with the missing episodes, keep an eye on Ian Levine’s twitter feed. It is not always good news but I think it might be the most accurate source out there at the moment. I am not saying I don’t believe in the Easter announcement but reading his responses to people asking him questions about this subject, I do think he may have the best assessment of the situation.
