The Tenth Planet

Story Code: DD / Season 4	UK Airdate: 8 Oct to 29 Oct 1966	Doctor: William Hartnell
First airings by location	UK Repeats / Foreign Cable and Satellite	Previous Story / Next Story

This story aired in the following three countries. They are listed in chronological order according to airdate. (Refer also to Selling Doctor Who for expanded airdates.)

A new Doctor Who is Required!; The Times, 6 August 1966

Australia	Jun 67	b/w
New Zealand	Aug 69	b/w
Singapore	Apr 72	b/w

• The Tenth Planet was the first story made in the fourth production block, and as such was not included in any package of stories on offer; the latest package included up to The Smugglers only. Serial DD and all subsequent serials would be part of the next run of stories to be offered. When the Dalek stories were withdrawn from sale by agreement between the BBC and Terry Nation (from late 1966 to the end of 1967), the sale of this story and The Power of the Daleks to Australia had already been completed.

• It is thought that the BBC withdrew The Tenth Planet from sale at that time as well, as it might have felt that it couldn't offer Hartnell's final story without Troughton's first to follow-on, or it had decided that it was preferable to sell the new batch of Troughton stories (The Highlanders to The Faceless Ones) as a discrete package of 22 episodes featuring the same lead actor, than to force foreign stations to have to purchase one single Hartnell story as well. This is particularly true when we see that the three countries after Australia to buy The Highlanders hadn't screened any Hartnell stories for several years! (Uganda and Hong Kong had both stopped screening Doctor Who with The Rescue in 1967, while The Time Meddler was the last story to be seen in Singapore in 1966!).
• The regeneration was shown on the BBC's Junior Points of View programme on Friday 4 November 1966 (part 1 of The Power of the Daleks aired the following day.) It's possible this film extract (taken from the broadcast master tape the day before) was then retained by the Film Library...
• The serial was eventually made available again by mid-1968, by which time Barbados was about to complete its screening of the season three serials, and may have been too late to accept an offer of an extra serial.
• The first new sale was to New Zealand, who censored the serial in June 1968. (The serial was the last in a package of 44 William Hartnell episodes, starting with The Space Museum.)
• For reasons unknown, two further countries still screening season three stories did not acquire this story: Zambia did not acquire the serial to play after The Smugglers in October 1968, and Sierra Leone did not have it for broadcast in September 1970.
• New Zealand sent its edited film prints of this serial to Singapore on 10 January 1972. The sale to Singapore was actually "back-catalogue", as they had already started screening Jon Pertwee stories by this time.
• The regeneration sequence from part 4 was seen in the 5 November 1973 edition of Blue Peter. There are four likely sources for this clip:
  • (1) It was struck directly from the original tele-recording negatives or prints held by Enterprises, however it was not common for other BBC programmes to approach Enterprises for clips.
  • (2) It's the film transfer (on 35mm?) that had been made in October 1966 intended to be used as the telecine insert reprise at the beginning of The Power of the Daleks part 1, but which was not used; the Film Library managed to retain it for seven years, despite their having junked all the other film that was shot for the episode...
  • (3) It's a reuse of the extract that had featured on Junior Points of View in 1966 (see above), which means the Film Library had it on file for seven years...
  • (4) The clip was extracted from the 16mm film prints returned to the BBC from Singapore, where it had aired in April 1972. If so, the Blue Peter editors may have chopped out the regeneration sequence from the print rather than making a copy; the episode had been edited by the New Zealand censors and so was incomplete anyway. They binned the butchered print afterwards...
• Whatever the source, the film clip itself was no longer held at the Library when the BBC archive was established in 1978.
• The ABC in Australia returned its prints to the BBC on 4 June 1975.
• By the end of 1976, the BBC only held prints of parts 1,2 and 3. (Part 4 possibly having been binned per above.)
• In 1982, a print of part 2 was found in the possession of a film collector, who had "acquired" the film from the BBC at some point in the 1970s; this may well be the ex-Australian print, which would mean the existing prints of 1,2 and 3 were indeed the ex-New Zealand / Singapore ones.
• See also Hartnell Junkings

Reconstruction

• The missing Part 4 was animated, and the story released on DVD in 2013.
• From December 2019, the animated reconstruction of the story was available on UK BritBox.

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