The Tenth Planet
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| 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.)
| 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 When the Dalek stories were withdrawn from sale by agreement between the BBC and Terry Nation (from late 1966 to the end of 1967), the sale of this story and The Power of the Daleks to Australia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 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. (Or was maybe never offered it? See note below about Caribbean...)
- 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. (Was the story available only to countries in Australasia because of the original sale to Australia, and not elsewhere, such as Africa and Caribbean (see above)?)
- New Zealand sent its 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 used in the 5 November 1973 edition of Blue Peter. The print was never returned to the film library.
- It's very likely that the ex-New Zealand / Singapore prints had been returned to the BBC by 1973, and these were the same ones that were made available to Blue Peter.
- CONSPIRACY THEORY: It's possible that the Blue Peter editors actually chopped out the regeneration sequence from the original film print rather than making a copy; the film had been censored by the New Zealand censor and so was incomplete anyway. They binned the butchered print afterwards...
- 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 the parts 1,2 and 3. (Part 4 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.
